thought the lawyers beat the Bishops as talkers, and the Bishops the
wits. Nearly all great orators have been fine talkers. Lord Chatham, who
could electrify the House of Lords by pronouncing the word "Sugar," but
who in private was but commonplace, was an exception; but the
conversation of Pitt and Fox was brilliant and fascinating,--that of
Burke, rambling, but splendid, rich and instructive, beyond description.
The latter was the only man in the famous "Literary Club" who could cope
with Johnson. The Doctor confessed that in Burke he had a foeman worthy
of his steel. On one occasion, when debilitated by sickness, he said:
"That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it
would kill me." At another time he said: "Burke, sir, is such a man
that, if you met him for the first time in the street, where you were
stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter
but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner, that when you
parted you'd say--'This is an extraordinary man.'" "Can he wind into a
subject like a serpent, as Burke does?" asked Goldsmith of a certain
talker. Fox said that he had derived more political information from
Burke's conversation alone than from books, science, and all his worldly
experience put together. Moore finely says of the same conversation,
that it must have been like the procession of a Roman triumph,
exhibiting power and riches at every step, occasionally mingling the low
Fescennine jest with the lofty music of the march, but glittering all
over with the spoils of a ransacked world.

--_Mathews._

* * * * *

The fault of literary conversation in general is its too great
tenaciousness. It fastens upon a subject, and will not let it go. It
resembles a battle rather than a skirmish, and makes a toil of a
pleasure. Perhaps it does this from necessity, from a consciousness of
wanting the more familiar graces, the power to sport and trifle, to
touch lightly and adorn agreeably, every view or turn of a question _en
passant_, as it arises. Those who have a reputation to lose are too
ambitious of shining, to please. "To excel in conversation," said an
ingenious man, "one must not be always striving to say good things: to
say one good thing, one must say many bad, and more indifferent ones."
This desire to shine without the means at hand, often makes men
silent:--

The fear of being silent strikes us dumb.

A wri