say, a regiment gone wholly to the drum, with hardly a good musket to
be seen in it,--more a canaille than a regiment. Canaille of all the
loud-sounding levities, and general winnowings of Chaos, marching
through the world in a most ominous manner; proclaiming, audibly if
you have ears: "Twelfth hour of the Night; ancient graves yawning; pale
clammy Puseyisms screeching in their winding-sheets; owls busy in the
City regions; many goblins abroad! Awake ye living; dream no more; arise
to judgment! Chaos and Gehenna are broken loose; the Devil with his
Bedlams must be flung in chains again, and the Last of the Days is about
to dawn!" Such is Literature to the reflective soul at this moment.

But what now concerns us most is the circumstance that here too the
demand is, Vocables, still vocables. In all appointed courses of
activity and paved careers for human genius, and in this unpaved,
unappointed, broadest career of Literature, broad way that leadeth to
destruction for so many, the one duty laid upon you is still, Talk,
talk. Talk well with pen or tongue, and it shall be well with you;
do not talk well, it shall be ill with you. To wag the tongue with
dexterous acceptability, there is for human worth and faculty, in our
England of the Nineteenth Century, that one method of emergence and no
other. Silence, you would say, means annihilation for the Englishman of
the Nineteenth Century. The worth that has not spoken itself, is not;
or is potentially only, and as if it were not. Vox is the God of this
Universe. If you have human intellect, it avails nothing unless you
either make it into beaverism, or talk with it. Make it into beaverism,
and gather money; or else make talk with it, and gather what you can.
Such is everywhere the demand for talk among us: to which, of course,
the supply is proportionate.

From dinners up to woolsacks and divine mitres, here in England, much
may be gathered by talk; without talk, of the human sort nothing. Is
Society become wholly a bag of wind, then, ballasted by guineas? Are our
interests in it as a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal?--In Army or
Navy, when unhappily we have war on hand, there is, almost against our
will, some kind of demand for certain of the silent talents. But in
peace, that too passes into mere demand of the ostentations, of the
pipeclays and the blank cartridges; and,--except that Naval men are
occasionally, on long voyages, forced to hold their tongue, and convers