Men in general may be divided into the inquisitive and the communicative.  To the first class belong Peeping Toms, eaves-droppers, navel-contemplating Brahmins, metaphysicians, travellers, Empedocleses, spies, the various societies for promoting Rhinothism, Columbuses, Yankees, discoverers, and men of science, who present themselves to the mind as so many marks of interrogation wandering up and down the world, or sitting in studies and laboratories.  The second class I should again subdivide into four.  In the first subdivision I would rank those who have an itch to tell us about themselves,—­as keepers of diaries, insignificant persons generally, Montaignes, Horace Walpoles, autobiographers, poets.  The second includes those who are anxious to impart information concerning other people,—­as historians, barbers, and such.  To the third belong those who labor to give us intelligence about nothing at all,—­as novelists, political orators, the large majority of authors, preachers, lecturers, and the like.  In the fourth come those who are communicative from motives of public benevolence,—­as finders of mares’-nests and bringers of ill news.  Each of us two-legged fowls without feathers embraces all these subdivisions in himself to a greater or less degree, for none of us so much as lays an egg, or incubates a chalk one, but straightway the whole barnyard shall know it by our cackle or our cluck. Omnibus hoc vitium est.  There are different grades in all these classes.  One will turn his telescope toward a back-yard, another toward Uranus; one will tell you that he dined with Smith, another that he supped with Plato.  In one particular, all men may be considered as belonging to the first grand division, inasmuch as they all seem equally desirous of discovering the mote in their neighbor’s eye.

To one or another of these species every human being may safely be referred.  I think it beyond a peradventure that Jonah prosecuted some inquiries into the digestive apparatus of whales, and that Noah sealed up a letter in an empty bottle, that news in regard to him might not be wanting in case of the worst.  They had else been super or subter human.  I conceive, also, that, as there are certain persons who continually peep and pry at the keyhole of that mysterious door through which, sooner or later, we all make our exits, so there are doubtless ghosts fidgeting and fretting on the other side of it, because they have no means of conveying back to this world the scraps of news they have picked up in that.  For there is an answer ready somewhere to every question, the great law of give and take runs through all nature, and if we see a hook, we may be sure that an eye is waiting for it.  I read in every face I meet a standing advertisement of information wanted in regard to A.B., or that the friends of C.D. can hear something to his disadvantage by application to such a one.