character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and
women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival
mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports
of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All
sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and
selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or
heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has
the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and
hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among
friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.
It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy
that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of
relations and the sport of life.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the
quarry of two heated minds, springs up like a deer out of the wood. Not
that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and
more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of
conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying
where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is
rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing
prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing
in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow
it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and
so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be
reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are
other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.
Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal
lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument;
asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and
opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the
admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of
ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the
vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay
ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we
swell in each o