INTRODUCTION
by his speeches. He declared himself never to have remedied the defects of his early education, to have a smattering of many subjects as a result of much desultory reading, but to have no profound knowledge of any one of them. Nor had he literary ability, and he could not write except in a pedestrian way; "Sir," he would reiterate, "I have no literary talent. I cannot write. I never could write anything, and I never would write anything." "I never knew any law, sir, but I knew the practice." "I am nothing, and never was anything, not even a lawyer." "You see that my memory is quite gone; though that is an absurd way of talking, for I never had any." He had wasted his life, and there was an end of it. The only talent he had ever possessed was for speaking, and even that he had often abused by unduly monopolizing the conversation.
There is, further, a delightful comment when he was going through the papers left by his friend Hamond, whose suicide at the end of 1819 was a great grief to him. "I was interested in a paragraph about myself—not of indiscriminate eulogy, though of friendly appreciation. The unfavourable features of my character are all truly given, and except the epithet ingenious, which I disclaim, the other qualities are not given me without foundation." Here is the passage in question: "March 1816. Paris. Miss Williams…called H. C. R. an interesting man. Now, he is a kind-hearted, gay, ingenious, animated, well-read man, with a good taste in morals, but he is far from being an interesting man…His manners are too coarse—he has too little ambition, too much vanity and garrulity." An ordinary individual, we imagine, would scarcely accept such a description of himself as "friendly appreciation," "truly given" if only the one intellectual quality ascribed to him were eliminated.[1] Robinson has too frequently
- ↑ Cf. Diary, June 16, 1820: "M. does not know how liberally I feel on such matters, and I daresay he feels greatly embarrassed by what need not trouble him. His unfavourable opinion of me was founded on my talking too much—he considered me as one of the men who hunt merely after talent without having a sincere
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