To make a good talker, genius and learning, even wit and eloquence, are insufficient; to these, in all or in part, must be added in some degree the talents of active life.  The character has as much to do with colloquial power as has the intellect; the temperament, feelings, and animal spirits, even more, perhaps, than the mental gifts.  “Napoleon said things which tell in history like his battles.  Luther’s Table-Talk glows with the fire that burnt the Pope’s bull.”  Caesar, Cicero, Themistocles, Lord Bacon, Selden, Talleyrand, and, in our own country, Aaron Burr, Jefferson, Webster, and Choate, were all, more or less, men of action.  Sir Walter Scott tells us that, at a great dinner party, he thought the lawyers beat the Bishops as talkers, and the Bishops the wits.  Nearly all great orators have been fine talkers.  Lord Chatham, who could electrify the House of Lords by pronouncing the word “Sugar,” but who in private was but commonplace, was an exception; but the conversation of Pitt and Fox was brilliant and fascinating,—­that of Burke, rambling, but splendid, rich and instructive, beyond description.  The latter was the only man in the famous “Literary Club” who could cope with Johnson.  The Doctor confessed that in Burke he had a foeman worthy of his steel.  On one occasion, when debilitated by sickness, he said:  “That fellow calls forth all my powers.  Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.”  At another time he said:  “Burke, sir, is such a man that, if you met him for the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he’d talk to you in such a manner, that when you parted you’d say—­’This is an extraordinary man.’” “Can he wind into a subject like a serpent, as Burke does?” asked Goldsmith of a certain talker.  Fox said that he had derived more political information from Burke’s conversation alone than from books, science, and all his worldly experience put together.  Moore finely says of the same conversation, that it must have been like the procession of a Roman triumph, exhibiting power and riches at every step, occasionally mingling the low Fescennine jest with the lofty music of the march, but glittering all over with the spoils of a ransacked world.

—­Mathews.

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The fault of literary conversation in general is its too great tenaciousness.  It fastens upon a subject, and will not let it go.  It resembles a battle rather than a skirmish, and makes a toil of a pleasure.  Perhaps it does this from necessity, from a consciousness of wanting the more familiar graces, the power to sport and trifle, to touch lightly and adorn agreeably, every view or turn of a question en passant, as it arises.  Those who have a reputation to lose are too ambitious of shining, to please.  “To excel in conversation,” said an ingenious man, “one must not be always striving to say good things:  to say one good thing, one must say many bad, and more indifferent ones.”  This desire to shine without the means at hand, often makes men silent:—­