You read the works of an author--you are pleased with them, and you wish to become acquainted with the man. You anticipate great pleasure--you expect from his lips, in _impromptu_, the same racy remarks, the same chain of reasoning, the same life and vigour which have cost him so many hours of labour and reflection, or which have been elicited in his happiest moods, and this from a person who comes, perhaps, almost a total stranger into a large company. Is this fair or just to him? Did you find any of your other friends, at first meeting, play the fiddle to a whole company of strangers? Are not authors as reserved and shy as other people--even more so? And yet you ask them, as if they were mountebanks or jugglers with a certain set of tricks, to amuse the company. The very circumstance of being aware that this is expected of him makes the man silent, and his very anxiety to come up to your expectations takes away from his power. The consequence is, that you are disappointed, and so are the company, to whom you have announced that "Mr So-and-So" is to meet them. Had you become intimate with this person you would perhaps have found the difference, and that he whom you pronounced as so great a failure, would have turned out equally amusing. At the same time there is some truth in the remarks of the "Desennuyee" that "some authors will not let out their new ideas, because they require them for their books." But, as Bulwer observes, they must be but second-raters, as the majority of authors are. In many instances they are punsters; but punning is not a standard of authorship; or, perhaps, there may be other second-rate authors present, and if so, they know that they are in the company of literary pickpockets. To prove that this remark of the "Desennuyee" can only apply to second-rate authors, let us examine into the conversational powers of those who are first-rate. And here I can only speak of those whom I have known--there may be many others. Where could you find such conversationists as Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Sir John Malcolm, and many others, who are now gone? And among those in existence, I have but to mention Croker, Theodore Hooke, Professor Wilson, Bulwer, Lockhart, the Smiths, and, in the other sex, Lady Blessington, Lady Morgan, Mesdames Somerville, Austin, and Jameson.