His intellect was eminently practical. He did not love speculation or the pursuit of abstract truth, nor had he a taste for literature, still less a delight in learning for its own sake. Even of the annals of Ireland his knowledge was most slender. He had no grasp of constitutional questions, and was not able to give any help in the construction of a Home Rule scheme in 1886. His general reading had been scanty, and his speeches show no acquaintance either with history, beyond the commonest facts, or with any other subject connected with politics. Very rarely did they contain a maxim or reflection of general applicability, apart from the particular topic he was discussing. Nor did he ever attempt to give to them the charm of literary ornament. All was dry, direct, and practical, without so much as a graceful phrase or a choice epithet. Sometimes, when addressing a great public meeting, he would seek to rouse the audience by vehement language; but though there might be a glow of suppressed passion, there were no flashes of imaginative light. Yet he never gave the impression of an uneducated man. His language, though it lacked distinction, was clear and grammatical. His taste was correct. It was merely that he did not care for any of those things which men of ability comparable to his usually do care for. His only interests, outside politics, lay in mechanics and engineering and in the development of the material resources of his country. He took pains to manage his estate well, and was specially anxious to make something out of his stone quarries, and to learn what could be done in the way of finding and working minerals.
Those who observed that he was almost always occupied in examining and attacking the measures or the conduct of those who governed Ireland were apt to think his talent a purely critical one. They were mistaken. Critical, indeed, it was, in a remarkable degree; keen, penetrating, stringently dissective of the arguments of an opponent, ingenious in taking advantage of a false step in administration or of an admission imprudently made in debate. But it had also a positive and constructive quality. From time to time he would drop his negative attitude and sketch out plans of legislation which were always consistent and weighty, though not made attractive by any touch of imagination. They were the schemes not so much of a statesman as of an able man of business, who saw the facts, especially the financial facts, in a sharp, cold light, and they seldom went beyond what the facts could be made to prove. And his ideas struck one as being not only forcible but independent, the fruit of his own musings. Although he freely used the help of others in collecting facts or opinions, he did not seem to be borrowing the ideas, but rather to have looked at things for himself, and seen them as they actually were, in their true perspective, not (like many Irishmen) through the mists of sentiment or party feeling. The impression made by one of his more elaborate speeches might be compared to that which one receives from a grey sunless day with an east wind, a day in which everything shows clear, but also hard and cold.