 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 sordid and treacherous idea, so
inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him thro' life like his
shadow, and, in the end, made a miser and a rascal of him, in spight, 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; - Teodidaktos. - Persuasion hung upon his
lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him, - and,
withall, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his
respondent, -- that NATURE might have stood up and said, - »This man is
eloquent.« In short, whether he was on the weak or the strong side of the
question, 'twas hazardous in either case to attack him: - And yet, 'tis strange,
he had never read Cicero nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Isocrates, nor
Aristotle, nor Longinus amongst the antients; -- nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor
Ramus, nor Farnaby amongst the moderns; - and what is more astonishing, he had
never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty struck into his
mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp or Burgersdicius, or any Dutch
logician or commentator; - he knew not so much as in what the difference of an
argument ad ignorantiam, and an argument ad hominem consisted; so that I well
remember, when he went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College in * *
* * *, - it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three
fellows of that learned society, - that a man who knew not so much as the names
of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with 'em.
    To work with them in the best manner he could, was what my father was,
however, perpetually forced upon; -- for he had a thousand little sceptical
notions of the comick kind to defend, -- most of which notions, I verily
believe, at first enter'd upon the footing of mere whims, and of a
