web of that information which he will not desist from imparting. Nobody
that I know of ever proposed a testimonial to a man for thus
volunteering the whole expense of the conversation.

Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writer
who plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker plays
in what is traditionally called conversation? The busy Adrastus, whose
professional engagements might seem more than enough for the nervous
energy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chief
current subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the Idea of the
Infinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and the
grape disease in the south of France, is generally praised if not
admired for the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers of
work. Poor Theron, who has some original ideas on a subject to which he
has given years of research and meditation, has been waiting anxiously
from month to month to see whether his condensed exposition will find a
place in the next advertised programme, but sees it, on the contrary,
regularly excluded, and twice the space he asked for filled with the
copious brew of Adrastus, whose name carries custom like a celebrated
trade-mark. Why should the eager haste to tell what he thinks on the
shortest notice, as if his opinion were a needed preliminary to
discussion, get a man the reputation of being a conceited bore in
conversation, when nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself in
print? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering at a time, and
there is the comfort of thinking that everywhere else other
fellow-citizens who have something to say may get a chance of delivering
themselves; but the exorbitant writer can occupy space and spread over
it the more or less agreeable flavour of his mind in four "mediums" at
once, and on subjects taken from the four winds. Such restless and
versatile occupants of literary space and time should have lived earlier