He was by habit and repute a satirist.

If he did occasionally condemn anything or anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had hitherto escaped, it was simply because he condemned everything and everybody.

While I was with him he disposed of St.Paul with an epigram, shook my reverence for Shakespeare in a neat antithesis, and fell foul of the Almighty Himself, on the score of one or two out of the ten commandments.

Nothing escaped his blighting censure.

At every sentence he overthrew an idol, or lowered my estimation of a friend.