He has had relations, neither few nor unimportant, with the Pope and the Old Catholics, with Oxford and Lambeth, with the cultivated Whiggery of the great English families, with the philosophic radicalism of Germany, and with those Nationalist complications which, in these later days, have drawn official Liberalism into their folds.  He has long lived on terms of the closest intimacy with Mr. Gladstone, and may perhaps be bracketed with Canon MacColl and Sir Algernon West as the most absolute and profound Gladstonian outside the family circle of Hawarden.  But he is thoroughly eclectic in his friendships, and when he is in London he flits from Lady Hayter’s tea-table to Mr. Goschen’s bureau, analyzes at the Athenaeum the gossip which he has acquired at Brooks’s, and by dinner-time is able, if only he is willing, to tell you what Spain intends and what America; the present relations between the Curia and the Secret Societies; how long Lord Salisbury will combine the Premiership with the Foreign Office; and the latest theory about the side of Whitehall on which Charles I. was beheaded.

The ranks of our good talkers—­none too numerous a body at the best, and sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter—­have been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell.  For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during the last nine—­in short, since he entered Parliament—­that the admirable qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized.  Before that time his delightful Obiter Dicta had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest.  What would he be like?  Should we be disillusioned?  Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote?  Well, in due course he appeared, and the questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or even himself could have desired.  It was unanimously voted that his conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its agreeableness was of an entirely different kind.  His literary knack of chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect.  To “birrell” is now a verb as firmly established as to “boycott,” and it signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive, perhaps a little superficial.  Its characteristic note is grace.  But when the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it was seen that his predominant quality was strength.

An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel nicknamed him “The Harmonious Blacksmith,” and the collocation of words happily hits off the special quality of his conversation.  There is burly strength in his positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his thorough knowledge of the persons and things that he discusses.  In his sledge-hammer blows against humbug and wickedness,