the dispute,--but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own
good sense and candid disquisition in this matter;--you are a person free
from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men;--and, if I may
presume to penetrate farther into you,--of a liberality of genius above
bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son,--your
dear son,--from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect.--
Your Billy, Sir!--would you, for the world, have called him Judas?--Would
you, my dear Sir, he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the
genteelest address,--and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice,
which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires,--Would
you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and
offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a
desecration of him?--O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know your
temper right, Sir,--you are incapable of it;--you would have trampled upon
the offer;--you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with
abhorrence.

Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous
contempt of money, which you shew me in the whole transaction, is really
noble;--and what renders it more so, is the principle of it;--the workings
of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis,
namely, That was your son called Judas,--the forbid and treacherous idea,
so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like
his shadow, and, in the end, made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite,
Sir, of your example.

I never knew a man able to answer this argument.--But, indeed, to speak of
my father as he was;--he was certainly irresistible;--both in his orations
and disputations;--he was born an orator;--(Greek).--Persuasion hung upon
his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in