Wycherley: bland and bald with a fine bead, and a face naturally
intelligent, but crossed every now and then by gleams of vacancy; a man
of large reading, and of tact to make it subserve his interests. A
voluminous writer on certain medical subjects, he had so saturated
himself with circumlocution, that it distilled from his very tongue: he
talked like an Article, a Quarterly one; and so gained two advantages:
1st, he rarely irritated a fellow-creature; for if he began a sentence
hot, what with its length, and what with its windiness, he ended it cool:
item, stabs by polysyllables are pricks by sponges. 2ndly, this foible
earned him the admiration of fools; and that is as invaluable as they are
innumerable.
Yet was there in the mother-tongue he despised one gem of a word he
vastly admired: like most Quarterly writers. That charming word, the pet
of the polysyllabic, was "OF."
He opened the matter in a subdued and sympathising tone well calculated
to win a loving father, such as Richard Hardie--was not.
"My good friend here informs me, sir, you are so fortunate as to possess
a son of distinguished abilities, and who is at present labouring under
some of those precursory indications of incipient disease of the
cerebro-psychical organs, of which I have been, I may say, somewhat
successful in diagnosing the symptoms.
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