The person to whom Vizard fled from the tongue of beauty was a delightful
talker: he read two or three newspapers every day, and recollected the
best things. Now, it is not everybody can remember a thousand
disconnected facts and recall them apropos. He was various, fluent, and,
above all, superficial; and such are your best conversers. They have
something good and strictly ephemeral to say on everything, and don't
know enough of anything to impale their hearers. In my youth there talked
in Pall Mall a gentleman known as "Conversation Sharpe." He eclipsed
everybody. Even Macaulay paled. Sharpe talked all the blessed afternoon,
and grave men listened, enchanted; and, of all he said, nothing stuck.
Where be now your Sharpiana? The learned may be compared to mines. These
desultory charmers are more like the ornamental cottage near Staines,
forty or fifty rooms, and the whole structure one story high. The mine
teems with solid wealth; but you must grope and trouble to come to it: it
is easier and pleasanter to run about the cottage with a lot of rooms.
all on the ground-floor.

The mind and body both get into habits--sometimes apart, sometimes in
conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its
lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about
laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to
man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We _sit_ at
the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon
and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing or walking, we love to take
brains easy. If this delightful chatterbox had been taken down shorthand
and printed, and Vizard had been set down to Severni Opuscula, ten
volumes-- and, mind you, Severne had talked all ten by this time--the
Barfordshire squire and old Oxonian would have cried out for "more matter