Sir Isaac Isaacs

From the Australian Dictionary of Biography:

 Alfred Deakin describes Isaacs in the later 1890s as follows: ‘A clear, cogent, forcible and fiery speaker, he set himself at once to work to conquer the methods of platform and parliamentary debate and in both succeeded. He was not trusted or liked in the House. His will was indomitable, his courage inexhaustible and his ambition immeasurable. But his egotism was too marked and his ambition too ruthless to render him popular. Dogmatic by disposition, full of legal subtlety and the precise literalness and littleness of the rabbinical mind, he was at the same time kept well abreast by his reading of modern developments and modern ideas’.

His only excess was tea drinking.

Sir Isaac Alfred Isaacs (1855 – 1948), by unknown artist.