is attached to what you are saying, while there is something provoking even in the outward signs that the mind of the (by courtesy) listener is in a non-receptive state-the eye looking beyond you, the grin that is not the effect of any smartness on your part, and the occasional inarticulate sounds put in at the close of your sentence, as if to delude you with a show of attention. "The non-receptive mind is occasionally found in clever men ; but the men who exhibit it are invariably conceited. They can think of nothing but themselves." Alexander von Humboldt has been charged with putting down all talk but his own; but those who knew him better declared this to be the natural mistake of the empty-minded, who were not qualified either to listen or talk in his presence-there being, on good authority, no better listener than Humboldt in the presence of one who had anything worth hearing to say on any subject whatever. The traditional picture of Chateaubriand in Mdme. de Récamier's salon is quite different: when he deigned to talk, everybody was bound to listen; and nobody was allowed to talk a moment longer than seemed agreeable to the idol, who had "well-understood ways of intimating his weariness or impatience," such as stroking an ugly cat placed purposely on a chair by his side, or playing with a bell-rope conveniently hung within reach,-which last was the signal for Madame to rush to the rescue, "coûte que coûte." His deafness too, as Mr. Hayward says, was observed to come and go upon occasions.

Judge Haliburton being assured by his Yankee hero, “I like your conversation," as a motive plea for improving his acquaintance, goes on to reflect, "How singular this is! To the native reserve of my country I add an uncommon taciturnity; but this peculiar adaptation to listening has everywhere established for me that rare, but most desirable reputation, of being a good companion." It is therefore evident to him, that listeners are everywhere more scarce than talkers, and are valued accordingly. Indeed, without them, what would become of the talkers? he pertinently asks. When Falstaff is accused by the Chief Justice of being deaf, he answers, "Rather, an't please

you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled with." And the same disease or malady continues to the present day, as "Original" Walker complains, to be very troublesome; and those who are afflicted with it may, on his showing, be instantly known by the interrogative "umph?" with which they notice whatever is said to them. The habit he takes to arise not from any defect in the faculties, but from carelessness in the use of them; and it is as great an impediment to conversation as deafness, and without its excuse. "Pride cannot condescend to listen, except to its superiors; conceit does not think it worth while, and selfishness is too much taken up with its own concerns." Attention to whatever is said is confessedly sometimes the consequence of obsequiousness, or of a fawning disposition; but that is a species easily distinguishable from the unaffected attention which is the result of composure and kindness. "Attention to what is said to us, or in our presence, is not only a very agreeable quality, but it is indicative of a well-regulated mind, of a mind at ease, above the cares and vanities of the world, free from pride, conceit, and selfishness, and without fear or [? self-] reproach"-of which last two hindrances, fear is destructive of presence of mind, and self-reproach turns inward with fatal frequency. Chesterfield reckons it a great advantage for any man to be able to talk or to hear, neither ignorantly nor absurdly, upon any subjects; "for I have known people who have not said one word, hear ignorantly and absurdly: it has appeared in their inattentive and unmeaning faces." He assures his son, when pressing upon him the importance of not only real but seeming attention, that "there is nothing so brutally shocking, nor so little forgiven, as a seeming inattention to the person who is speaking to you; and I have known many a man knocked down for (in my opinion) a much slighter provocation than that shocking inattention which I mean.” Lord Shaftesbury, in his celebrated critique on the Judgment of Hercules, as a work of art, insists upon the absolute necessity of silence being distinctly characterized in him, while Virtue is pleading; for the effect would be utterly lost if, in the instant

that she employed the greatest force of action, she should appear to be interrupted by the ill-timed speech, reply, or utterance of her listener. "Such a design or representation as this, would prove contrary to order, contrary to history, and to the decorum or decency of manners." And he takes note, in passing, of the general absurdity committed by many of the “esteemed great masters in painting," who, in one and the same company, jointly engaged in one simple or common action, represent to us not only two or three, but several, and sometimes all, speaking at once: which must naturally have the same effect on the eye, as such a confused colloquy would have upon the ear, were we in reality to hear it.

Salathiel found, even in the sandy ways of Palestine, that to be a judicious listener is one of the first talents for popularity, all over the world. There can be no doubt that real attention, as a social essayist affirms, is a great talent and a great power: indeed, an extreme impatience of attention incapacitates a man for a place in the world. And he exposes that morbid, demoralized state of mind in which men cannot listen-cannot follow another man's train of thought, for they cannot give their minds into another man's custody even for a momentthe very thought of it is an irritation and a bondage. "No man can be really influential who cannot listen as well as talk; and no one can know anything of the mind of others without attending in the simple patient attitude of attention." There is subtle significance in the saw ascribed to the Stoic philosopher, Zenodotus: "Ακουε τοῦ τέσσαρα ὦτα ἔχοντος-listen to him who has four ears ("Had I three ears, I'd hear thee," exclaims eager Macbeth): listen to one who shows himself ready to learn from others. Sir Jasper, in the story, is described as having your true talker's instinctive faculty of discovering a good listener: he finds one accordingly in George Pauncefort; not your stupid listener, who gazes at you with the fixed stare of rapt admiration, and flounders dismally in the endeavour to reply to you, thereby too clearly revealing that he has not understood a word you have been saying; nor yet your self-absorbed listener, who abandons

himself to his own reflections while you talk to him, and strikes in with a vacant grin and a "Really !" whenever you come to a full-stop. "Mr. Pauncefort was of the sterling metal-the thoughtful listener who weighs every word you say to him," and proves it by differing where need be, and by tokens of intelligent discrimination to form a sort of running commentary throughout. Ellesmere protests that whenever a talk is good, he is the last man in the world to interrupt it: he only interrupts folly, irrelevancy, inaccuracy, and incomplete logic. "I am the best listener in the United Kingdom when there is anything worth listening to." It soon came to be admitted by all who knew Phineas Finn that he had a peculiar power of making himself agreeable which no one knew how to analyse or define. "I think it is because he listens so well," said one man. "He has studied when to listen and when to talk,” said another. Place aux dames. The Lady Muriel of one popular story is admired as the possessor of powers of conversation quite out of the common way—but it never, says the author, occurred to her admirers to calculate how much of her talking she did by means of intelligent acquiescent little looks, graceful little bows, sprightly exclamations, a judicious expression of intense interest in the subject under discussion when it chanced to be personal to the other party in the discourse, and sundry other skilful and effective feminine devices. The Eleanor Vane of another wins the heart of old De Crespigny by her manifestly real interest in his reminiscent talk: he was accustomed to the polite attention of his nieces, whose suppressed yawns sometimes broke in unpleasantly at the very climax of a story, and whose woodenfaced stolidity had at best something unpleasantly suggestive of being listened to and stared at by two Dutch clocks; but he was not accustomed to see "a beautiful and earnest face turned towards him as he spoke, a pair of bright gray eyes lighting up with new radiance at every crisis in the narrative, and lovely lips half parted through intensity of interest." The garrulous senior in this case was not quite of the class Mrs. Gaskell somewhere describes as being not at all particular as

regards receptive intelligence, and who, so that they may themselves talk on undisturbedly, are not so unreasonable as to expect attention to what they say. Her Cynthia, in a later (indeed her latest) work, excels in putting on a look of intense interest in what any one is saying to her, let the subject be what it may, as if it were the thing she cared most about in the whole world. The old squire, despite his distrust of her, can scarcely find it in his heart to be hard on "a lass who was so civil to me, and had such a pretty way with her of hanging on every word that fell from my lips." Towards the end of the tale Cynthia evinces her good taste as well as tact in listening with the semblance of unwearied interest to Molly Gibson's distressful experiences at Hamley Hall,-knowing instinctively that the repetition of all those painful recollections would ease the oppressed memory: "so she never interrupted Molly, as Mrs. Gibson had so frequently done, with 'You told me all that before, my dear,'" etc. The Miss Desmond of yet another fiction that made its mark is characterized as always wise enough to remember that the larger art of talking well comprehends the smaller art of listening gracefully; she being emphatically not one of "those obnoxious people" who talk for the sake of talking, and who, after rattling on without a full-stop for half an hour at a stretch, will stare vacantly at you while you recite to them some noteworthy adventure, evidently thinking of what they mean to say next, and waiting for the chance of cutting in. Miss Tox in Dombey and Son, "from a long habit of listening admiringly to everything that was said in her presence,, and looking at the speakers as if she were mentally engaged in taking off impressions of their images upon her soul, never to part with the same but with life," had got her head settled quite on one side; while her hands had contracted a spasmodic habit of raising themselves of their own accord as in involuntary admiration, and her eyes too had become liable to a similar affectión. Jane Eyre is often elected the involuntary confidant of her acquaintances' secrets, because people (Mr. Rochester included) instinctively discover that it is not her forte to talk of herself, but to listen while