When he had thrown aside the cares of professional or public business, he revelled in hearty, boisterous fun, and he had that sanest of qualities, an honest, boyish love of pure nonsense.

He delighted in a good story and dearly loved a joke, although no jester himself.

This sense of humor and appreciation of the ridiculous, although they give no color to his published works, where, indeed, they would have been out of place, improved his judgment, smoothed his path through the world, and saved him from those blunders in taste and those follies in action which are ever the pitfalls for men with the fervid, oratorical temperament.
This sense of humor gave, also, a great charm to his conversation and to all social intercourse with him.

He was a good, but never, so far as can be judged from tradition, an overbearing talker.

He never appears to have crushed opposition in conversation, nor to have indulged in monologue, which is so apt to be the foible of famous and successful men who have a solemn sense of their own dignity and importance.