I come home, I shall talk you all to death, and be voted a bore in every house which I visit.  I will commence with Jeffrey himself.  I had almost forgotten his person; and, indeed, I should not wonder if even now I were to forget it again.  He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father’s to Mr. Wilberforce’s, and infinitely more unlike to each other than those of near relatives often are; infinitely more unlike, for example, than those of the two Grants.  When absolutely quiescent, reading a paper, or hearing a conversation in which he takes no interest, his countenance shows no indication whatever of intellectual superiority of any kind.  But as soon as he is interested, and opens his eyes upon you, the change is like magic.  There is a flash in his glance, a violent contortion in his frown, an exquisite humour in his sneer, and a sweetness and brilliancy in his smile, beyond anything that ever I witnessed.  A person who had seen him in only one state would not know him if he saw him in another.  For he has not, like Brougham, marked features which in all moods of mind remain unaltered.  The mere outline of his face is insignificant.  The expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance, not even in that of the most celebrated actors.  I can conceive that Garrick may have been like him.  I have seen several pictures of Garrick, none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished, and of the unequalled radiance and penetration of his eye.  The voice and delivery of Jeffrey resemble his face.  He possesses considerable power of mimicry, and rarely tells a story without imitating several different accents.  His familiar tone, his declamatory tone, and his pathetic tone are quite different things.  Sometimes Scotch predominates in his pronunciation; sometimes it is imperceptible.  Sometimes his utterance is snappish and quick to the last degree; sometimes it is remarkable for rotundity and mellowness.  I can easily conceive that two people who had seen him on different days might dispute about him as the travellers in the fable disputed about the chameleon.

In one thing, as far as I observed, he is always the same and that is the warmth of his domestic affections.  Neither Mr. Wilberforce, nor my uncle Babington, come up to him in this respect.  The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible.  Not five minutes pass without some fond expression, or caressing gesture, to his wife or his daughter.  He has fitted up a study for himself; but he never goes into it.  Law papers, reviews, whatever he has to write, he writes in the drawing-room, or in his wife’s boudoir.  When he goes to other parts of the country on a retainer he takes them in the carriage with him.  I do not wonder that he should be a good husband, for his wife is a very amiable woman.  But I was surprised to see a man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer, pouring himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in all sorts of affectionate nonsense.  Through our whole journey to Perth he kept up a sort of mock quarrel with his daughter; attacked her about novel-reading, laughed her into a pet, kissed her out of it, and laughed her into it again.  She and her mother absolutely idolise him, and I do not wonder at it.