He varied often, yet in each variation he was equally undiscoverable.

Was he performing a series of parts, or was it the ordinary changes of a man's true temperament that you beheld in him?
Commonly smooth, quiet, attentive, flattering in social intercourse, he was known in the senate and courts of law for a cold asperity, and a caustic venom,--scarcely rivalled even in those arenas of contention.
It seemed as if the bitterer feelings he checked in private life, he delighted to indulge in public.

Yet even there he gave not way to momentary petulance or gushing passion; all seemed with him systematic sarcasm or habitual sternness.

He outraged no form of ceremonial or of society.

He stung, without appearing conscious of the sting; and his antagonist writhed not more beneath the torture of his satire than the crushing contempt of his self-command.