THE ART OF CONVERSATION.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 2063, 14 August 1875, Page 4

THE ART OF CONVERSATION.

All the newsyapers are publishing, in a little paragraph, the large fact tbat a certain baron in Paris, to us anonymous, offers .by advertisement to give lessons in conversation. Terms sdol. a month. Moreover our/baronial friend will accept invitations to dinner —limited since the human stomach is—and at these banquets he will furnish talk as the cook does the courses. Better than all, our talkative nobleman lias perfected a colloquial system in which ideas are not necessary.. You go on chattering volubly; you amuse, you entertain, you ; you seem to be learned, wise, philosophical, witty, allsided ; and all the while you are only a delicious delusion and fascinating.fraud. Alas,, we know several persons, more, indeed, than several, who are adepts in this mystery, and who have never had even sdol. worth of instruction from the baron or so many as six lessons from any master —lords of loquacity and ladies of rigmarole who will talk to you by the hour and a half of things which you understand and which they do not, as if they were the enlightened, and you were the ignoramus. The.secret (and it is the baron's) is that very little goes to gabble—oniy a little technicality and. nomenclature with a few names and dates, and from six to twenty phrases. Is it of music that the discourse is ? Beethoven, andante, Thalberg, smypathetic and symphony, timbre, Lucca, and tol do-rol/; Of art? The Venus de Medici and Miss Hosmer, the religion of Baphael, and the majesty of Michael Angelo—it will be a great hit, and will bother the other side, if you call this last-named personage Buonaroitii, and mention "Ms.! admiration" for the gate" of Ghiberti. Of science ? Cosmogony, Tyndall, Hugh Miller, and the old red sandstone, Of the drama? Billy Shakspeare, Dion Boucicault, Joseph Jefferson, Charlotte Cushmon. . And so on, and so on ! All topics are trivial and easy to the master of his resources. As for the resources themselves, are they not upon every book shelf—dictionaries, encyclopaedias, compendiu'ms, manuals — one universal swash of all the elements ?— New York Tribune. „