NTAINE, was more
facetious in his tales than in his conversation; for the Countess of
Pembroke used to rally him, observing that his silence was more agreeable
to her than his talk. TASSO'S conversation, which his friend Manso has
attempted to preserve for us, was not agreeable. In company he sat
absorbed in thought, with a melancholy air; and it was on one of these
occasions that a person present observing that this conduct was indicative
of madness, that TASSO, who had heard him, looking on him without emotion,
asked whether he was ever acquainted with a madman who knew when to hold
his tongue! Malebranche tells us that one of these mere men of learning,
who can only venture to praise antiquity, once said, "I have seen
DESCARTES; I knew him, and frequently have conversed with him; he was a
good sort of man, and was not wanting in sense, but he had nothing
extraordinary in him." Had Aristotle spoken French instead of Greek, and
had this man frequently conversed with him, unquestionably he would not
have discovered, even in this idol of antiquity, anything extraordinary.
Two thousand years would have been wanting for our learned critic's
perceptions.

It is remarkable that the conversationists have rarely proved to be the
abler writers. He whose fancy is susceptible of excitement in the presence
of his auditors, making the minds of men run with his own, seizing on the
first impressions, and touching the shadows and outlines of things--with a
memory where all lies ready at hand, quickened by habitual associations,
and varying with all those extemporary changes and fugitive colours which
melt away in the rainbow of conversation; with that wit, which is only wit
in one place, and for a time; with that vivacity of animal spirits which
often exists separately from the more retired intellectual powers--this
man can strike out wit by habit, and pour forth a stream of phrase which
has sometimes been imagined to require only to be written down to be read
with the same delight with which it was heard; but he cannot print his
tone, nor his air and manner, nor the contagion of his hardihood. All the
while we were not sensible of the flutter of his ideas, the incoherence of
his transitions, his vague notions, his doubtful assertions, and his
meagre knowledge. A pen is the extinguisher of this luminary.

A curious contrast occurred between BUFFON and his friend MONTBELLIARD,
who was associated in his great work. The one possessed the