We all have our company voices, as we all have our company manners; and, after a time, we get to know the company voices of our friends, and to understand them as we understand their best dresses and state service. The person whose voice absolutely refuses to put itself into company tone startles us as much as if he came to a state dinner in a shooting-jacket. This is a different thing from the insincere and flattering voice, which is never laid aside while it has its object to gain, and which affects to be one thing when it means another. The company voice is only a little bit of finery, quite in its place if not carried into the home, where however, silly men and women think they can impose on their house-mates by assumptions which cannot stand the test of domestic ease. The lover's voice is of course _sui generis_; but there is another kind of voice which one sometimes hears that is quite as enchanting--the rich, full, melodious voice which irresistibly suggests sunshine and flowers, and heavy bunches of purple grapes, and a wealth of physical beauty at all four corners. Such a voice is Alboni's; such a voice we can conceive Anacreon's to have been; with less lusciousness and more stateliness, such a voice was Walter Savage Landor's. His was not an English voice; it was too rich and accurate; yet it was clear and apparently thoroughly unstudied, and was the very perfection of art. There was no greater treat of its kind than to hear Landor read Milton or Homer. Though one of the essentials of a good voice is its clearness, there are certain lisps and catches which are pretty, though never dignified; but most of them are painful to the ear. It is the same with accents. A dash of brogue; the faintest suspicion of the Scotch twang; even a little American accent--but very little, like red-pepper to be sparingly used, as indeed we may say with the others--gives a certain piquancy to the voice. So does a Continental accent generally; few of us being able to distinguish the French accent from the German, the Polish from the Italian, or the Russian from the Spanish, but lumping them all together as 'a foreign accent' broadly. Of all the European voices the French is perhaps the most unpleasant in its quality, and the Italian the most delightful. The Italian voice is a song in itself; not the sing-song voice of an English parish schoolboy, but an unnoted bit of harmony. The French voice is thin, apt to become wiry and metallic; a head-voice for the most part, and eminently unsympathetic; a nervous, irritable voice, that seems more fit for complaint than for love-making; and yet how laughing, how bewitching it can make itself!--never with the Italian roundness, but _câlinante_ in its own half-pettish way, provoking, enticing, arousing. There are some voices which send you to sleep and others which stir you up; and the French voice is of the latter kind when setting itself to do mischief and work its own will.