allowed to sit down and dine with us.' This | pany in the world; and Pope, who bewas the reduction to practice of that saying longed to the last, confessed that his of Lycurgus which Lord Bacon has included in his Apophthegms, when the proposition being made to introduce into Sparta an absolute popular equality, he replied, 'Begin it in your own house.' Possibly Richard Milward was a more judicious reporter than most talkers have found; but we must not forget the great and earnest struggle of Selden's century which had put our countrymen of all opinions on their best metal. He had lived his life in a higher moral atmosphere than that of the gayest Parisian saloons. There was a stuff and a sap in Englishmen of that period which gave their talk a rich ness and a colour unknown to the pungent levities of a Boileau, a Ménage, a Segrais, or a Monsieur de Bautru. Nor was Selden a scholar and antiquary only; he had taken his wine with the wits and Ben Jonson, and had thundered against 'tonnage and poundage' on the floor of the House of Commons. It would appear, indeed, that to a thoroughly good talker something is required of the talents of active life. Lord Bacon, Selden, Cicero, Burke, were all men of action. Napoleon said things which tell in history like his battles. Luther's Table-Talk glows with the fire which burnt the Pope's Bull. Nearly all great orators have been excellent in colloquy; and, which is a kindred fact, a very large proportion of actors likewise. If we take the conversational men of letters, we shall find that they were either men fit for action, but kept out of it by accident, like Dr. Johnson; or at once, men of letters and men of action, like Swift. If we take the conversational poets, we shall find them among those nearest to men of action in their natures, like Byron, and Burns, and Scott. The best sayers of good things have been among statesmen, diplomatists, and men of the world: in short, we think the essence of the quality lies as much in the character as in the intellect. It is an affair of the emotions, of the animal spirits, as well as of mental gifts. At any rate there are great names which show that the talent for talking is distinct from the talent for writing. Addison, who has been condemned upon his own happy metaphor, that he could draw bills for a thousand pounds, though he had not a guinea in his pocket,' must be excluded from the list. His friends, and we may add his enemies, have been juster to him that he was to himself. Lady Mary Wortley, who belonged to the former category, declared he was the best com There conversation had something in it more charming than he had found in any other man. But this,' Pope continues, was only when familiar: before strangers, or perhaps a single stranger, he preserved his dignity by a stiff silence.' It was in fact one of Addison's own remarks that there was no such thing as real conversation except between two persons. His case is, therefore, a confirmation rather than otherwise of our supposition, that to shine in mixed companies at least, demands a portion of the qualities which render men fit for the stir of life, for it was the want of this which was the cause of his bashfulness, and made him fear to take the lead before strangers. Pope himself, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith, were none of them good talkers, if we may trust current belief and report. Bayle was of opinion that few learned men at all had conversational ability: but this remark must not lead us too far; on the contrary, Scaliger, Casaubon, Lipsius, Salmasius, Ménage, at once occur as exceptions to his rule. can be no error more absurd, no prejudice more ignorant, than to suppose that the old scholars, the sixteenth and seventeenth century men, were merely pedants and book-worms; they held their own with kings, cardinals, and knights: nay, they cut a figure more conspicuous in the world than their representatives do now. When they accepted a chair in a town, the magistrates and burghers came out in procession to welcome them through the gates. Casaubon travelled to England in company with an ambassador, and was received by James I. at his dinner-table. Henri Quatre wrote to Scaliger with his own hand. All the boasting we hear now-a-days of the spread of knowledge must not make us forget, that as far as being sincerely and reverently honoured in the persons of his possessors, it enjoyed more homage then than now. In quite recent times, to return to the assertion of Bayle, the ranks of great scholars have given men to the ranks of great talkers. Few men talked with more uniform vivacity and vigour than Parr; no man said better things than Porson; and we wish the Porsoniana was worthier of him. Niebuhr, again, handled his favourite literary subjects with great colloquial animation, as a pleasant little book called Lieber's 'Reminiscences' of him exists to testify. How he with his full mind and his earnest heart-felt the dreary vacuity which reigned in his time at the dinners to which his position as a diplomatist condemned him, we know from an anecdote told by Bunsen, whose own experience also seems to have been se vere.* After Selden's Table-Talk' there is a long interval before we arrive at any formal record of a great man's conversation; but we have an excellent dissertation from Swift himself, as might be expected, an admirable talker-entitled 'Hints towards an Essay on Conversation.' He sets out by saying that he had observed few obvious subjects to have been so seldom, or at least so slightly, handled as this, and that few were so difficult to treat. He was in possession of the traditions of the age preceding his own, and gives us the following interesting statement: "I take the highest period of politeness in England (and it is of the same date in France) to have been the peaceable part of King Charles I.'s reign; and from what we read of those times, as well as from the accounts I have formerly met with from some who lived in that court, the methods then used for raising and cultivating conversation were altogether different from ours: several ladies whom we find celebrated by the poets of that age, had assemblies at their houses, where persons of the best understanding and of both sexes met to pass the evenings in discoursing upon whatever agreeable subjects happened to be started; and although we are apt to ridicule the sublime platonic notions they had, or personated, in love and friendship, I conceive their refinements were grounded upon reason, and that a little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious, and low.' These chivalrous notions from Swift may astonish, but they are worthy of his acute intellect; and were especially needed in an age when the re-action still continued, and grossness and familiarity took the place of knightly courtesy and admiring respect. In Swift's own time there was no word in more frequent use, both in writing and conversation, than that of raillery. It usually signified a kind of satirical banter; but the French, from whom we borrow the word,' remarks the Dean, have quite a different idea of the thing; and so had we in the politer age of our fathers. Raillery was to say something that at first appeared a reproach or reflection, but by some turn of wit, unexpected and surprising, ended always in a compliment, and to the advantage of the person it was addressed to.' One species of this art, ac *Niebuhr's 'Life and Letters,' ii. 427. cording to Fielding, was to heighten good qualities by applying to them the terms which denoted their excess-as when you spoke of generosity as prodigality, and of courage as foolhardiness, or it was a complimentary irony by which vices were imputed to men the exact reverse of their notorious virtues. Of this latter kind there is a fine example in Pope's well-known lines : Spirit of Arnall! aid me while I lie. Cobham's a coward, Polwarth is a slave, And Lyttleton a dark designing knave; St. John has ever been a wealthy fool, But let me add, Sir Robert's mighty dullHas never made a friend in private life, And was, besides, a tyrant to his wife." Though Swift considered raillery the most refined part of conversation, it is one of those artifices for which there can only be an occasional opening, and which requires at all times a tact and discrimination which are the gifts of few. Thus it had passed from an ingenious and delicate description of compliment into gentle banter upon harmless foibles, and from this into laughing at real defects, and into attempts to render people ridiculous. It was then nothing better than privileged abuse. It is very remarkable how entirely the reverse of cynical are all Swift's maxims upon conversation. Surely,' he says, when speaking of raillery, one of the best rules is never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish we had left unsaid; nor can anything be well more contrary to the ends for which people meet together than to part unsatisfied with each other or themselves.' It was indignation at the perversion of an innocent and useful pleasure that led him to take up his pen; and he held that, though few were qualified to shine, most persons had it in their power to be agreeable. He imputed the low ebb to which conversation had run less to defects of understanding than to pride, vanity, ill-nature, affectation, singularity, and positiveness. He conceived, therefore, that it would be sufficient to produce a reform if he pointed out the errors which were the source of the evil, and which all might correct if they pleased. He did not omit faults which were generally felt and condemned, but which prevailed notwithstanding. The folly of talking too much, for instance, was universally exclaimed against, yet he had rarely seen five people together without one of the number being guilty of it, to the great annoyance of the rest. It might have been supposed that to please himself and disgust his company was a species of reputation of which no one would be particularly ambitious. The Dean's own practice was to make a long pause after he had spoken, to give anybody who was inclined the opportunity to take his turn. It will startle many people to find what company Swift singled out as presenting the climax of tiresome talk: a good thing. This is the bane of real sociality; and a few forced jests are a miserable substitute for the feast of reason and the flow of soul. One wit of the Dean's acquaintance was never easy unless he was allowed to dictate and preside; and it will usually be found that the jester requires an audience that he takes the initiative, and commands your attention like the Punch which appears before your windows. But wit ought to spring natu'The worst conversation I ever remember to rally out of the conversation: A good have heard in my life was that at Will's Coffee-bon-mot, like the sparkle from a grindstone, house, where the wits (as they were called) used is the casual brilliance of an intellect in formerly to assemble; that is to say, five or six men who had writ plays, or at least prologues, fruitful activity. Such was the wit of or had a share in a miscellany, came thither Ménage; and such also that of Bacon, and entertained one another with their trifling Cicero, Montesquieu, Johnson, Burke, and composures, in so important an air as if they the many great men who have possessed. had been the noblest efforts of human nature, or the endowment. The mass of modern that the fate of kingdoms depended on them. 'diners-out' are mere jokers who have some fun and great animal spirits. This amount of facetiousness is compatible with a very ordinary understanding and no attainments. Let us again refer to Swift's high authority: In other words, the conversation at Will's assumed a local, personal, and exclusive character; whereas good conversation, whether literary or not, is distinguished by its sociability, and, being addressed to the world, does not bear the colour of what is peculiar and private in the individual. Byron wrote in verse to the same effect: 'One hates an author that's all author, fellows In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink.' The talk of such men may be witty, or it may be eloquent-but it is not conversation, For conversation implies as much attention to your neighbour the listener, as to your self the speaker. This led Swift to extend the meaning of the term pedantry, which he understood to signify the unseasonable obtruding our own branch of knowledge upon a company which could not participate in it. Thus he held it to be pedantic for a soldier to talk too freely of military affairs; for acquaintances to dwell on passages of their history which were caviare to the general circle; for women to be over-copious upon the subject of their dresses, fans, and china. Fielding complained that the lawyers in his day were particularly liable to the failing, owing to their being a good deal confined to the society of one another. He had known, he said, a very agreeable party spoiled by a couple of barristers, who seemed rather to think themselves in a court of justice than in a mixed assembly of persons met only for the entertainment of each other. Swift had no liking for professed wits. He objected to them that their inventions were always on the rack, and that they only watched the conversation for an opportunity to display their talents, and say 'I have known men happy enough at ridicule who upon grave subjects were perfectly stupid; of whom Dr. Echard of Cambridge, who writ the Contempt of the Clergy, was a great instance.' Indeed the Dean went so far as to assert that he had never known a wag who was not a dunce. The men of wit and pleasure about town,' as they used to be called, though Fielding says the wit had disappeared in his time, and we are inclined to add that the pleasure has followed it in ours, would seem to be instances of this. so utterly drivelling and so void of all serious purpose, or sensible application, is much of our current satirical literature. Of the stock phrases and stereotyped questions and answers which were the common staple of talk in the reign of Queen Anne among non-literary people, who lived in what was called the world, Swift gives a curious representation, in his Complete Collection of genteel and ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode now used at Court and in the best Companies in England.' He professes to record nothing which had not been in constant circulation for at least a hundred years; but if the fashionable folks of that day really employed one half of the observations he has set down, we must confess that we have sadly degenerated since, and that our great-great-grandmothers had a larger, richer, and livelier repository than is to be met with now. Many of the retorts, apart from their antiquity, are plea 2 D sant enough: Neverout. Here's poor Miss has not a word to throw at a dog. Come, a penny for your thoughts. Miss. They are not worth a farthing; for I was thinking of you.' And again : Colonel. Is it certain that Sir John Blunderbuss is dead at last? Lord Sparkish. Yes, or else he's sadly wrong'd, for they have buried him. We are quoting from Sir Walter Scott's edition of Swift; and it is singular to come, in Washington Irving's Abbotsford,' upon the following example of Scott's own humour in conversation :— 'One morning at breakfast, when Dominie Thomson, the tutor, was present, Scott was going on with great glee to relate an anecdote of the Laird of Macnab, "who, poor fellow!" premised he, "is dead and gone." Why, Mr. Scott," exclaimed his good lady. "Macnab's not dead, is he?""Faith, my dear," replied Scott, with humorous gravity, "if he's not dead, they have done him great injustice, for they've buried him." The joke passed harmless and unnoticed by Mrs. Scott, but hit the poor Dominie just as he had raised a cup of tea to his lips, causing a burst of laughter which sent half of the contents about the table.' Spence's memoranda of the conversation of Pope and others contain many facts which are well worth preserving, but as specimens of talk the work cannot rank very high. We have come, however, now in Boswell's 'Johnson' to the greatest work of the class which exists in the world. The Tour to the Hebrides' had shown what was to be expected from a man who seems to have been better fitted for his vocation than anybody else who ever lived, and whose name has supplied the English language with a new word. Every year increases the popularity of Boswell's marvellous work. The world will some day do more justice to his talents, which those who cannot forgive his Toryism are far too prone to run down; for he possessed great dramatic talent, great feeling for humour, and a very keen perception of all the kinds of colloquial excellence. With the Cockneys and Radicals, nine tenths of whose affected contempt of him rests on the mean foundation that they dislike the very pardonable pride he took in his ancient birth, who would condescend to reason? But if any unprejudiced person doubts the real talent required for doing what Boswell did, let him make the experiment by attempting to describe somebody's conversation himself. Let him not may be added to the merits of Boswell's Life of Johnson that Mr. Croker's edition of it is beyond question the best edited book in the Eng lish language. fancy that he is performing a trivial or undignified task; for which of us, in any station, can hope to render a tithe of the service to the world that was conferred on it by the Laird of Auchinleck? Johnson's conversation is the perfection of the talk of a man of letters; and if, as we believe, the test of Table-Talk be its worthiness to take a place as literature after its immediate effect has been produced, where shall we look for its match? It has a style of its own, and cannot be imitated without absurdity. It is an intermediate something between literature and conversation, in which it is impossible to separate the share of the man of letters from the share of the man of the world. He sometimes said things which might have been transferred unaltered to his Lives of the Poets,' and he sometimes. wrote things which only required the preliminary Why, Sir,' as wings to send them flying through the dining-room of Streatham; but while in his study he was or the drawing-room at always more or less the scholar, in society he was often a man of the world: and his whole life was such an union of Town and Gown' as was perhaps never before exhibited by an individual. Sir Joshua Not without difficulty do we realise the impression which his vivid, pithy talk made on his friends. We remember nothing which better illustrates it than the description by Garrick of the talk of Adam Smith: What do you think, eh? Flabby, isn't it?' The word perfectly describes, by opposites, the qualities of Johnsonian conversation. It spoiled men for every; thing that was not both weighty and smart. It was at once gay and potent; its playfulness resembling the ricochetting of sixty-eight pounders, which bound like Indian-rubber balls, and yet batter down fortresses. Such talk could only come from a great, active, practical man. mere scholar, no mere metaphysician, could ever have produced it. No Johnson's conversation was, however, not suited to general society; but, with all its transcendent merit, had its limitations. It had not the winning easy charm of Sir Walter Scott, but was stern and logical. It kept down all sorts of conversational excellence except its own, and gave rise afterwards to many inferior copies. Argument is seldom tolerable in conversation; but as this propensity of Johnson was easier to mimic than his unrivalled faculty of flinging out illustrations, men played at Johnson and Burke' who could ill reach the meanest qualities of either. The Edin burgh school which followed were a set of argumentative declaimers, or men who varied argument only by epigram. A perverse disputatiousness was seasoned by an unwholesome smartness. The indispensable requisite of nature was forgotten. These were the men who, as Lockhart tells us, thought Scott's conversation common-place; the truth being that it was rich in ease, sense, and humour; while theirs was like the breakfasts in military novels, which seem to consist chiefly of devilled kidneys, grilled bones, and other fiery and salamandrine elements. We have one book of Ana, the Walpoliana,'* which more resembles French works of the kind than any other in our literature. Nor is this wonderful, since if ever a human being dearly loved Ana it was Horace Walpole, though they are for the most part the sweetmeats of literature, and are by no means to be made a staple article of diet. Unfortunately the Walpoliana contains much triviality about 'warming-pans that had belonged to Charles the Second,' and such congenial subjects; flavoured with a kind of satirical cynicism against men and man's nature, conceived and expressed in a way to make us fancy we are listening to a French soubrette who had studied Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. We must add that there are anecdotes against the characters of eminent individuals totally destitute of truth, yet told with a kind of gusto which would be disagreeable even if they were unquestionably veracious. When we add that there are some good stories, many of them, however, borrowed, and that his peculiar brilliancy is shown in some happy bon-mots, we shall have said all that the book can fairly claim. Like Voltaire and Chesterfield, Walpole both wrote and talked wittily. Sydney Smith at once occurs as another instance of the combination. It will almost always be found that such wits or talkers are altogether greater than those, by no means rare, individuals, who possess the oral gift only. Much of the charm which belongs to these last is found to resolve itself into person and manner. In a country, too, like England, where colloquial talent has never had so high a place as in other parts of Europe, and where consequently it is rarer, it will sometimes happen that a man, encouraged by the freedom of the field, devotes himself to it, to the exclusion of other pursuits. But such disciples of the Conversation Sharp' school are few. Published in 1799. 6 For the period immediately before the present, we have the various Conversations' of Lord Byron, besides the everincreasing Memoirs and Diaries,' such as those of Mackintosh and Moore. Byron was a most remarkable talker. His more serious conversation,' said Shelley, is a sort of intoxication.' That his gayer kind was most shrewd, witty, and lively, those who must trust to records in the matter can see in his Life, and in the work on the subject by Lady Blessington. He seems to have talked Childe Harold or Don Juan at his pleasure, just as he could act either character. He has given us his opinion of all the great conversers of his day: Curran, with his poetic and imaginative wildness; De Staël, with her sentimental glitter; Luttrell's elegant epigram; Lord Dudley's pregnant point; the convivial brilliance of Sheridan and Colman; the fairy grace and ornament of Moore; and the abundant knowledge, the precision, and the modesty of Mackintosh. There was a vast deal of splendid talent in England in Byron's time; and we had better not ask too curiously, Who are the men who supply its place now? Two remarkable books-Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe,' and the Table-Talk' of Coleridge-have appeared since Byron's time. Both are too fresh in the remembrance to demand much notice. Eckermann's shows us that the riches of Goethe's mind flowed as readily from his tongue as his pen. He spoke freely on the deepest, and playfully on the slightest subjects; sometimes saying a wise thing, and sometimes a good thing.' Such a book irresistibly impresses us as coming fresher from the heart than any merely literary work. Nothing can supersede the value and importance of the original forces of nature; and the force of oral communication is one of these. The conversation of Coleridge-latterly, at least-was sometimes of the nature of monologue, or even reverie, and cloudy with mystic magnificence; but unquestionably enough exists in his Table-Talk to prove that substantial thought, and free, lucid, bright-hued expression abounded in his conversation as they abound in his writings. We presume to assign it a place among the best; yet how few are good books of the kind after all! We have looked for them among the records of the wise and the foolish, the witty and the dull, the famous and the little known, and cannot help feeling that after all the Literature of Conversation plays a poor part in literary history. When we consider how |