“Curran, the Master of the Rolls, said to Mr. Grattan, ’You would be the greatest man of your age, Grattan, if you would buy a few yards of red tape, and tie up your bills and papers.’  This was the fault or the misfortune of your excellent father; he never knew the use of red tape, and was utterly unfit for the common business of life.  That a guinea represented a quantity of shillings, and that it would barter for a quantity of cloth, he was well aware; but the accurate number of the baser coin, or the just measurement of the manufactured article, to which he was entitled for his gold, he could never learn, and it was impossible to teach him.  Hence his life was often an example of the ancient and melancholy struggle of genius with the difficulties of existence.

* * * * *

“A high merit in Sir James Mackintosh was his real and unaffected philanthropy.  He did not make the improvement of the great mass of mankind an engine of popularity, and a stepping-stone to power, but he had a genuine love of human happiness.  Whatever might assuage the angry passions, and arrange the conflicting interests of nations; whatever could promote peace, increase knowledge, extend commerce, diminish crime, and encourage industry; whatever could exalt human character, and could enlarge human understanding, struck at once at the heart of your father, and roused all his faculties.  I have seen him in a moment when this spirit came upon him—­like a great ship of war—­cut his cable, and spread his enormous canvass, and launch into a wide sea of reasoning eloquence.”

For pure fun, one could not quote a better sample than the review of Waterton’s[137] Travels in South America.—­

“Snakes are certainly an annoyance; but the snake, though high-spirited, is not quarrelsome; he considers his fangs to be given for defence, and not for annoyance, and never inflicts a wound but to defend existence.  If you tread upon him, he puts you to death for your clumsiness, merely because he does not understand what your clumsiness means; and certainly a snake, who feels fourteen or fifteen stone stamping upon his tail, has little time for reflection, and may be allowed to be poisonous and peevish.  American tigers generally run away—­from which several respectable gentlemen in Parliament inferred, in the American war, that American soldiers would run away also!

“The description of the birds is very animated and interesting; but how far does the gentle reader imagine the Campanero may be heard, whose size is that of a jay?  Perhaps 300 yards.  Poor innocent, ignorant reader! unconscious of what Nature has done in the forests of Cayenne, and measuring the force of tropical intonation by the sounds of a Scotch duck!  The Campanero may be heard three miles!—­this single little bird being more powerful than the belfry of a cathedral, ringing for a new dean—­just