ngaged
in a profession has to support. He is not always upon duty. There are
services he owes, which are neither parochial, nor forensic, nor military,
nor to be described by any such epithet of civil regulation, and yet are
in no wise inferior to those that bear these authoritative titles;
inferior neither in their intrinsic value, nor their moral import, nor
their impression upon society. As a friend, as a companion, as a citizen
at large; in the connections of domestic life; in the improvement and
embellishment of his leisure, he has a sphere of action, revolving, if you
please, within the sphere of his profession, but not clashing with it; in
which if he can show none of the advantages of an improved understanding,
whatever may be his skill or proficiency in the other, he is no more than
an ill-educated man.

"There is a certain faculty in which all nations of any refinement are
great practitioners. It is not taught at school or college as a distinct
science; though it deserves that what is taught there should be made to
have some reference to it; nor is it endowed at all by the public;
everybody being obliged to exercise it for himself in person, which he
does to the best of his skill. But in nothing is there a greater
difference than in the manner of doing it. The advocates of professional
learning will smile when we tell them that this same faculty which we
would have encouraged, is simply that of speaking good sense in English,
without fee or reward, in common conversation. They will smile when we lay
some stress upon it; but in reality it is no such trifle as they imagine.
Look into the huts of savages, and see, for there is nothing to listen to,
the dismal blank of their stupid hours of silence; their professional
avocations of war and hunting are over; and, having nothing to do, they
have nothing to say. Turn to improved life, and you find conversation in
all its forms the medium of something more than an idle pleasure; indeed,
a very active agent in circulating and forming the opinions, tastes, and
feelings of a whole people. It makes of itself a considerable affair. Its
topics are the most promiscuous--all those which do not belong to any
particular province. As for its power and influence, we may fairly say
that it is of just the same consequence to a man's immediate society, how
he talks, as how he acts. Now of all those who furnish their share to
rational conversation, a mere adept in his own art is unive