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THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-1. The Table-Talk of John Selden. With Notes by David Irving, LL.D. Edinburgh, 1854.

2. Table-Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Third edition. London, 1851.

3. The Table- Talk, or Familiar Discourse of Martin Luther. Translated by William Hazlitt. London, 1848.

WE have not only to thank Dr. Irving for a good edition of a book which holds a high place in the belles-lettres of England, but for recalling our attention to the important class of works which constitute the literature of conversation. It seems to be the Doctor's destiny to deal with neglected subjects. He has written a biography of George Buchanan, whose face, we fear, the public does not even recognise on the cover of his country's famous magazine. He has written lives of Scottish poets, many of whose pipings are no longer heeded by the present generation. Selden's Table-Talk, which Johnson preferred to all the French Ana,' was passing into forgetfulness in our own times when he took it under his editorial care. world cannot afford to throw aside such books, particularly if it considers the frivolity and want of substance of the current publications which profess to combine amusement and instruction. It requires a light literature with a value in it,-a lightness like that of the paper boat which Shelley launched on the Serpentine, and which was made of a fifty pound Bank of England bill.

6

The

'Ana' are out of fashion now, and books of Table-Talk little read. Some go so far as to say that conversation itself is becoming a lost art, that the last Whig conversationist will soon have wearied the last Whig peer, and that the prediction which winds up the Dunciad' will thus far have achieved its fulfilment in England. These are the gloomy vaticinations of a few who, like Socrates, have a morbid passion for discourse; but on whom their auditors may possibly retaliate with the assertion that human nature is unequal to supporting them in their talkative

mood.

It would be unpardonable to omit mentioning the Table-Talk of the ancients. În fact, it was one of the points in which they

VOL. XCVIII. NO. CXCV.

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had

had an advantage over us; for though they were less domestic, they were more social. The absence of printing imparted to their conversation the same superior importance which it gave to their oratory. A modern philosopher lives like a hermit, and publishes in quarto; the ancient one carried his philosophy about with him and propagated it in the market-place, in shops, and at suppers. The Table-Talk of an age was its wisdom. No wonder the affection of disciple for master, and there is no more beautiful relation, was so vividly felt. The whole state experienced the effect of oral teaching through all the veins of its moral being. From the lips of Socrates himself, in the saddler's shop, Euthydemus learned that he who would be fit for politics must go through an ethical training little dreamed of by dabblers in democracy. From the lips of the reverend seniors of the state the Roman youth learned what reading alone could never have taught him. His first step from home was to the house of the statesman or orator by whom he was generally initiated into the duties of life, and in whom he was to see the living image of that which a book can but faintly reflect. Cicero appears to have thought that his own hilarity at the banquets of his political friends was really a public service at periods of public despondency. We cannot but profoundly regret that the Liber Jocularis, or collection of his jokes made by Tiro, has not been preserved; for he was as thorough a table-talker as Socrates himself, and his mots preserved in Plutarch, Quintilian, and Macrobius, show that with Burke's eloquence he combined Canning's wit.

The vivacity of the southern races was one great cause why this conversation had a tendency to degenerate into loquacity. The Greek to this day is pre-eminently a talker, and may be seen lolling outside his cafés, making a clatter as rapid and endless as that of the λos in Theophrastus from whom he descends. What babblers abounded in Athens in the period of its decay we know from the fact that Theophrastus gives us no less than three species of such characters

'All clear and well defined '—

and who, as Casaubon observes, are not to be confounded. First comes the adoλions or simple garrulus. He sits down,' Theophrastus tells us, by the side of a man whom he does not know, and begins to praise his own wife. Tells what he dreamed the night before, and what he had for dinner.' Have we not seen him in the flesh in our own day? The λákos, again, was not only fond of talking, but was an inveterate chatterer, who interfered with every human pursuit-who haunted the schools

and

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