“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.
Those two hundred papers which he wrote in the _Edinburgh Review_ are of the widest range--charmingly and piquantly written. Yet they do not hold place among great and popular essays; not with Macaulay, or Mackintosh, or Carlyle, or even Hazlitt. He was French in his literary aptitudes and qualities; never heavy; touching things, as we have said, with a feather’s point, yet touching them none the less surely.
Could he have written a book to live? His friends all thought it, and urged him thereto. He thought not. There would be great toil, he said, and mortification at the end; so he lies buried, where we leave him, under a great tumulus of most happy _Review_ writing.