The other day I went to dine at a house known for the brilliancy of the conversation. I confess that I found the experience a little trying. In conversation I am naturally rather a pedestrian person. The talk I like is the talk which Washington Irving had in mind when he said that "that is the best company in which the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant." I do not want to be expected to be brilliant or to be dazzled by verbal pyrotechnics. I like to talk in my , as it were, with my legs at full stretch, my mind at ease, and with all the evening before me. Above all, I like the company of people who talk for and not for . "I am none of those who sing for meat, but for company," says Isaac Walton, and therein is the secret of good talk as well as of cheerful song. But at this dinner table the conversation flashed around me like forked lightning. It was so staccato and that it seemed like talking in shorthand. It was a very fencing match of wit and epigram, a sort of game of touch-and-go, or tip-and-run, or catch-as-catch-can, or battledore and shuttlecock, or patience, or anything you like that is intellectually and breathless and baffling. I thought of a bright thing to say now and then, but I was always so slow in getting away from the mark that I never got it out. It had grown stale and out of date before I could invest it with the merit that would enable it to appear in such brilliant company. And so, mentally out of breath, I just sat and felt old-fashioned and slow, and tried to catch the drift of the sparkling dialogue. But I looked as wise as possible, just to give the impression that nothing was escaping me, and that the things I did not say were quite worth saying. That was Henry Irving's way when the conversation got beyond him. He just looked wise and said nothing.  
There are few things more enviable than the quality of good talk, but this was not good talk. It was clever talk, which is quite a different thing. There was no "stuff" in it. It was like trying to make a meal off the east wind, which it resembled in its hard brilliancy and lack of . It reminded me of the of Mr. Justice Darling, who always gives the impression of having just come into court from the study of some jest book or a volume of appropriate . The foundation of good talk is good sense, good nature, and the gift of fellowship. Given these things you may serve them up with the sauce of wit, but wit alone never made good conversation. It is like mint sauce without the lamb.
 
Fluent talkers are not necessarily good conversationalists. Macaulay talked as though he were addressing a public meeting, and Coleridge as though he were engaged in an argument with space and . "If any of you have got anything to say," said Samuel Rogers to his guests at breakfast one morning, "you had better say it now you have got a chance. Macaulay is coming." And you remember that whimsical story of Lamb cutting off the coat button that Coleridge held him by in the garden at Highgate, going for his day's work into the City, returning in the evening, hearing Coleridge's voice, looking over the hedge and seeing the poet with the button between and thumb still talking into space. His life was an unending . "I think, Charles, that you never heard me preach," said Coleridge once, speaking of his pulpit days. "My dear boy," answered Lamb, "I never heard you do anything else."
 
Johnson's talk had the quality of conversation, because, being a clubbable man, he enjoyed the give-and-take and the cut-and-thrust of the encounter. He liked to "lay his mind to yours," as he said of Thurlow, and though he was more than a little "huffy" on occasion he had that wealth of humanity which is the soul of conversation. He quarrelled and forgave heartily—as in that heated scene at Sir Joshua's when a young stranger had been too talkative and knowing and had come under his hammer. Then, proceeds Boswell, "after a short pause, during which we were somewhat uneasy;—Johnson: Give me your hand, Sir. You were too tedious and I was too short.—Mr. ——: Sir, I am honoured by your attention in any way.—Johnson: Come, Sir, let's have no more of it. We offend one another by our

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