[17] "Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information; but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to the lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but silence does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion."--George Eliot's _Felix Holt_. Two things indicate an obscure understanding: to be silent when we should converse, and to speak when we should be silent. Put not yourself so much in the power of your friend that, if he should become your enemy, he may be able to injure you. * * * * * Our English poet Young has this observation in his _Night Thoughts_: Thought, in the mine, may come forth gold or dross; When coined in word, we know its real worth. He had been thus anticipated by Saadi: "To what shall be likened the tongue in a man's mouth? It is the key of the treasury of wisdom. When the door is shut, who can discover whether he deals in jewels or small-wares?" The poet Thomson, in his _Seasons_, has these lines, which have long been hackneyed: Loveliness Needs not the aid of foreign ornament, But is when unadorned adorned the most. Saadi had anticipated him also: "The face of the beloved," he says, "requireth not the art of the tire-woman. The finger of a beautiful woman and the tip of her ear are handsome without an ear-jewel or a turquoise ring." But Saadi, in his turn, was forestalled by the Arabian poet-hero Antar, in his famous _Mu'allaka_, or prize-poem, which is at least thirteen hundred years old, where he says: "Many a consort of a fair one, whose beauty required no ornaments, have I laid prostrate on the field." Yet one Persian poet, at least, namely, Nakhshabi, held a different opinion: "Beauty," he says, "adorned with ornaments, portends disastrous events to our hearts. An amiable form, ornamented with diamonds and gold, is like a melodious voice accompanied by the rabab." Again, he says: "Ornaments are the universal ravishers of hearts, and an upper garment for the shoulder is like a cluster of gems. If dress, however," he concedes, "may have been at any time the assistant of beauty, beauty is always the animator of dress." It is remarkable that homely-featured women dress more gaudily than their handsome sisters generally, thus unconsciously bringing their lack of beauty (not to put too fine a point on it) into greater prominence.