As a conversationalist, it has not been our fortune to meet with many who are his equals, either in the readiness or the variety of his topics, the fine play of his fancy, or the mellow flow of his words. There is not at this bar, a man of his years, who is his equal in scholarship—who has accumulated so vast a mass of curious learning. Upon all questions of History, Philosophy or Biography—he is the referee among his friends. His accuracy is singularly nice—no event of which he has read, seems ever to escape the tenacious grasp of his memory. No quotation from the Classics, apt at the moment, is ever wanting to illustrate or point an anecdote or a sentence. His knowledge of old English literature is thorough, and his acquaintance with the modern familiar and full. He is, in all respects a thorough student—stealing the hours which others devote to idle pleasure or indolent sleep, to enlarge his stores of knowledge and make broader and surer the foundations of intellectual power. The defect of Mr. Brewster’s character has been the terrible impetuosity of his impulses, which would carry him to the gates of Hades in pursuit of a foe, and through a burning river in support of a friend—frequently, too, without stopping to ask whether either was worth the sacrifice. Hence, he has sometimes become the assailant and the champion, without the clearest notions as to which side victory justly belonged. These impulses, too, were as quick as they were strong. The lightning was not more sudden than his wrath—nor more certain in its destructiveness. No man made an enemy of him and escaped the well-timed blow. But his vengeance was rarely garnered, but blazed out in a fury which lent additional terror to the funeral pile of his victim. His generous sentiments are easily touched. His time, his talents, his whole soul are given to the cause of a friend. There is no halfway-house on the road to his heart—the door is fast shut, or the whole of the spacious apartments are thrown open, and the visitor is received amid a blaze of light from every genial corner.