and publishes in quarto; the ancient one carried his philosophy about with him and propagated it in the market-place, in shops, and at suppers. The Table-Talk of an age was its wisdom. No wonder the affection of disciple for master, and there is no more beautiful relation, was so vividly felt. The whole state experienced the effect of oral teaching through all the veins of its moral being. From the lips of Socrates himself, in the saddler's shop, Euthydemus learned that he who would be fit for politics must go through an ethical training little dreamed of by dabblers in democracy. From the lips of the reverend seniors of the state the Roman youth learned what reading alone could never have taught him. His first step from home was to the house of the statesman or orator by whom he was generally initiated into the duties of life, and in whom he was to see the living image of that which a book can but faintly reflect. Cicero appears to have thought that his own hilarity at the banquets of his political friends was really a public service at periods of public despondency. We cannot but profoundly regret that the "Liber Jocularis," or collection of his jokes made by Tiro, has not been preserved; for he was as thorough a table-talker as Socrates himself, and his mots preserved in Plutarch, Quintilian, and Macrobius, show that with Burke's eloquence he combined Canning's wit.

The vivacity of the southern races was one great canse why their conversation had a tendency to degenerate into loquacity. The Greek to this day is preeminently a talker, and may be seen lolling outside his cafés, making a clatter as rapid and endless as that of the λáλos in Theophrastus from whom he descends. What babblers abounded in Athens in the period of its decay, we know from the fact that Theophrastus gives us no less than three species of such characters

"All clear and well defined"—

and who, as Casaubon observes, are not to be confounded. First comes the ddoλéoxns or simple garrulus. "He sits ἀδολέσχης down," Theophrastus tells us, " by the side of a man whom he does not know, and begins to praise his own wife. Tells what he dreamed the night before, and what he had for dinner." Have we not seen him in the flesh in our own day? The λáλos,

again, was not only fond of talking, but was an inveterate chatterer, who interfered with every human pursuit-who haunted the schools and talked to the schoolmaster. Worse still was the 20уonоlois, who dealt in rumors, and spread scandal-who was ever asking "Is there nothing new?" Often, says Theophrastus, while gathering crowds round. them in the baths, these gossips have lost their clothes.

To this corrupted taste for an enjoyment very profitable in its healthy condition, the ancients owed a class of tabletalkers whom it would be improper to pass over, more particularly as they are represented in considerable force in modern Europe-a class of diners-out. The wag was well known in antiquity, from the simple yeλWTоTOLÓS or laughter-maker who attended suppers professionally, up to the smart conversationist who paid for the good things which he ate by the good things which he said. Of this gentleman, for so we call him in these polite times, there are excellent specimens in Plautus. Sometimes when invitations ran slack, he complained that the age was getting rude and unpolished, and had no taste for elegant pleasures. The same kind of character is to be traced in every generation; and ages after the men we have been speaking of had crackled on their pyres, Martial saw their representatives flourishing in Rome. A rival of these parasites was the aretalogus, whom we know not how to match in our own days. He combined the diner-out and moral philosopher, and used to talk at suppers of the summum bonum, and the Good and the Beautiful, for the amusement of those who thought the scurra and the parasite frivolous. The Emperor Augustus was particularly fond of these philosophical declaimers. They seem principally to have been Stoics or Cynics, and were remarkable for their loquacity, their love of eleemosynary provender, and their long beards. Between them and the comic writers there was deadly war.

Fond as the ancients were of conversation, it is not wonderful that they should have left books which may justly be includ ed under the head of Table-Talk. At the head of these must be placed the "Memorabilia" of Socrates by Xenophon, which, indeed, the ingenious Frenchman who has edited the "Table-Talk" of Ménage was inclined to call "Socratiana.”