instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.  Mr. Mahaffy, however, makes an exception in favour of the eminent specialist and tells us that intelligent questions addressed to an astronomer, or a pure mathematician, will elicit many curious facts which will pleasantly beguile the time.  Here, in the interest of Society, we feel bound to enter a formal protest.  Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a dinner-table.  A question of this kind is quite as bad as inquiring suddenly about the state of a man’s soul, a sort of coup which, as Mr. Mahaffy remarks elsewhere, ’many pious people have actually thought a decent introduction to a conversation.’

As for the moral qualifications of a good talker, Mr. Mahaffy, following the example of his great master, warns us against any disproportionate excess of virtue.  Modesty, for instance, may easily become a social vice, and to be continually apologising for one’s ignorance or stupidity is a grave injury to conversation, for, ’what we want to learn from each member is his free opinion on the subject in hand, not his own estimate of the value of that opinion.’  Simplicity, too, is not without its dangers.  The enfant terrible, with his shameless love of truth, the raw country-bred girl who always says what she means, and the plain, blunt man who makes a point of speaking his mind on every possible occasion, without ever considering whether he has a mind at all, are the fatal examples of what simplicity leads to.  Shyness may be a form of vanity, and reserve a development of pride, and as for sympathy, what can be more detestable than the man, or woman, who insists on agreeing with everybody, and so makes ’a discussion, which implies differences in opinion,’ absolutely impossible?  Even the unselfish listener is apt to become a bore.  ‘These silent people,’ says Mr. Mahaffy, ’not only take all they can get in Society for nothing, but they take it without the smallest gratitude, and have the audacity afterwards to censure those who have laboured for their amusement.’  Tact, which is an exquisite sense of the symmetry of things, is, according to Mr. Mahaffy, the highest and best of all the moral conditions for conversation.  The man of tact, he most wisely remarks, ‘will instinctively avoid jokes about Blue Beard’ in the company of a woman who is a man’s third wife; he will never be guilty of talking like a book, but will rather avoid too careful an attention to grammar and the rounding of periods; he will cultivate the art of graceful interruption, so as to prevent a subject being worn threadbare by the aged or the inexperienced; and should he be desirous of telling a story, he will look round and consider each member of the party, and if there be a single stranger present will forgo the