so goes on. And, to crown the
business, it perhaps proveth at last a story the company hath heard
fifty times before; or, at best, some insipid adventure of the relater.

Another general fault in conversation is, that of those who affect to
talk of themselves: Some, without any ceremony, will run over the
history of their lives; will relate the annals of their diseases, with
the several symptoms and circumstances of them; will enumerate the
hardships and injustice they have suffered in court, in parliament, in
love, or in law. Others are more dexterous, and with great art will
lie on the watch to hook in their own praise: They will call a witness
to remember, they always foretold what would happen in such a case, but
none would believe them; they advised such a man from the beginning,
and told him the consequences, just as they happened; but he would have
his own way. Others make a vanity of telling their faults; they are
the strangest men in the world; they cannot dissemble; they own it is a
folly; they have lost abundance of advantages by it; but, if you would
give them the world, they cannot help it; there is something in their
nature that abhors insincerity and constraint; with many other
insufferable topics of the same altitude.

Of such mighty importance every man is to himself, and ready to think
he is so to others; without once making this easy and obvious
reflection, that his affairs can have no more weight with other men,
than theirs have with him; and how little that is, he is sensible
enough.

Where company hath met, I often have observed {54} two persons
discover, by some accident, that they were bred together at the same
school or university, after which the rest are condemned to silence,
and to listen while these two are refreshing each other's memory with
the arch tricks and passages of themselves and their comrades.

I know a great officer of the army, who will sit for some time with a
supercilious and impatient silence, full of anger and contempt for
those who are talking; at length of a sudden demand audience, decide
the matter in a short dogmatical way; then withdraw within himself
again, and vouchsafe to talk no more, until his spirits circulate again
to the same point.

There are some faults in conversation, which none are so subject to as
the men of wit, nor ever so much as when they are with each other. If
they have opened their mouths, without endeavouring to say a witty
thing, they th