Page:Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Volume 1.djvu/16



xii in legal attainment. He not only had a copious vocabulary, but could also convey much meaning by his manner, and by a playful exaggeration in his words.

Of this last use of speech he says in a letter to his brother:—"What I wrote about the parson's alleging that he had never seen me at church, was not altogether a joke, but was a real feeling, exaggerated into a joke, which is very much my habit in company, and, I may say, is one of the secrets of conversational tact. There is not a better way of insinuating a wholesome but unpalatable truth, than clothing it in language wilfully beyond truth, so that it may be taken as a satire on those who gravely maintain the same doctrine, by all who perhaps would not tolerate a sober and dry statement of it. I have the vanity to think I know how to do this, but I may sometimes fail, of course. The intelligent always understand me, and the dull are puzzled." It is not too much to say, that to the great majority of those who were in the habit of meeting him his conversation was a real delight. The Editor well remembers the secret pleasure with which he invariably saw him come into the room, and the feeling which the announcement of his death caused, as of a loss which, in kind, could never be made up. There were veins in his conversation, from which more good was to be gained in a pleasant hour after dinner, than from many a lengthened serious discourse.

Throughout life Mr. Robinson was a man of unusual