We read so much of those interesting reunions in the salons of distinguished people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that we naturally seek to know what constituted their peculiar charm.  It seems to me to have been conversation, which is both an art and a gift.  In these exclusive meetings women did not reign in consequence of their beauty so much as their wit.  Their vivacity, intelligence, and tact, I may add also their good-nature, were a veil to cover up all eccentricities.  It was when Madame du Deffand was eighty, and blind, that Horace Walpole pronounced her to be the most interesting woman in France.  Madame de Stael, never beautiful, was the life of a party at forty-five; Madame Recamier was in her glory at fifty; Hannah More was most sought when she was sixty.  There can be no high society where conversation is not the chief attraction; and men seldom learn to talk well when not inspired by gifted women.  They may dictate like Dr. Johnson, or preach like Coleridge in a circle of admirers, or give vent to sarcasms and paradoxes like Carlyle; but they do not please like Horace Walpole, or dazzle like Wilkes, or charm like Mackintosh.  When society was most famous at Paris, it was the salon—­not the card table, or the banquet, or the ball—­which was most sought by cultivated men and women, where conversation was directed by gifted women.  Women are nothing in the social circle who cannot draw out the sentiments of able men; and a man of genius gains more from the inspiration of one brilliant woman than from all the bookworms of many colleges.  In society a bright and witty woman not merely shines, but she reigns.  Conversation brings out all her faculties, and kindles all her sensibilities, and gives expression to her deepest sentiments.  Her talk is more than music; it is music rising to the heights of eloquence.  She is more even than an artist:  she is a goddess before whom genius delights to burn its incense.

Success in this great art of conversation depends as much upon the disposition as upon the brains.  The remarkable women who reigned in the salons of the last century were all distinguished for their good-nature,—­good-nature based on toleration and kind feeling, rather than on insipid acquiescence.  There can be no animated talk without dissent; and dissent should be disguised by the language of courtesy.  As vanity is one of the mainsprings of human nature, and is nearly universal, the old queens of society had the tact to hide what could not easily be extirpated; and they were adepts in the still greater art of seeming to be unconscious.  Those people are ever the most agreeable who listen with seeming curiosity, and who conceal themselves in order to feed the vanity of others.  Nor does a true artist force his wit.  “A confirmed punster is as great a bore as a patronizing moralist.”  Moreover, the life of society depends upon the general glow of the party, rather than the prominence of an individual, so that