to those, he would add, who have not carefully sifted it to the bottom,—I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it;⸺and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you,—not as a party in the dispute,—but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter;⸺you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men;—and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you,—of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son,—your dear son,—from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect.—Your Billy , Sir!—would you, for the world, have called him Judas ?—Would you, my dear Sir, he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the genteelest address,—and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice, which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires,—Would you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of him?⸺O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know your temper right, Sir,—you are incapable of it;⸺you would have trampled upon the offer;—you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter’s head with abhorrence.
Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous contempt of money, which you show me in the whole transaction, is really noble;—and what renders it more so, is the principle of it;—the workings of a parent’s love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis, namely, That was your son called Judas ,—the sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like his shadow, and, in the end, made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example.
I never knew a man able to answer this argument.⸺But, indeed, to speak of my father as he was;—he was certainly irresistible;—both in his