George Salmon. 353 



most fantastic and ingenious reasoning to show that under certain 

 circumstances the plan would not work, and he would not be satisfied 

 until he got the worst of the argument ; or he would use his inimitable 

 powers of ridicule to make the thing appear absurd. Yet no one 

 could be more direct in his conversation, in his writings, even in his 

 funeral sermons. 



Salmon's generosity was as unbounded as it was unostentatious and 

 disinterested. His hospitality was splendid, and of the kindliest 

 nature. He shone pre-eminent in whatever company he might be 

 found. His after-dinner speeches were deservedly reckoned among the 

 chief attractions of public dinners in Ireland, and those who had the 

 good fortune to breakfast quietly with him have not been able to 

 forget the charm of his simplicity, of his humour, and of his kindliness. 



His figure was well known in Dublin nearly every afternoon he 

 might be seen wandering through the streets. He was a great lover 

 of music, a great chess-player, an omnivorous reader of novels. His 

 fund of amusing stories was inexhaustible. His jokes were circulated 

 through the clubs. Men of all classes and creeds read his theological 

 works and talked of them. They " were no sooner published than the 

 learned men of two continents acclaimed them ; and their men of 

 letters smiled over controversies more witty than anything since Pascal, 

 and of a humour more benign than his."* He had no taste for 

 metaphysics ; he despised rhetoric ; he cared little for painting or 

 architecture, and for poetry he did not care at all. Salmon's con- 

 structive faculty was not remarkable when judged by the exceptionally 

 high standard of his other brilliant gifts. His destructive power, for 

 example, was immense, and it is known that in his later years he 

 satisfied himself he had demolished some of the intellectual edifices he 

 himself had raised. He had a marvellous capacity for separating the 

 grain from the chaff of a mathematical or of a theological argument, 

 and what he retained he generally adorned. He excelled in the use of 

 happy illustrations of the simplest but of the most telling nature. No 

 less wonderful was the rapidity with which he grasped an argument 

 and the readiness with which he replied. A stranger in the synod 

 hall might, during the course of a debate, have looked pityingly and 

 half contemptuously at an ungainly and rather untidy old clergyman, 

 scribbling hastily and without interruption on little scraps of paper. 

 He might have seen that the writer was not taking notes of the 

 speeches, but was working arithmetic, searching for primes or finding 

 the recurring periods in their reciprocals. He would be surprised 

 when he saw this strange figure struggling to his feet and proceeding 

 to talk to the synod. His surprise would give place to astonishment 



* The Bishop of Derry, loc. cit. 



C 2 



