Read it through once

Another of the notables who came prominently into Miss Mitford’s life at this period was young Thomas Noon Talfourd, the son of a Reading brewer. He had been educated at the Reading Grammar School under Dr. Valpy, and “began to display his genius by publishing a volume of most stupid poems before he was sixteen.” The description is, of course, Miss Mitford’s. Nevertheless, he who wrote such detestable poetry, “wrote and talked the most exquisite prose.” Upon leaving school he was sent “to Mr. Chitty a-special-pleading; and now he has left Mr. Chitty and is special pleading for himself—working under the Bar, as the lawyers call it, for a year or two, when he will be called; and I hope, for the credit of my judgment, shine forth like the sun from behind a cloud. You should know that he has the very great advantage of having nothing to depend on but his own talents and industry; and those talents are, I assure you, of the very highest order. I know nothing so eloquent as his conversation, so powerful, so full; passing with equal ease from the plainest detail to the loftiest and most sustained flights of imagination; heaping with unrivalled fluency of words and of ideas, image upon image and illustration upon illustration. Never was conversation so dazzling, so glittering. Listening to Mr. Talfourd is like looking at the sun; it makes one’s mind ache with excessive brilliancy.”