You have doubtless heard it before, but not attended to it. Would it not be much to your credit in company, and much to the comfort of those with whom you converse, if you allowed this maxim to have its due weight upon your mind? Common sense, if such you have, must certainly intimate when you exceed the bounds of propriety in the volume of your talk. How would you like another to impose his talk upon you to the extent you impose your talk upon him? When you talk I have noticed you are so pleased with yourself as to think very little of what you say, or of how people hear. If you talked about fifty or seventy-five per cent. less than you do, you would be welcomed into the circles of society with fifty or seventy-five per cent. greater pleasure than you are. Do not imagine, because people seem to listen, therefore they like to hear you talk. It is nothing of the kind. They must at least have a show of good behaviour. Were they to forget their manners in being listless, as you do in talking so much, there would be an end to all decorum. (Do not be impatient. Do be quiet for once.) Have you not sometimes seen one or more go to sleep in company while you have been talking? Did not that show they were unable to resist the soothing influence of your long-continued and thoughtless words? And have you not sometimes talked upon subjects in such a peculiar and protracted manner that when you have done, your hearers have been so absent-minded that they have not known anything you have said? Has not this taught you that you have been a drag upon their mental powers? Have they not said in the words of Job, “O that you would altogether hold your peace, and it should be your wisdom”? (Job xiii. 5.)

Conversation is a means of mutual interchange of thought and feeling upon subjects which may be introduced. And if the right subject be brought forward, each one could contribute his quota to the general stock. But to do so we must talk with people and not at them. We must be willing to hear as well as to be heard. We must give others credit to know something as well as ourselves. We must remember it is not he who talks most that talks best. One man may give a long, wordy, dry essay on a topic of conversation, and another may speak a sentence of a score words which shall contain far more sense than his long discourse.

“Words learned by rote a parrot may rehearse,
But talking is not always to converse.
Not more distinct from harmony divine,
The constant creaking of a country sign.”
····
“If in talking from morning till night,
A sign of our wisdom it be,
The swallows are wiser by right,
For they prattle much faster than we.”

“The talking lion of the evening circle,” observes an English writer, “generally plays off his part as obviously to his own satisfaction as to the nausea of the company who forbear to hear him. Were he a distinguished and illustrious talker like Johnson and Coleridge, he might be excused, though in their case they laid too much embargo upon the interchange of thought; but when the mind is an ordinary one, the offence is insufferable, if not unpardonable. Those that talk much cannot often talk well. There is generally the least of originality and interest about what they say. It is the dry, old, oft-repeated things which are nearly as well stereotyped upon the minds of the hearers as they are upon their own. And even those who have the gift of talking sensibly as well as loquaciously should remember that few people care to be eclipsed, and that a superiority of sense is as ill to be borne as superiority of fortune.”

“He that cannot refrain from much speaking,” says Sir W. Raleigh, “is like a city without walls, and less pains in the world a man cannot take, than to hold his tongue; therefore if thou observest this rule in all assemblies thou shalt seldom err; restrain thy choler, hearken much and speak little, for the tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and greatest evil that is done in the world.”

“As it is the characteristic,” says Lord Chesterfield, “of great wits to say much in few words, so it is of small wits to talk much and say nothing. Never hold any one by the button or the hand in order to be heard out; for if people are unwilling to hear you, you had better hold your tongue than them.”

“The evil of this” (much speaking), says Bishop Taylor, “is very considerable in the accounts of prudence, and the effects and plaisance of conversation: and the ancients described its evil well by a proverbial expression; for when a sudden silence arose, they said that Mercury was entered, meaning that, he being their ‘loquax numen,’ their ‘prating god,’ yet that quitted him not, but all men stood upon their guard, and called for aid and rescue, when they were seized upon by so tedious an impertinence. And indeed, there are some persons so full of nothings, that, like the strait sea of Pontus, they perpetually empty themselves by their mouth, making every company or single person they fasten on to be their Propontis, such a one as was Anaximenes, who was an ocean of words, but a drop of understanding.”

You would do well to study the lesson, When to talk, and when to be silent. Silence is preferred by the wise and the good to superfluity of talking. You may read strange stories of some of the ancients, choosing silence to talking. St. Romualdus maintained a seven years’ silence on the Syrian mountains. It is said of a religious person in a monastery in Brabant, that he did not speak a word in sixteen years. Ammona lived with three thousand brethren in such silence as though he was an anchoret. Theona was silent for thirty years together. Johannes, surnamed Silentarius, was silent for forty-seven years. I do not mention these as examples for your imitation, and would not have you become such a recluse. These are cases of an extreme kind,—cases of moroseness and sullenness which neither reason nor Scripture justify. “This was,” as Taylor observes, “to make amends for committing many sins by omitting many duties; and, instead of digging out the offending eye, to pluck out both, that they might neither see the scandal nor the duty; for fear of seeing what they should not, to shut their eyes against all light.” The wiser course for you to adopt is the practice of silence for a time, as a discipline for the correction of the fault into which you have fallen. Pray as did the Psalmist, “Put a guard, O Lord, unto my mouth, and a door unto my lips.” “He did not ask for a wall,” as St. Gregory remarks, “but for a door, a door that might open and shut.” It is said of Cicero, he never spake a word which himself would fain have recalled; he spake nothing that repented him. Silence will be a cover to your folly, and a disclosure of your wisdom.

“Keep thy lips with all diligence.”

“A man that speaketh too much, and museth but little and lightly,
Wasteth his mind in words, and is counted a fool among men:
But thou when thou hast thought, weave charily the web of meditation,
And clothe the ideal spirit in the suitable garments of speech.”

Note well the discretion of silence. What man ever involved himself in difficulties through silence? Who thinks another a fool because he does not talk? Keep quiet, and you may be looked upon as a wise man; open your mouth and all may see at once that you are a simpleton. Ben Jonson, speaking of one who was taken for a man of