tales than in his conversation; for the Countess of Pembroke used to rally him, observing that his silence was more agreeable to her than his talk.  TASSO’S conversation, which his friend Manso has attempted to preserve for us, was not agreeable.  In company he sat absorbed in thought, with a melancholy air; and it was on one of these occasions that a person present observing that this conduct was indicative of madness, that TASSO, who had heard him, looking on him without emotion, asked whether he was ever acquainted with a madman who knew when to hold his tongue!  Malebranche tells us that one of these mere men of learning, who can only venture to praise antiquity, once said, “I have seen DESCARTES; I knew him, and frequently have conversed with him; he was a good sort of man, and was not wanting in sense, but he had nothing extraordinary in him.”  Had Aristotle spoken French instead of Greek, and had this man frequently conversed with him, unquestionably he would not have discovered, even in this idol of antiquity, anything extraordinary.  Two thousand years would have been wanting for our learned critic’s perceptions.

It is remarkable that the conversationists have rarely proved to be the abler writers.  He whose fancy is susceptible of excitement in the presence of his auditors, making the minds of men run with his own, seizing on the first impressions, and touching the shadows and outlines of things—­with a memory where all lies ready at hand, quickened by habitual associations, and varying with all those extemporary changes and fugitive colours which melt away in the rainbow of conversation; with that wit, which is only wit in one place, and for a time; with that vivacity of animal spirits which often exists separately from the more retired intellectual powers—­this man can strike out wit by habit, and pour forth a stream of phrase which has sometimes been imagined to require only to be written down to be read with the same delight with which it was heard; but he cannot print his tone, nor his air and manner, nor the contagion of his hardihood.  All the while we were not sensible of the flutter of his ideas, the incoherence of his transitions, his vague notions, his doubtful assertions, and his meagre knowledge.  A pen is the extinguisher of this luminary.

A curious contrast occurred between BUFFON and his friend MONTBELLIARD, who was associated in his great work.  The one possessed the reverse qualities of the other:  BUFFON, whose style in his composition is elaborate and declamatory, was in conversation coarse and careless.  Pleading that conversation with him was only a relaxation, he rather sought than avoided the idiom and slang of the mob, when these seemed expressive and facetious; while MONTBELLIARD threw every charm of animation over his delightful talk:  but when he took his seat at the rival desk of Buffon, an immense interval separated them; he whose tongue dropped the honey and the music of the bee, handled a pen of iron; while Buffon’s