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of narrators or raconteurs. Of all the bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, the most insufferable, he declares, is the teller of "good stories," a nuisance which, he asserts, should be put down by cudgeling, by submersion in horse-ponds, or any mode of abatement, as summarily as men would combine to suffocate a vampire or a mad dog.

It seems to be an almost inevitable result, when great wits are pitted against each other in the social circle, that the wish to shine prevents the conversation from taking an easy, natural course. Every one is anxious to seize as it flies by the opportune moment for saying his brilliant things, and in many cases the apropos is very far-fetched. Marmontel, in picturing the fine conversations of his day, tells us that in Marivaux, the impatient wish to display his sagacity and finesse was conspicuously manifest. Montesquieu waited with more calmness till the ball should come to him, but he waited for it nevertheless. Mairan watched for the favorable opportunity. Astruc disdained to wait. There is, perhaps, hardly any greater nuisance than when a company at dinner, or in a drawing-room, are compelled to listen to two or three literary lions who are trying to dazzle it with their brilliant wit. No doubt they enjoy this, but they show that they lack the very first element of good breeding, which is courtesy; and it is absurd to call their talk conversation, when it is confined to themselves. A still greater nuisance is when two men interrupt the easy flow of talk by a controversial discussion. As De Quincey says, mere good sense is sufficient, without any experience at all of high life, to point out the intolerable absurdity of allowing two angry champions to lock up and sequestrate, as

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it were, the whole social enjoyment of a large party, and compel them to sit in sad civility, witnesses of a contest which can interest the majority neither by its final object nor by its management." Listening to such logomachy is even more disagreeable than sitting within ear-shot of "the young college don who solves the enigma of Free Will and constructs a Philosophy of Being in twenty minutes."

Hazlitt tells us that the best converser he ever knew was the best listener. "I mean Northcote, the painter. Painters, by their profession, are not bound to shine in conversation, and they shine the more. He lends his ear to an observation as if you had brought him a piece of news, and enters into it with as much avidity and earnestness as if it interested him personally." Romilly was a similar talker; his conversation never indicated a wish to display, but flowed from the abundance of a refined and richly informed understanding. Carlyle, on the other hand, is a poor listener. He gives no one else a chance, but, according to Margaret Fuller, bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound.

It is said that Thiers, the late French president, was an interminable monologist, and that it was only when he shaved that one could get a chance of being listened to by him. Only while the razor was at his throat was he silent, or did he vouchsafe attention. Thiers could speak from morning till night unwearied, with ever new sparkling thoughts, ever new plays of wit flashing forth, rejoicing his audience, teaching, blinding,- in short, a

spoken firework. The colloquial despotism of such a man is comparatively excusable; yet even from monopolists of far inferior gifts the skillful listener will glean many kernels of wheat among the chaff. Madame Geoffrin, who was impatient of prolonged talk, was asked how she could bear the conversation of a very tiresome man for three or four hours. "I made him talk of himself and his affairs," was the reply, "and in talking of ourselves, we become interesting to others." Sainte-Beuve states that one day when she saw the good Abbé de Saint-Pierre installing himself at her house for a whole winter's evening, she was frightened for a moment, but drawing inspiration from the desperate situation, she did so well that she utilized the worthy abbé, and made him positively amusing. He was completely astonished at it himself; and when, as he withdrew, she complimented him. upon his good conversation, saying: "You have been delightful to-day; you have said many witty things,” he replied: "Madame, I am but an instrument; you have played on it according to your own taste, and you know how to sound it."

WHO ARE GENTLEMEN?

"A gentleman?

What, o' the wool-pack? or the sugar chest?
Or lists of velvet? which is't, pound or yard,
You vend your gentry by?"

DEMOCRATIC as we profess to be in this country,

and though we are as fond of denouncing aristocrats as were the "sansculottes" at the beginning of the French Revolution, there is, nevertheless, hardly an American town of a thousand inhabitants where there are not certain families that pique themselves on being "genteel." But what do they mean by "genteel "? The word is one which some persons have continually on their lips, yet there is hardly one, perhaps, between the two covers of Webster's "Unabridged," the precise meaning of which they would be more sorely puzzled to define. Gentility,— what is it? It is harder to define than the term with which Sir Robert Peel was wont to puzzle the financiers,— "What is a pound"? We all have some dim, shadowy ideas of the thing; but what mental chemist has yet appeared gifted with powers so subtle as to analyze the elements of this mysterious attribute of humanity; or what lexicographer, living or dead, has presumed to expound to the world the curious substance or essence of which it is composed? Ask any man who is in the habit of applying and denying this epithet to scores of his spe

cies, Who or what is a gentleman? and the chances are that you will get a reply about as precise and satisfactory as Bardolph's definition of "accommodation"; gentleman, that is a gentleman; or when a person is-beingwhereby he may be thought to be a gentleman; which is an excellent thing. All will unhesitatingly agree that a man well born, having an independent fortune, an upright, generous, high-minded character, with courteous. manner, and withal good clothes, is a gentleman. But the puzzle is to tell how many of these qualities is essential to give one a claim to gentility,- for it is on this point that men's sentiments so widely vary. Undoubtedly there are in every case many seemingly trivial but really important circumstances to be taken into account before we may pronounce a man to be, absolutely and unqualifiedly, a gentleman; and hence, it behooves us always to be exceedingly cautious, for to a nice mind, ardently engaged in the pursuit of truth, a hair's-breadth distinction is found oftentimes more obstinately irreconcilable than a glaring discrepancy.

Dr. Johnson defines a gentleman as a man of birth, which is no doubt the etymological sense of the word. A gentleman was originally a man of noble family, or gens, as it was called in Latin. How the barbarians who conquered the Romans came to use the word as a word of honor, has been much disputed. Some say that as the barbarians were gentiles, or outer nations to the Romans, their leaders assumed the appellation as one of honor to distinguish themselves from the degenerate people they had enslaved. This was the learned Selden's view, but Gibbon preferred to derive the word from the civilian's use of it as synonymous with ingenuus. A "gentle" (its derivative)

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