ose
impostures which offer themselves in our days as criticisms.

_XIV. PRONUNCIATION._

To _write_ his own language with propriety is the ambition of here and
there an individual; to speak it with propriety is the ambition of
multitudes. Amongst the qualifications for a public writer--the
preliminary one of _leisure_ is granted to about one man in three
thousand; and, this being indispensable, there at once, for most men,
mercifully dies in the very instant of birth the most uneasy and
bewildering of temptations. But _speak_ a man must. Leisure or no
leisure, to _talk_ he is obliged by the necessities of life, or at least
he thinks so; though my own private belief is, that the wisest rule upon
which a man could act in this world (alas! I did not myself act upon it)
would be to seal up his mouth from earliest youth, to simulate the
infirmity of dumbness, and to answer only by signs. This would soon put
an end to the impertinence of questions, to the intolerable labour of
framing and uttering replies through a whole life, and, above all (oh,
foretaste of Paradise!), to the hideous affliction of sustaining these
replies and undertaking for all their possible consequences. That notion
of the negroes in Senegal about monkeys, viz., that they _can_ talk if
they choose, and perhaps with classical elegance, but wisely dissemble
their talent under the fear that the unjust whites would else make them
work in Printing Houses, for instance, as 'readers' and correctors of
the press, this idea, which I dare say is true, shows how much wiser, in
his generation, is a monkey than a man. For, besides the wear and tear
to a man's temper by the irritation of talking, and the corrosion of
one's happiness by the disputes which talking entails, it is really
frightful to think of the mischief caused, if one measures it only by
the fruitless expense of words. Eleven hundred days make up about three
years; consequently, eleven thousand days make up thirty years. But that
day must be a very sulky one, and probably raining cats and dogs, on
which a man throws away so few as two thousand words, not reckoning what
he loses in sleep. A hundred and twenty-five words for every one of
sixteen hours cannot be thought excessive. The result, therefore, is,
that, in one generation of thirty years, he wastes irretrievably upon
the impertinence of answering--of wrangling, and of prosing, not less
than twice eleven thousand times a thousand words; th