his own hero. As he remarked of Francis Beaumont, he loved too much himself and his own verses.' 'He is,' writes Drummond, a great praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others.' This last quality is abundantly manifested in his host's report of his opinion of his brother bards. Spenser's stanzas, Ben said, 'pleased him not, nor his matter; Samuel Daniel was a good, honest man, but no poet; Michael Drayton's long verses pleased him not; Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas was not well done, nor that of Fairfax of Tasso; that Harington's Ariosto was of all translations the worst; that Donne's Anniversary was profane and full of blasphemies, and that he deserved hanging for not keeping of accent; that Shakspeare wanted art; that Sharpham, Day, Dicker, and Minshew were all rogues; that Abram Francis, in his English hexameters, was a fool; that next himself only Fletcher and Chapman could make a masque.' These harsh judgments are crowded together unqualified by a word of commendation, but the remainder of the book is less unfavourable to the detracting propensities of surly Ben. He sometimes speaks good of others, and has many topics besides them and himself. Here and there we have a curious trait of character, such as that Sir Philip Sidney's mother never showed herself at court except masked after she had had the smallpox; or we come upon one of the received rumours of the day which tells us how the famous Earl of Leicester, who had murdered one wife, fell into the pit which he dug for the second. 'He gave a bottle of liquor to his lady, which he willed her to use in any faintness; which she, after his return from court, not knowing. it was poison, gave him, and so he died.' Nor is it beneath our curiosity to learn Lord Bacon's habitual action in speaking,'My Lord Chancellor wringeth his speeches from the strings of his band;' or that Ben himself drew poetic inspiration from his great toe. 'He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in imagination.' But how meagre and fragmentary, on the whole, are these specimens of the talk of one who had talked a thousand times with Shakspeare! We are glad to know from them certain facts of the speaker's history which we cannot get elsewhere, on such good authority; but when we recollect Pope's line

'What boy but hears the sayings of old Ben?'

when we recall Herrick's ode to him, and the colloquial, convivial nature of the man, we feel mournfully what we have lost by the indifference of Drummond, or the ravages of time.

Jonson's friend Selden has been more fortunate. He died in

1654, and his 'Table-Talk' was published by his amanuensis Richard Milward in 1689. Lucky the scholar who can talk and who has a discriminating Richard Milward'; for, otherwise, how many readers would John Selden now boast in England? Most men of letters, indeed, have had occasion to make some acquaintance with his writings-let us say with the Titles of Honour' for instance - and have bowed reverently to the immensely learned man, of whom Ben Jonson said, that 'he was the Law Book of the Judges.' But is the Selden of the 'Titles of Honour' the same person as the Selden of the 'TableTalk?' One scarcely believes it. Dry, grave, and even crabbed in his writings-his conversation is homely, humorous, shrewd, vivid, even delightful! He is still the great scholar and the tough parliamentarian, but merry, playful, and witty. The avμov yeλzoua is on the sea of his vast intellect. He writes like the opponent of Grotius; he talks like the friend of Ben Jonson.

În Selden's Table-Talk' is found that exquisite illustration that libels and pasquils are like straws, which serve to show how the wind sets. In it, too, is the striking thought so much admired by Coleridge, that Transubstantiation is only Rhetoric turned into Logic.' His chief conversational quality, the one, says his amanuensis, which his friends most valued in him, was his turn for familiar illustration. He put off the cumbersome garb of the scholar and talked about a scholar's subjects like a man of the world. This is the great difference between Selden's 'Table-Talk' and the Ana generally, that it is infinitely more substantial. He employs his colloquial familiarity to light up the high themes of Church and State. You are amused, but you are also benefited. By a single curious fact he shows us how jealous the old Parliaments were of their independence and

power.

In time of Parliament it used to be one of the first things the House did to petition the King that his confessor might be removed, as fearing either his power with the King, or else lest he should reveal to the Pope what the House was doing, as no doubt he did when the Catholic cause was concerned.'

How quietly satirical is the sarcastic question with which he concludes his observation on the pretended poverty of the friars!

The friars say they possess nothing: whose then are the lands they hold? Not their superior's; he hath vowed poverty as well as they. Whose then? To answer this, 'twas decreed they should say they were the Pope's. And why must the friars be more perfect than the Pope himself?'

How felicitous, again, is the illustration by which he expresses the necessary connexion of faith and works!

'Twas an unhappy division that has been made between faith and works. Though in my intellect I may divide them, just as in the candle I know there is both light and heat, but yet put out the candle and they are both gone; one remains not without the other; so 'tis betwixt faith and works.'

Then he has admirable observations upon human nature, and pleasant anecdotes with which to exemplify his positions.

'We measure the excellency of other men by some excellency we conceive to be in ourselves. Nash, a poet poor enough, as poets used to be, seeing an alderman with his gold chain upon his great horse, by way of scorn said to one of his companions, " Do you see yon fellow, how goodly, how big he looks? Why that fellow cannot make a blank

verse!" "

The next extract is an instance of the same principle of the mind under a fresh aspect.

We cannot tell what is a judgment of God; 'tis presumption to take upon us to know. Commonly we say a judgment falls upon a man for something in him we cannot abide. An example we have in King James concerning the death of Henry the Fourth of France. One said he was killed for his dissoluteness, another said he was killed for turning his religion. No, says King James, who could not abide fighting, he was killed for permitting duels in his kingdom.'

A remark of Swift will once more vary the point of view, and show us this pervading self-sufficiency in another of its habits :'That was excellently observed, say I, when I read a passage an author where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.'

We have already referred to Johnson's admiration of the 'TableTalk' of Selden, and one of his own most celebrated dicta was borrowed from it. 'Sir,' said he to Boswell, your levellers. wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?' This,' said Selden, is the juggling trick of the parity,-they would have nobody above them, but they do not tell you they would have nobody under them.' Johnson proceeded with the democratical Mrs. Macaulay to put her principles to the test. 'Madam,' he said, 'I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow citizen,

your

your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us.' This was the reduction to practice of that saying of Lycurgus which Lord Bacon has included in his Apophthegms, when the proposition being made to introduce into Sparta an absolute popular equality, he replied, 'Begin it in your own house.'

Possibly Richard Milward was a more judicious reporter than most talkers have found; but we must not forget the great and earnest struggle of Selden's century which had put our countrymen of all opinions on their best mettle. He had lived his life in a higher moral atmosphere than that of the gayest Parisian saloons. There was a stuff and a sap in the Englishmen of that period which gave their talk a richness and a colour unknown to the pungent levities of a Boileau, a Ménage, a Segrais, or a Monsieur de Bautru. Nor was Selden a scholar and antiquary only; he had taken his wine with the wits and Ben Jonson, and had thundered against 'tonnage and poundage' on the floor of the House of Commons. It would appear, indeed, that to a thoroughly good talker something is required of the talents of active life. Lord Bacon, Selden, Cicero, Burke, were all men of action. Napoleon said things which tell in history like his battles. Luther's Table-Talk glows with the fire which burnt the Pope's Bull. Nearly all great orators have been excellent in colloquy; and, which is a kindred fact, a very large proportion of actors likewise. If we take the conversational men of letters, we shall find that they were either men fit for action, but kept out of it by accident, like Dr. Johnson; or at once, men of letters and men of action, like Swift. If we take the conversational poets, we shall find them among those nearest to men of action in their natures, like Byron, and Burns, and Scott. The best sayers of good things have been among statesmen, diplomatists, and men of the world: in short, we think the essence of the quality lies as much in the character as in the intellect. It is an affair of the emotions, of the animal spirits, as well as of mental gifts.

At any rate there are great names which show that the talent for talking is distinct from the talent for writing. Addison, who has been condemned upon his own happy metaphor, that he could draw bills for a thousand pounds, though he had not a guinea in his pocket,' must be excluded from the list. His friends, and we may add his enemies, have been juster to him than he was to himself. Lady Mary Wortley, who belonged to the former category, declared he was the best company in the world; and Pope, who belonged to the last, confessed that his conversation had something in it more charming than he had

found

found in any other man. But this,' Pope continues, was only when familiar: before strangers, or perhaps a single stranger, he preserved his dignity by a stiff silence.' It was in fact one of Addison's own remarks that there was no such thing as real conversation except between two persons. His case is, therefore, a confirmation rather than otherwise of our supposition, that to shine in mixed companies at least, demands a portion of the qualities which render men fit for the stir of life, for it was the want of this which was the cause of his bashfulness, and made him fear to take the lead before strangers. Pope himself, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith, were none of them good talkers, if we may trust current belief and report. Bayle was of opinion that few learned men at all had conversational ability: but this remark must not lead us too far; on the contrary, Scaliger, Casaubon, Lipsius, Salmasius, Ménage, at once occur as exceptions to his rule. There can be no error more absurd, no prejudice more ignorant, than to suppose that the old scholars, the sixteenth and seventeenth century men, were merely pedants and book-worms; they held their own with kings, cardinals, and knights: nay, they cut a figure more conspicuous in the world than their representatives do now. When they accepted a chair in a town, the magistrates and burghers came out in procession to welcome them through the gates. Casaubon travelled to England in company with an ambassador, and was received by James I. at his dinner-table. Henri Quatre wrote to Scaliger with his own hand. All the boasting we hear now-a-days of the spread of knowledge must not make us forget, that as far as being sincerely and reverently honoured in the persons of its possessors, it enjoyed more homage then than now. In quite recent times, to return to the assertion of Bayle, the ranks of great scholars have given men

ranks of great talkers. Few men talked with more uniform vivacity and vigour than Parr; no man said better things than Porson; and we wish the Porsoniana was worthier of him. Niebuhr, again, handled his favourite literary subjects with great colloquial animation, as a pleasant little book called Lieber's 'Reminiscences' of him exists to testify. How hewith his full mind and his earnest heart-felt the dreary vacuity which reigned in his time at the dinners to which his position as a diplomatist condemned him, we know from an anecdote told by Bunsen, whose own experience also seems to have been

After Selden's 'Table-Talk' there is a long interval before we arrive at any formal record of a great man's conversation; but

*Niebuhr's 'Life and Letters,' ii. 427.

we