It was asserted of Lord George Bentinck that true sportsmen ‘loved his prate,’ because his speech recalled the ‘four-mile course,’ his arguments the ‘feather-weight.’ One is reminded, in this connection, of the preacher of whom it was observed that he ‘so lengthily his subject did pursue,’ that it was feared ‘he had, indeed, eternity in view.’ And, perhaps, a long discourse is none the more acceptable when it is palpable to the hearers that the discourser has committed it to memory, and is bound to go on to the bitter end. Possibly this adds to the feeling of exasperation. Nevertheless, there are those who must learn their speeches by heart, or else not speak at all. As Luttrell contended that Lord Dudley had said of himself:
‘In vain my affections the ladies are seeking;
If I give up my heart, there’s an end to my speaking.’
However, it is, perhaps, scarcely fair of laymen to dwell too sternly on the joy which so many legislators seem to feel in hearing their own voices. Man is a talking animal, and can ‘hold forth’ outside the Houses of Parliament as well as in. And though in the term ‘man’ we may include woman, let us give no countenance to the old calumny, that the fairer and weaker is also the more talkative sex. There are some old lines to the effect that Nature wisely forbade a beard to grow on woman’s chin,
‘For how could she be shaved, whate’er the skill,
Whose tongue would never let her chin be still?’
There is also a certain epitaph on an old maid,
‘Who from her cradle talk’d till death,
And ne’er before was out of breath,’
and of whom it was opined that in heaven she’d be unblest, because she loathed a place of rest. But these flouts and sneers are as cheap as they are venerable. Let the ladies take heart. Men have been censured for their ‘much speaking’ at least as frequently as women. Prior declared of one Lysander that he ought to possess the art of talk, if he did not, for he practised ‘full fourteen hours in four-and-twenty.’ And we owe to a more recent writer this paraphrase of an epigram by Macentinus:
‘Black locks hath Gabriel, beard that’s white—
The reason, sir, is plain:
Gabriel works hard from morn till night,
More with his jaw than brain.’
It is well that satire should go that way for a change. All the talking is not done by women or by Parliament. There is, at times, as much chatter in the smoking-room as in the boudoir and the Senate. Tongues, as well as beards, ‘wag all,’ when we are ‘merry in hall.’
