Apart from the graces of manner, the charm of these relations between the ladies and the prelates sprang from their perfect skill in effacing their own personality, in suggesting that what they were giving was pure soul—for suggestion was enough. A boor will strut about, listen to his own voice, arrange his smile, select his words with a view to effect—little absurdities, much less easy to endure than a really serious fault. It was by their overweening though unconscious self-conceit that the inferior clergy made themselves so odious in Renaissance society; the monk would talk of nothing but his order, the parish parson fancied that no service was so attractive as his, and that good music was not to be heard except in his church.[262] They had better have been less virtuous—and less fatiguing. Conversation can glide along like a shallow stream. A pleasant talker is not always capable of writing or painting profundities; there is something more beautiful than a picture, and that is the face of the woman watching him and enjoying his talk. In those days they ridiculed—and not without cause—certain brilliant talkers clever enough to win a wide-spread renown (without ruining their health by profound study of Horace or Virgil) by nothing in the world but talking on every subject in the same airy way—appearing to have forgotten half they knew and to know half they had forgotten—able to bring in without false modesty a stanza pat to the occasion. Such talkers are in reality very second-rate, and it is not long before they get into difficulties. Sometimes abstruse subjects crop up without warning in a drawing-room, and then the conversation takes a course which gives opportunity for judging men. At the instant when it appears to be merely disporting itself on the surface, shining in full view, it takes a sudden plunge, rises again, starts on another flight and again plunges; to follow it demands an intellectual force and suppleness that cannot be improvised. We can see this from the portrait Castiglione draws of the duke of Urbino. The duke, notwithstanding his habit of keeping early hours, was a good talker, like his guests; his speech was bland, polished, fluent, and picturesque; he brought down his bird with one shot. But under this appearance of ease and readiness he possessed an unequalled fund of information. He could reel off long passages from all the classical writers, particularly from Cicero. He spoke ancient Greek perfectly, and lived by choice in intimate fellowship with the Greeks—with Lucian, and more especially with Xenophon, whom he called “the Siren of antiquity.” “We used to call the duke,” adds Castiglione, “a second Siren.”