e
with the dumb elements, and illimitable oceans, that moan and rave there
without you and within you, which is a great advantage to the Naval
man,--our poor United Services have to make conversational windbags and
ostentational paper-lanterns of themselves, or do worse, even as the
others.

My friends, must I assert, then, what surely all men know, though all
men seem to have forgotten it, That in the learned professions as in the
unlearned, and in human things throughout, in every place and in every
time, the true function of intellect is not that of talking, but of
understanding and discerning with a view to performing! An intellect may
easily talk too much, and perform too little. Gradually, if it get into
the noxious habit of talk, there will less and less performance come
of it, talk being so delightfully handy in comparison with work; and
at last there will no work, or thought of work, be got from it at
all. Talk, except as the preparation for work, is worth almost
nothing;--sometimes it is worth infinitely less than nothing; and
becomes, little conscious of playing such a fatal part, the general
summary of pretentious nothingnesses, and the chief of all the curses
the Posterity of Adam are liable to in this sublunary world! Would you
discover the Atropos of Human Virtue; the sure Destroyer, "by painless
extinction," of Human Veracities, Performances, and Capabilities to
perform or to be veracious,--it is this, you have it here.

Unwise talk is matchless in unwisdom. Unwise work, if it but persist, is
everywhere struggling towards correction, and restoration to health;
for it is still in contact with Nature, and all Nature incessantly
contradicts it, and will heal it or annihilate it: not so with unwise
talk, which addresses itself, regardless of veridical Nature, to the
universal suffrages; and can if it be dexterous, find harbor there
till all the suffrages are bankrupt and gone to Houndsditch, Nature not
interfering with her protest till then. False speech, definable as the
acme of unwise speech, is capable, as we already said, of becoming the
falsest of all things. Falsest of all things:--and whither will the
general deluge of that, in Parliament and Synagogue, in Book and
Broadside, carry you and your affairs, my friend, when once they are
embarked on it as now?

Parliament, _Parliamentum_, is by express appointment the Talking
Apparatus; yet not in Parliament either is the essential function, by
any