There are two opposite ways, on Washington Irving’s showing, by which some men get into notice—one by talking a vast deal and thinking a little, and the other by holding their tongues and not thinking at all. By the first, he says, many a vapouring, superficial pretender acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many a vacant dunder-pate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be complimented, by a discerning world, with all the attributes of wisdom. Silent, quiet people, as Miss Jewsbury incidentally remarks, have a charmed mystery about them which gives them a great advantage over more demonstrative mortals; “nobody knows exactly what they think, nor the impression made on them by anything; all within them has the prestige of an oracle; the extent of what they indicate is unknown; and what little is uttered goes so far.” The best, perhaps, as well as the best-known of all stories illustrative of our theme, is that of Coleridge admiring a certain dinner-guest, so impregnable in his sublime reserve, so inexorably proof against every temptation to join in the table-talk, such a model (in appearance) of dignified superiority—until there was carried in that unlucky dish of apple-dumplings, the very first glance at which roused Sir Oracle to the enthusiastic outburst, “Them are the jockeys for me!” Goldsmith had, long before, recorded a somewhat parallel passage of disenchantment. His travelled Chinese, Lien Chi Altangi, is present at a dinner-party of dignitaries and dons in whose company and from whose converse he expects to find a feast of reason as well as turtle, and a flow of soul as well as claret. Their silence before dinner is served, rather puzzles and disappoints the eager expectant; who, however, accounts for and excuses it by the reflection, that men of wisdom are ever slow of speech, and deliver nothing unadvisedly. “Silence,” says Confucius, “is a friend that will never betray.” The dons and dignitaries were now by the mandarin’s surmise, inventing maxims, or hard sayings, for their mutual instruction, when some one should think proper to begin. “My curiosity was now wrought up to the highest pitch; I impatiently looked round to see if any were going to interrupt the mighty pause; when at last one of the company declared that there was a sow in his neighbourhood that farrowed fifteen pigs at a litter.” Broken at once was the spell, and disillusion was the Chinaman’s doom. Pope, being satirist of the first class, as well as poet of (say) the second, took care, in his imitative stanzas on Silence, not to be all sentiment and rhapsodical rapture on that subject. Hence, one or his stanzas begins, “Silence, the knave’s repute;” and another declares Dulness to be her bosom-friend: “And in thy bosom lurks in Thought’s disguise; Thou varnisher of fools, and cheat of all the wise.”