we have an excellent dissertation from Swift-himself, as might be expected, an admirable talker-entitled 'Hints towards an Essay on Conversation.' He sets out by saying that he had observed few obvious subjects to have been so seldom, or at least so slightly, handled as this, and that few were so difficult to treat. He was in possession of the traditions of the age preceding his own, and gives us the following interesting statement:

'I take the highest period of politeness in England (and it is of the same date in France) to have been the peaceable part of King Charles I.'s reign; and from what we read of those times, as well as from the accounts I have formerly met with from some who lived in that court, the methods then used for raising and cultivating conversation were altogether different from ours: several ladies whom we find celebrated by the poets of that age, had assemblies at their houses, where persons of the best understanding and of both sexes met to pass the evenings in discoursing upon whatever agreeable subjects happened to be started; and although we are apt to ridicule the sublime platonic notions they had, or personated, in love and friendship, I conceive their refinements were grounded upon reason, and that a little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious, and low.'

These chivalrous notions from Swift may astonish, but they are worthy of his acute intellect; and were especially needed in an age when the re-action still continued, and grossness and familiarity took the place of knightly courtesy and admiring respect.

In Swift's own time there was no word in more frequent use, both in writing and conversation, than that of raillery. It usually signified a kind of satirical banter; but the French, from whom we borrow the word,' remarks the Dean, 'have quite a different idea of the thing; and so had we in the politer age of our fathers. Raillery was to say something that at first appeared a reproach or reflection, but by some turn of wit, unexpected and surprising, ended always in a compliment, and to the advantage of the person it was addressed to.' One species of this art, according to Fielding, was to heighten good qualities by applying to them the terms which denoted their excess as when you spoke of generosity as prodigality, and of courage as foolhardiness, or it was a complimentary irony by which vices were imputed to men the exact reverse of their notorious virtues. Of this latter kind there is a fine example in Pope's well-known lines:

Spirit of Arnall! aid me while I lie.
Cobham's a coward, Polwarth is a slave,
And Lyttleton a dark designing knave;

St.

St. John has ever been a wealthy fool,
But let me add, Sir Robert's mighty dull-
Has never made a friend in private life,
And was, besides, a tyrant to his wife.'

Though Swift considered raillery the most refined part of conversation, it is one of those artifices for which there can only be an occasional opening, and which requires at all times a tact and discrimination which are the gifts of few. Thus it had passed from an ingenious and delicate description of compliment into gentle banter upon harmless foibles, and from this into laughing at real defects, and into attempts to render people ridiculous. It was then nothing better than privileged abuse.

It is very remarkable how entirely the reverse of cynical are all Swift's maxims upon conversation. Surely,' he 'Surely,' he says, when speaking of raillery, one of the best rules is never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish we had left unsaid; nor can anything be well more contrary to the ends for which people meet together than to part unsatisfied with each other or themselves.' It was indignation at the perversion of an innocent and useful pleasure that led him to take up his pen; and he held that, though few were qualified to shine, most persons had it in their power to be agreeable. He imputed the low ebb to which conversation had run less to defects of understanding than to pride, vanity, ill-nature, affectation, singularity, and positiveness. He conceived, therefore, that it would be sufficient to produce a reform if he pointed out the errors which were the source of the evil, and which all might correct if they pleased. He did not omit faults which were generally felt and condemned, but which prevailed notwithstanding. The folly of talking too much, for instance, was universally exclaimed against, yet he had rarely seen five people together without one of the number being guilty of it, to the great annoyance of the rest. It might have been supposed that to please himself and disgust his company was a species of reputation of which no one would be particularly ambitious. The Dean's own practice was to make a long pause after he had spoken, to give anybody who was inclined the opportunity to take his turn.

It will startle many people to find what company Swift singled out as presenting the climax of tiresome talk:

'The worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life was that at Will's Coffee-house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble; that is to say, five or six men who had writ plays, or at least prologues, or had a share in a miscellany, came thither and entertained one another with their trifling composures, in so

important

important an air as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature, or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them.'

In other words, the conversation at Will's assumed a local, personal, and exclusive character; whereas good conversation, whether literary or not, is distinguished by its sociability, and, being addressed to the world, does not bear the colour of what is peculiar and private in the individual. Byron wrote in verse to the same effect:

'One hates an author that 's all author, fellows

In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink.'

The talk of such men may be witty, or it may be eloquentbut it is not conversation. For conversation implies as much attention to your neighbour the listener, as to yourself the speaker. This led Swift to extend the meaning of the term pedantry, which he understood to signify the unseasonable obtruding our own branch of knowledge upon a company which could not participate in it. Thus he held it to be pedantic for a soldier to talk too freely of military affairs; for acquaintances to dwell on passages of their history which were caviare to the general circle; for women to be over-copious upon the subject of their dresses, fans, and china. Fielding complained that the lawyers in his day were particularly liable to the failing, owing to their being a good deal confined to the society of one another. He had known, he said, a very agreeable party spoiled by a couple of barristers, who seemed rather to think themselves in a court of justice than in a mixed assembly of persons met only for the entertainment of each other.

Swift had no liking for professed wits. He objected to them that their inventions were always on the rack, and that they only watched the conversation for an opportunity to display their talents, and say a good thing. This is the bane of real sociality; and a few forced jests are a miserable substitute for the feast of reason and the flow of soul. One wit of the Dean's acquaintance was never easy unless he was allowed to dictate and preside; and it will usually be found that the jester requires an audience that he takes the initiative, and commands your attention like the Punch which appears before your windows. But wit ought to spring naturally out of the conversation. good bon-mot, like the sparkle from a grindstone, is the casual brilliance of an intellect in fruitful activity. Such was the wit of Ménage; and such also that of Bacon, Cicero, Montesquieu, Johnson, Burke, and the many great men who have possessed the endowment. The mass of modern diners-out' are mere jokers who have some fun and great animal spirits. This

A

amount

amount of facetiousness is compatible with a very ordinary understanding and no attainments. Let us again refer to Swift's high authority:—

'I have known men happy enough at ridicule who upon grave subjects were perfectly stupid; of whom Dr. Echard of Cambridge, who writ the Contempt of the Clergy, was a great instance.'

Indeed the Dean went so far as to assert that he had never known a wag who was not a dunce. The men of wit and pleasure about town,' as they used to be called, though Fielding says the wit had disappeared in his time, and we are inclined to add that the pleasure has followed it in ours, would seem to be instances of this, so utterly drivelling and so void of all serious purpose, or sensible application, is much of our current satirical literature.

Of the stock phrases and stereotyped questions and answers which were the common staple of talk in the reign of Queen Anne among non-literary people, who lived in what was called the world, Swift gives a curious representation, in his 'Complete Collection of genteel and ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode now used at Court and in the best Companies in England.' He professes to record nothing which had not been in constant circulation for at least a hundred years; but if the fashionable folks of that day really employed one half of the observations he has set down, we must confess that we have sadly degenerated since, and that our great-great-grandmothers had a larger, richer, and livelier repository than is to be met with now. Many of the retorts, apart from their antiquity, are, pleasant enough :- Neverout. Here's poor Miss has not a word to throw at a dog. Come, a penny for your thoughts. Miss. They are not worth a farthing; for I was thinking of you.' And again: Colonel. Is it certain that Sir John Blunderbuss is dead at last? Lord Sparkish. Yes, or else he's sadly wrong'd, for they have buried him.' We are quoting from Sir Walter Scott's edition of Swift; and it is singular to come, in Washington Irving's 'Abbotsford,' upon the following example of Scott's own humour in conversation :—

'One morning at breakfast, when Dominie Thomson, the tutor, was present, Scott was going on with great glee to relate an anecdote of the Laird of Macnab, "who, poor fellow!" premised he, "is dead and gone." "Why, Mr. Scott," exclaimed his good lady, "Macnab 's not dead, is he?" "Faith, my dear," replied Scott, with humorous gravity, "if he's not dead, they have done him great injustice, for they 've buried him." The joke passed harmless and unnoticed by Mrs. Scott, but hit the poor Dominie just as he had raised a cup of tea to his lips,

causing

causing a burst of laughter which sent half of the contents about the table.'

Spence's memoranda of the conversation of Pope and others contain many facts which are well worth preserving, but as specimens of talk the work cannot rank very high. We have come, however, now in Boswell's 'Johnson' to the greatest work of the class which exists in the world. The 'Tour to the Hebrides' had shown what was to be expected from a man who seems to have been better fitted for his vocation than anybody else who ever lived, and whose name has supplied the English language with a new word. Every year increases the popularity of Boswell's* marvellous work. The world will some day do more justice to his talents, which those who cannot forgive his Toryism are far too prone to run down; for he possessed great dramatic talent, great feeling for humour, and a very keen perception of all the kinds of colloquial excellence. With the Cockneys and Radicals, nine tenths of whose affected contempt of him rests on the mean foundation that they dislike the very pardonable pride he took in his ancient birth, who would condescend to reason? But if any unprejudiced person doubts the real talent required for doing what Boswell did, let him make the experiment by attempting to describe somebody's conversation himself. Let him not fancy that he is performing a trivial or undignified task; for which of us, in any station, can hope to render a tithe of the service to the world that was conferred on it by the Laird of Auchinleck?

Johnson's conversation is the perfection of the talk of a man of letters; and if, as we believe, the test of Table-Talk be its worthiness to take a place as literature after its immediate effect has been produced, where shall we look for its match? It has a style of its own, and cannot be imitated without absurdity. It is an intermediate something between literature and conversation, in which it is impossible to separate the share of the man of letters from the share of the man of the world. He sometimes said things which might have been transferred unaltered to his 'Lives of the Poets,' and he sometimes wrote things which only required the preliminary Why, Sir,' as wings to send them flying through the dining-room of Sir Joshua or the drawingroom at Streatham; but while in his study he was always more or less the scholar, in society he was often a man of the world: and his whole life was such an union of Town and Gown' as was perhaps never before exhibited by an individual.

6

Not without difficulty do we realise the impression which

It may be added to the merits of Boswell's Life of Johnson that Mr. Croker's edition of it is beyond question the best edited book in the English language.