CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
| Page | ||
| Sketches of Character: I. | ||
| Talk-Stoppers | [1] | |
| Social Grievances: I. | ||
| A Journey in Search of Nothing | [22] | |
| Nooks and Corners of History: I. | ||
| A Queen's Revenge | [48] | |
| Social Grievances: II. | ||
| A Petition to the Novel-Writers | [72] | |
| Fragments of Personal Experience: I. | ||
| Laid Up in Lodgings | [90] | |
| Sketches of Character: II. | ||
| A Shockingly Rude Article | [135] | |
| Nooks and Corners of History: II. | ||
| The Great (Forgotten) Invasion | [152] | |
| Curiosities of Literature: I. | ||
| The Unknown Public | [169] | |
| Social Grievances: III. | ||
| Give us Room! | [192] | |
| Curiosities of Literature: II. | ||
| Portrait of an Author, Painted by his Publisher | [205] | |
| Fragments of Personal Experience: II. | ||
| My Black Mirror | [250] | |
| Sketches of Character: III. | ||
| Mrs. Badgery | [274] | |
MY MISCELLANIES.
SKETCHES OF CHARACTER.—I.
TALK-STOPPERS.
We hear a great deal of lamentation now-a-days, proceeding mostly from elderly people, on the decline of the Art of Conversation among us. Old ladies and gentlemen with vivid recollections of the charms of society fifty years ago, are constantly asking each other why the great talkers of their youthful days have found no successors in this inferior present time. Where—they inquire mournfully—where are the illustrious men and women gifted with a capacity for perpetual outpouring from the tongue, who used to keep enraptured audiences deluged in a flow of eloquent monologue for hours together? Where are the solo talkers, in this degenerate age of nothing but choral conversation?
The solo talkers have vanished. Nothing but the tradition of them remains, imperfectly preserved in books for the benefit of an ungrateful posterity, which reviles their surviving contemporaries, and would perhaps even have reviled the illustrious creatures themselves as Bores. If they could rise from the dead, and wag their unresting tongues among us now, would they win their reputations anew, just as easily as ever? Would they even get listeners? Would they be actually allowed to talk? I venture to say, decidedly not. They would surely be interrupted and contradicted; they would have their nearest neighbours at the dinner-table talking across them; they would find impatient people opposite, dropping things noisily, and ostentatiously picking them up; they would hear confidential whispering, and perpetual fidgeting in distant corners, before they had got through their first half-dozen of eloquent opening sentences. Nothing appears to me so wonderful as that none of these interruptions (if we are to believe report) should ever have occurred in the good old times of the great talkers. I read long biographies of that large class of illustrious individuals whose fame is confined to the select circle of their own acquaintance, and I find that they were to a man, whatever other differences may have existed between them, all delightful talkers. I am informed that they held forth entrancingly for hours together, at all times and seasons, and that I, the gentle, constant, and patient reader, am one of the most unfortunate and pitiable of human beings in never having enjoyed the luxury of hearing them: but, strangely enough, I am never told whether they were occasionally interrupted or not in the course of their outpourings. I am left to infer that their friends sat under them just as a congregation sits under a pulpit; and I ask myself amazedly (remembering what society is at the present day), whether human nature can have changed altogether since that time. Either the reports in the biographies are one-sided and imperfect, or the race of people whom I frequently meet with now—and whom I venture to call Talk-stoppers, because their business in life seems to be the obstructing, confusing, and interrupting of all conversation—must be the peculiar and portentous growth of our own degenerate era.
Perplexed by this dilemma, when I am reading in long biographies about great talkers, I do not find myself lamenting, like my seniors, that they have left no successors in our day, or doubting irreverently, like my juniors, whether the famous performers of conversational solos were really as well worth hearing as eulogistic report would fain have us believe. The one invariable question that I put to myself under these circumstances runs thus:—Could the great talkers, if they had lived in my time, have talked at all? And the answer I receive is:—In the vast majority of cases, certainly not.