at it is preferable to eating with a knife.

The faculty of talking is too seldom regarded in the light of a talent
to be polished and variously improved. It is so freely employed in all
sorts of trivialities that, like the dyer's hand, it becomes subdued to
that it works in. Canon Ainger has declared positively that
"Conversation might be improved if only people would take pains and have
a few lessons." Nearly two hundred years before Canon Ainger came to
this decision, Dean Swift contended that "Conversation might be reduced
to perfection; for here we are only to avoid a multitude of errors,
which, altho a matter of some difficulty, may be in every man's power.
Therefore it seems that the truest way to understand conversation is to
know the faults and errors to which it is subject, and from thence every
man to form maxims to himself whereby it may be regulated, because it
requires few talents to which most men are not born, or at least may
not acquire, without any great genius or study. For nature has left
every man a capacity for being agreeable, tho not of shining in company;
and there are hundreds of people sufficiently qualified for both, who,
by a very few faults that they might correct in half an hour, are not so
much as tolerable." It is recorded of Lady Blessington by Lord Lennox in
his _Drafts on My Memory_ that in youth she did not give any promise of
the charms for which she was afterwards so conspicuous, and which, in
the first half of the nineteenth century, made Gore House in London
famous for its hospitality. A marriage at an early age to a man subject
to hereditary insanity was terminated by her husband's sudden death, and
in 1818 she married the Earl of Blessington. Everything goes to prove
that, in those few years during her first husband's life, she set
herself earnestly to cultivating charm of manner and the art of
conversation.

Talking well is given so little serious consideration that the average
person, when he probes even slightly into the art, is as surprized as
was Moliere's _bourgeois gentilhomme_ upon discovering that he had
spoken prose for forty years. Plato says: "Whosoever seeketh must know
that which he seeketh for in a general notion, else how shall he know it
when he hath found it?" And if what I write on this subject enables
readers to know for what they seek in good conversation, even in
abstract fashion, I shall be grateful. When all people cultivate the art
of conversation as a