As for Mr. Jeffrey, his associate on the _Review_, and for many years its responsible editor, he was a very different man--of easy address, courteous, gentlemanly--quite a master of deportment. Yet it was he who ripped open with his critical knife Southey’s _Thalaba_ and the early poems of Wordsworth. But even his victims forgot his severities in his pleasantly magnetic presence and under the caressing suavities of his manner. He was brisk, _débonnaire_, cheery--a famous talker; not given to anecdotes or storytelling, but bubbling over with engaging book-lore and poetic hypotheses, and eager to put them into those beautiful shapes of language which came--as easily as water flows--to his pen or to his tongue. He said harsh things, not for love of harsh things; but because what provoked them grated on his tastes, or his sense of what was due to Belles Lettres. One did not--after conversing with him--recall great special aptness of remark or of epithet, so much as the charmingly even flow of apposite and illustrative language--void of all extravagances and of all wickednesses, too. Lord Cockburn says of his conversation:-- “The listeners’ pleasure was enhanced by the personal littleness of the speaker. A large man [Jeffrey was very small] could scarcely have thrown off Jeffrey’s conversational flowers without exposing himself to ridicule. But the liveliness of the deep thoughts and the flow of bright expressions that animated his talk, seemed so natural and appropriate to the figure that uttered them, that they were heard with something of the delight with which the slenderness of the trembling throat and the quivering of the wings make us enjoy the strength and clearness of the notes of a little bird.”[31] The first Mrs. Jeffrey dying early in life, he married for second wife a very charming American lady, Miss Wilkes;[32] having found time--notwithstanding his engrossment with the _Review_--for an American journey, at the end of which he carried home his bride. Some of his letters to his wife’s kindred in America are very delightful--setting forth the new scenes to which the young wife had been transported. He knew just what to say and what not to say, to make his pictures perfect. The trees, the church-towers, the mists, the mosses on walls, the gray heather--all come into them, under a touch that is as light as a feather, and as sharp as a diamond. His honors in his profession of advocate grew, and he came by courtesy to the title of Lord Jeffrey--(not to be confounded with that other murderous Lord Jeffreys, who was judicial hangman for James II.). He is in Parliament too; never an orator properly; but what he says, always clean cut, sensible, picturesque, flowing smoothly--but rather over the surface of things than into their depths. Accomplished is the word to apply to him; accomplished largely and variously, and with all his accomplishments perfectly in hand.