In considering the Art of Conversation I obey a natural instinct when I think first of Mr. Charles Villiers, M.P.  His venerable age alone would entitle him to this pre-eminence, for he was born in 1802, and was for seventy years one of the best talkers in London.  Born of a family which combined high rank with intellectual distinction, his parentage was a passport to all that was best in social and political life.  It argues no political bias to maintain that in the first quarter of the nineteenth century Toryism afforded its neophytes no educational opportunities equal to those which a young Whig enjoyed at Bowood and Panshanger and Holland House.  There the best traditions of the previous century were constantly reinforced by accessions of fresh intellect.  The charmed circle was indeed essentially, but it was not exclusively, aristocratic; genius held the key, and there was a carriere ouverte aux talents.

Thus it came to pass that the society of Lord Lansdowne and Lord Holland and Lord Melbourne was also the society of Brougham and Mackintosh, and Macaulay and Sydney Smith.  It presented every variety of accomplishment and experience and social charm, and offered to a man beginning life the best conceivable education in the art of making oneself agreeable.  For that art Mr. Villiers had a natural genius, and his lifelong association with the Whigs superadded a technical training in it.  But this, though much, was by no means all.  I hold it to be an axiom that a man who is only a member of society can never be so agreeable as one who is something else as well.  And Mr. Villiers, though “a man about town,” a story-teller, and a diner-out of high renown, has had seventy years’ experience of practical business and Parliamentary life.  Thus the resources of his knowledge have been perpetually enlarged, and, learning much, he has forgotten nothing.  The stores of his memory are full of treasures new and old.  He has taken part in the making of history, and can estimate the great men of the present day by a comparison with the political immortals.

That this comparison is not always favourable to some exalted reputations of the present hour is indeed sufficiently notorious to all who have the pleasure of Mr. Villiers’s acquaintance; and nowhere is his mastery of the art of conversation more conspicuous than in his knack of implying dislike and insinuating contempt without crude abuse or noisy denunciation.  He has a delicate sense of fun, a keen eye for incongruities and absurdities, and that genuine cynicism which springs, not from the poor desire to be thought worldly-wise, but from a lifelong acquaintance with the foibles of political men.  To these gifts must be added a voice which age has not robbed of its sympathetic qualities, a style of diction and a habit of pronunciation which belong to the eighteenth century, and that formal yet facile courtesy which no one less than eighty years old seems capable of even imitating.