The "chap" in the railway carriage was by no means the only person to whom Mr Jeremy addressed this drastic advice. It was his usual mode of clinching an argument when his instincts supported a conclusion to which his intelligence could not find the way. This method of arriving at truth was especially useful in regard to politics and theology, in both of which Mr Jeremy took a lively, or even violent, interest. Needless to say, his political aversions were of the strongest, and Mr Lloyd George was the statesman who had to bear the hottest flame of Jeremy's wrath. More than once I have seen him fling his weekly paper on the floor with the words, "I wish this 'ere Lloyd George would jump into the copper and boil hisself"; and on my remarking that I thought this a rather inhuman suggestion, he would wave his arm round the room, in a manner to indicate the entire Liberal Party, and say, "I wish the whole lot on 'em would jump into coppers and boil themselves." As to theology, I seldom dared to address a hint of my heresies to Mr Jeremy. But on my once saying to another person, in his presence, something to the effect that I did not believe in eternal damnation, he quickly crossed over to where I was sitting, and, giving me a rather ugly dig with his powerful forefinger, said, "Look here! You just jump into the copper and boil yourself." A wise stupidity was the keynote of Mr Jeremy's life. Another expression reserved for occasions when great emphasis was needed, was "a finished specimen." A thing, in Mr Jeremy's eyes, deserved this title when its general condition was so bad that nothing worse of its kind could be conceived, and the expression accordingly was only used after the ordinary resources of descriptive language had given out. It was applied to persons as well as to things. Mr Lloyd George was, naturally, "a finished specimen": so was the German Emperor: so was Dr Crippen: so was a lady of uncertain reputation who "had taken a cottage" in the neighbourhood. A wet harvest, a badly built hayrick, a measly pig, a feeble sermon by the curate, were all "finished specimens." Once when the curate, getting gravelled for lack of matter at the end of five minutes--for he was preaching _ex tempore_--abruptly concluded his sermon by promising to complete the subject next week, I heard Jeremy whisper to his wife, "Well, _he_'s a finished specimen, that he is." Nothing irritated the good man so much as an unfinished job, and the fact that a thing was unfinished was precisely what he meant to express when he called it "a finished specimen." A great deal of human language, especially philosophical language, seems to be constructed on the same principle.