Montaigne exclaims, “To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanour procured the credit of prudence and capacity!” Note the counsel of Carlo to Sogliardo, in one of Ben Jonson’s heaviest comedies: “When anything is propounded above your capacity, smile at it, make two or three faces, and ’tis excellent; they’ll think you’ve travelled; though you argue a whole day in silence thus, and discourse in nothing but laughter, ’twill pass.” Elsewhere rare Ben cites approvingly the “witty saying,” about one who was taken for a great and weighty man so long as he held his peace: “This man might have been a counsellor of state, till he spoke; but having spoken, not the beadle of the ward.” Denouncing in his strong dialect the vapid verbiage of shallow praters, Mr. Carlyle exclaims, “Even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison!” Michelet says of the Spanish grandees of Charles the Fifth’s time, that the haughty silence they maintained, scarce deigning even a syllable of reply, served them admirably to conceal their dearth of ideas. Silence and imperturbability, according to the author of “The Gentle Life,” are the two requisites for a man to get on in the world. If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—there is a third, contends Nello, the barber of Florence, and that is ignorance, when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head. Charles Lamb shrewdly observes that a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in a mixed company; everybody being so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a _tête-à-tête_, he adds, there is no shuffling; the truth will out.