notion that this ready tongue amuses and interests. And whence comes this but from the lifelong mistake that the elders on whom she lavished her efforts were really entertained by talk spoken, not because it was worth speaking, or because it expressed her mind and heart, but because she conceived it to be adapted to failing powers and the dull monotony of a secluded life? Yet all the while, no doubt, the old folks had constantly felt weary of the tongue that never ceased, and had kept quite unimpaired their ideas of what was really entertaining and worth saying and hearing. Trifles swelled into an unnatural importance, with all their details, are only amusing if the narrative occupies the narrator, and develops what is in him. It is impossible really to impart pleasure through conversation without sharing it; but the people we mean do not see this. There is the notion of conferring kindness, of dispensing a sort of intellectual alms out of the store of their indisputable superiority, which keeps them above the level of their hearers, and tends to make their conversation continuous, easy, unembarrassed, and rapid beyond any other system of talk under the sun. Invalids as well as old people must be very liable to the infliction of this patronage. We ought to be lenient to any form of testiness in them when we are conscious of having been talking in a groove, our thoughts not keeping pace with our words; for we should remember that any one who sits down expecting to entertain, without the further effort of rousing his powers to sympathy, is engaged in an act of presumption.

But this facility grows out of less amiable forms of self-conceit. The superiority of health over sickness, of spirits over depression, of vigour over decay, is patent and incontestable even to the suffering side; but there are people who are actuated in all they do and say, and in their way of doing it, by this same notion of conferring something, of being the obliging party, who practically forget that human beings stand in mutual relations. Education, if it does not immediately infuse these ideas, fosters them on the one hand, as it moderates them on the other. Thus a public school training violently opposes any such inborn tendency, while certain private crotchety systems as actively develop it. All plans that put into children's heads the notion that it is their part to instruct or to patronise their elders, lay the foundations of a mechanical facility of speech, so that many would say that private education makes. the best talkers. Young people who live at home, who perhaps are secluded from the amusements of their own age, and consequently from its society, are often indemnified for the privation by a notion carefully instilled into them of their usefulness. If they may not be amused after the careless fashion of their fellows, they can, at any rate, lay themselves out to amuse, and study to devote their talents to the service of others. This sounds excellent, but neither a good manner nor a good style is formed by it, because it is not the natural order of things. Young people ought to do one another good, and they ought to expect to get good from their betters, of whom they are the unconscious cheerers. But as

soon as it formally enters into the mind of boy or girl to entertain their elders by their conversation, and to cultivate topics with this view-as soon as they set themselves to talk as a sort of practice, collecting things to say, and storing them in their memory, not because they naturally interest them, but because they esteem them the sort of things for Mr and Mrs So-and-sothey are laying the foundation of a facile, monotonous, inexpressive diction, which will haunt them through life. It will get them many a compliment, no doubt, and many a pretty speech of thanks, but will act as an insuperable impediment to all natural, free, enjoyable, and really profitable interchange of thought. A seed of conceit and self-estimation is sown which, because it is never recognised as a fault, or, rather, has all along been classed among the virtues, is scarcely likely to be eradicated. As we review all the fluent, complacent, mechanical utterances within our experience, certainly a sense of superiority, a mission to teach, to amuse, to do everybody good, or pleasure, lies at the bottom of them all. We find no recognition of mutual profit and service.

There is a volubility which is free from this charge. Children chatter, and some women chatter upon occasion; nay, men will now and then bubble over with words, and we like them all the better for it. It is an effervescence of the spirits, and if only the brain, by ever so trivial an exercise of its functions, has gone along with the tongue, the performance may be not only endurable, but delightful and exhilarating. But,

if delightful, it is so because it is spontaneous, and indulged in for the speaker's own pleasure and need of sympathy, his hearer's benefit being the very last thing thought of. Alas both for those that speak and us that hear, if they ever come to value themselves upon this charming vivacity, and keep it up deliberately for our entertainment after their own is spent! But it may be said that we often have to talk for mere talking's sake, which is very true; and what philosophers have advised about never opening our mouths unless we have something to say is impracticable nonsense; but in this case we ought to take the necessity quietly, and as a condition of which each party is fully aware. The people we mean throw themselves into the situation. with a spurious, unnatural relish, and use it as a sort of practice-ground for their powers. A half-hour of quiet dulness with a neighbour leaves us where it found us; but when one of the two throws himself with a false enthusiasm into the gap, and gets up a flow about nothing—the words being always half a sentence, if not a whole one, ahead of the ideas, while still the sentences are neat and complete in their structure, and not a pin's point to be got in between them—we come away with a sense of loss, and with a respect for the old science of humming and ha-ing which puts us out of humour with eloquence, as though we had been shown the wrong side of it, until our nerves and our memory have forgotten the infliction.

CONTEMPT.

THERE is a good deal in the tone and manners of our day to foster a habit of quiet, passive contempt. In simpler states of society, the man who values himself highly has little scruple in confessing as much. Savages have no more reticence in parading their good points than peacocks. We know that even the AngloSaxon, when removed from the restraints of refined cultivation, can expatiate on his own merits with perfectly unqualified, unblushing complacency. American writers themselves are the first to acknowledge this as a characteristic of their remote outlying social life. There, men extol themselves in all the simplicity of an ignorance which knows nothing higher or better, and are frankly astonished at their own successes. Nobody is thought the worse of for praising himself; and where this is the case, whether in England or in the backwoods, we shall not find the practice out of favour or out of date. But among ourselves it is out of date. A man cannot puff himself off with impunity-without,