and Italians and Germans. We have a word
for home, and our home is often a moated grange, an island, a castle
with its drawbridge up, cutting us off from all but our own
home-circle. In France and Germany and Italy there are the boulevards
and public gardens, where people do their family living in common. Mr.
A. is breakfasting under one tree, with wife and children around, and
Mr. B. is breakfasting under another tree, hard by; and messages,
nods, and smiles pass backward and forward. Families see each other
daily in these public resorts, and exchange mutual offices of good
will. Perhaps from these customs of society come that naive
simplicity and abandon which one remarks in the Continental, in
opposition to the Anglo-Saxon, habits of conversation. A Frenchman or
an Italian will talk to you of his feeling and plans and prospects
with an unreserve that is perfectly unaccountable to you, who have
always felt that such things must be kept for the very innermost
circle of home privacy. But the Frenchman or Italian has from a child
been brought up to pass his family life in places of public resort, in
constant contact and intercommunion with other families; and the
social and conversational instinct has thus been daily strengthened.
Hence the reunions of these people have been characterized by a
sprightliness and vigor and spirit that the Anglo-Saxon has in vain
attempted to seize and reproduce. English and American _conversazioni_
have very generally proved a failure, from the rooted, frozen habit of
reticence and reserve which grows with our growth and strengthens with
our strength. The fact is, that the Anglo-Saxon race as a race does
not enjoy talking, and, except in rare instances, does not talk well.
A daily convocation of people, without refreshments or any extraneous
object but the simple pleasure of seeing and talking with each other,
is a thing that can scarcely be understood in English or American
society. Social entertainment presupposes in the Anglo-Saxon mind
something to eat, and not only something, but a great deal. Enormous
dinners or great suppers constitute the entertainment. Nobody seems to
have formed the idea that the talking--the simple exchange of social
feelings--is, of itself, the entertainment, and that being together is
the pleasure.

"Madame Rocamier for years had a circle of friends who met every
afternoon in her salon from four to six o'clock, for the simple and
sole pleasure of talking wit