, and an admirable after-dinner speaker, was,
conversationally considered, an inaccurate man with an accurate manner.
But, after all, inaccuracy is by no means the worst of conversational
faults, and when he was in the vein Mr. Lowell could be exceedingly good
company. He liked talking, and talked not only much but very well. He
had a genuine vein of wit and great dexterity in phrase-making; and on
due occasion would produce from the rich stores of his own experience
some of the most vivid and striking incidents, both civil and military,
of that tremendous struggle for human freedom with which his name and
fame must be always and most honourably associated.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] April 15 1888

[16] Written in 1897.

XIV.

CONVERSATION--_continued_.

Brave men have lived since as well as before Agamemnon, and those who
know the present society of London may not unreasonably ask whether,
even granting the heavy losses which I enumerated in my last chapter,
the Art of Conversation is really extinct. Are the talkers of to-day in
truth so immeasurably inferior to the great men who preceded them?
Before we can answer these questions, even tentatively, we must try to
define our idea of good conversation, and this can best be done by
rigidly ruling out what is bad. To begin with, all affectation,
unreality, and straining aftereffect are intolerable; scarcely less so
are rhetoric, declamation, and whatever tends towards speech-making.
Mimicry is a very dangerous trick, rare in perfection, and contemptible
when imperfect. An apt story well told is delicious, but there was sound
philosophy in Mr. Pinto's view that "when a man fell into his anecdotage
it was a sign for him to retire from the world." One touch of ill-nature
makes the whole world kin, and a spice of malice tickles the
intellectual palate; but a conversation which is mainly malicious is
entirely dull. Constant joking is a weariness to the flesh; but, on the
other hand, a sustained seriousness of discourse is fatally apt to
recall the conversation between the Hon. Elijah Pogram and the Three
Literary Ladies--"How Pogram got out of his depth instantly, and how the
Three L.L.'s were never in theirs, is a piece of history not worth
recording. Suffice it that, being all four out of their depths and all
unable to swim, they splashed up words in all directions, and floundered
about famously. On the whole, it was considered to have been the
severest mental exercise