and talk to me whenever I wanted him to.  I know the man I would have:  a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies.  Yet he is as tender and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,—­that is, of a new influx of truth or beauty,—­as a nun over her missal.  In short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living.  Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life’s chessboard.  To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take—­to wife.  For all contingencies I would liberally provide.  In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, “put him through” all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—­with the privilege of shutting it off at will.

A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord of the macrocosm.  They do well to dine together once in a while.  A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of civilization over barbarism.  Nature and art combine to charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the system is soothed by well-studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into their natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a short jacket.

The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for granted.  Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out; nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies their dull apprehensions.  But look at two masters of that noble game!  White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red says, Mate in six moves;—­White looks,—­nods;—­the game is over.  Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table.  That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them, —­that glorious license, which, having shut the door and driven the reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the medius lectus,—­that carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody that shows himself,—­the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is one which the old Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce in their—­