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"Please understand that you are not dealing with a criminal, and I don't propose to be bulldozed by any fat-witted sleuths." I laughed in his face. "Maybe it will interest you to know that I have wit enough to contrast your secretive manner with Maillot's willingness to talk, and to draw the one consistent inference therefrom."
Such men as that make criminals. They're so fat-witted you positively ache they so tempt you to pull the wool over their eyes. O Mag, if the Lord had only made men cleverer, there'd be fewer Nancy Oldens. The Chief blew a blast at his speaking-tube that made his purple cheeks seem about to burst. My shoulders shook as I watched him, he was so wrathy.
To make an end of these first impressions, I fancied that not merely the Suffolk bar, but the bar of any inland county in New England, might show a set of thin-visaged men, looking wretchedly worn, sallow, deeply wrinkled across the forehead, and grimly furrowed about the mouth, with whom these heavy-checked English lawyers, slow-paced and fat-witted as they must needs be, would stand very little chance in a professional contest.
Time enough to threaten when you detect me in an unfriendly act. Did I play the traitor to you at Cumae? With the Hun this command of Justinian served you in good stead; Veranilda would not otherwise have escaped so easily. Chorsoman, fat-witted as he is, willingly believed that Veranilda and Aurelia, and you yourself, were all in my net which means the net of Bessas, whom he fears.
The young patrician wits of Athens doubtless laughed over Plato's ideal republic. Campanella's "City of the Sun" was looked upon, no doubt, as the distempered vision of a crazy state prisoner. Bacon's college, in his "New Atlantis," moved the risibles of fat-witted Oxford. More's "Utopia," as we know, gave to our language a new word, expressive of the vagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics.
But at the same time there was evident, in the midst of American jokes at the young Emperor's expense, a growing feeling that there was something in him; that, at any rate, he was not a fat-witted, Jesuit-ridden, mistress-led monarch of the old Bourbon or Hapsburg sort; that he had "go" in him some fine impulses, evidently; and here and there a quotation from a speech showed insight into the conditions of the present world and aspiration for its betterment.
And the louder they all laughed, the more stupid and helpless did the two-and-twenty gormandizers look. Beautiful as her face was, and though there was a smile on it, it looked just as wicked and mischievous as the ugliest serpent that ever was seen; and fat-witted as the voyagers had made themselves, they began to suspect that they had fallen into the power of an evil-minded enchantress.
"It belongs to a fat-witted rich young fellow from whom Storri borrowed it. Steamboat Dan is aboard; he went out in the skiff he spoke of. When he's tied her up and his gang's ashore, I'll wire the fat-witted one to come and claim his boat."
Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with the "Defence of Unlicensed Printing" before him? Who scoff at Quakerism over the "Journal" of George Fox? Who shall join with debauched lordlings and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the perusal of "Pilgrim's Progress?" "There were giants in those days."
The whole thing was inimitably done, and I hoped nobody saw it but myself; but years afterwards, a ponderous, fat-witted young man put the question squarely to me: "What was the matter with Mr. Thackeray, that night the club met at Mr 's house?"
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