Devon’s house, in Derbyshire, there was a good library and books enough for him, and his Lordship stored the library with what books he thought fit to be bought.  But the want of good conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he found a great defect.  In the country, in long time, for want of good conversation, one’s understanding and invention contract a moss on them, like an old paling in an orchard.”

Cities give us collision.  ’Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.  A great part of our education is sympathetic and social.  Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and superior people show in their manners an inestimable grace.  Fuller says, that “William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain every time he put off his hat.”  You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such.  They keep each other up to any high point.  Especially women:  it requires a great many cultivated women,—­saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society,—­in order that you should have one Madame de Stael.  The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician, is brought into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the country,—­and those, too, the driving-wheels, the business-men of each section,—­and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more searching culture.  Besides, we must remember the high social possibilities of a million of men.  The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson,—­of quiet manners.  It is the foible especially of American youth,—­pretension.  The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension.  He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact.  He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon.  His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.  How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray clothes!—­of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee!—­of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody!—­of Epaminondas, “who never says anything, but will listen eternally!”—­of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more capricious than he was!  There are advantages in the old hat and box-coat.  I have heard, that, throughout this country, a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth:  but dress makes a little restraint; men will not commit themselves.  But the box-coat is like wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think.  An old poet says,—­