Loud when they should be low, quoting the wrong person, talking on the wrong subject, teasing with notice, excruciating with attentions, disturbing a tete-a-tete in order to make up a dance; wasting eloquence in persuading a man to participate in amusement whose reputation depends on his social sullenness; exacting homage with a restless eye, and not permitting the least worthy knot to be untwined without their divinityships’ interference; patronizing the meek, anticipating the slow, intoxicating with compliment, plastering with praise that you in return may gild with flattery; in short, energetic without elegance, active without grace, and loquacious without wit; mistaking bustle for style, raillery for badinage, and noise for gayety—­these are the characters who mar the very career they think they are creating, and who exercise a fatal influence on the destinies of all those who have the misfortune to be connected with them.

PUBLIC SPEAKING

Eloquence is the child of Knowledge.  When a mind is full, like a wholesome river, it is also clear.  Confusion and obscurity are much oftener the results of ignorance than of inefficiency.  Few are the men who cannot express their meaning when the occasion demands the energy; as the lowest will defend their lives with acuteness, and sometimes even with eloquence.  They are masters of their subject.  Knowledge must be gained by ourselves.  Mankind may supply us with facts; but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our own mind.  To make others feel, we must feel ourselves; and to feel ourselves, we must be natural.  This we can never be when we are vomiting forth the dogmas of the schools.  Knowledge is not a mere collection of words; and it is a delusion to suppose that thought can be obtained by the aid of any other intellect than our own.  What is repetition, by a curious mystery, ceases to be truth, even if it were truth when it was first heard; as the shadow in a mirror, though it move and mimic all the actions of vitality, is not life.  When a man is not speaking or writing from his own mind, he is as insipid company as a looking-glass.  Before a man can address a popular assembly with command, he must know something of mankind, and he can know nothing of mankind without he knows something of himself.  Self-knowledge is the property of that man whose passions have their play, but who ponders over their results.  Such a man sympathizes by inspiration with his kind.  He has a key to every heart.  He can divine, in the flash of a single thought, all that they require, all that they wish.  Such a man speaks to their very core.  All feel that a master hand tears off the veil of cant, with which, from necessity, they have enveloped their souls; for cant is nothing more than the sophistry which results from attempting to account for what is unintelligible, or to defend what is improper.

FEMALE BEAUTY