In argument, of which intellectual exercise he was very fond,
he was a formidable antagonist. His power of handling masses of details
and facts, of showing their inner meanings and the principles underlying
them, and of making them intelligible, was very great; and very few men
of his time had it in equal measure.
But the most striking feature in his conversation was his masterly
application of general principles: these he handled with extraordinary
skill. In any subject with which he was familiar, he would solve, or
suggest a plausible solution of, difficulty after difficulty by
immediate reference to fundamental principles. This would give to his
conclusions an appearance of inevitableness which usually overbore his
adversary, and, even if it did not convince him, left him without any
effective reply. This, too, had a good deal to do, I am disposed to
conjecture, with another very noticeable characteristic of his which
often came out in conversation, and that was his apparently unfailing
confidence in the goodness of human nature. No man nor woman but he took
to be in the main honest and truthful, and no amount of
disappointment--not even losses of money and property incurred through
this faith in others' virtues--had the effect of altering this mental
habit of his.
His intellectual interests were very widely extended, and he once
confessed to me that they were agreeably stimulated by novelty and
opposition.
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