Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable
quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred, on the other
hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow
nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine
in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory
jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the
end. And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in
the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the
result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his
hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and,
coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the
more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour. There
are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain
of the language; you would think he must have worn the words next his
skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good
things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart
woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while he
has been wielding the broad-axe; and between us, on this unequal,
division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known him to battle
the same question night after night for years, keeping it in the reign
of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous
or grave intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor
taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given moment, when
arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to
those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even
calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to
condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still
judicial, and still faithfully contending with his doubts.