to engage in easy and fluent conversation,--a presumption, by the way, always likely to justify itself by the event. I insist, therefore, from my own experience, that conversation is an art as well as a gift; and that where it is not a gift, the deficiency may be more surely supplemented by art than almost any other. You will tell me, perhaps, in common with others who are not talkers, that speech must be natural to be attractive, and that all appearance of effort will spoil its charm. Is not this rather the excuse of indolence than the valid objection of reason? It has been finely argued, that even with children "work" must precede "play." The proverb, too, says that "every beginning is hard." I know that the _appearance_ of effort is not attractive; but after a while there is no such appearance, not merely because "the province of art is to conceal art," but because habit has become a second nature. When you think what a trained and educated thing our life is in its minutest particulars, and how not only the civilized, but the savage man has to _learn_ the use of his senses, his muscles, and his brain, you must admit that it is frivolous to urge against the charm or value of conversation, that it must be studied. It is hardly too much to say, that all the noblest things in the world are the result of study. Why not also study the noble and most desirable art of framing our thoughts, opinions, sentiments, tastes, into free, familiar, and appropriate speech? But here I fancy you may meet me with a question,--Is it, after all, so desirable an art, and one well worth the learning? I have, it is true, given you credit for coveting earnestly a greater facility of speech; and yet you may have become more reconciled to your deficiency than you like to acknowledge, through the influence of certain popular maxims and fallacies. The one I wish especially to challenge now is expressed in that German proverb which Mr. Carlyle has taken under his peculiar patronage,--"Speech is silver, silence is gold." A great comfort, to be sure, to one who is either too lazy or too diffident to open his lips to get credit so cheaply for superior wisdom! When he does not talk, of course it can only be because he keeps up such an incessant thinking! "Too deep for utterance" is the character of all his meditations! Do you remember Coleridge's amusing experience with one of these reputed sages? But for the appearance of the "dumplings,"--almost as historic now as King George's famous ones,--it might never have been suspected that this empty-headed fellow was not the profoundest of philosophers. Can you or anybody explain the reasons for this singular praise of silence and disparagement of speech? You do not expect to be commended for shutting your eyes instead of keeping them open. The feeble and unused hand is not preferred to the strong cunning one. Nor is there any sense or faculty of our nature of which the simple non-use is better than the use.