The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-

Heel'd Jack. I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so
largely the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish

proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman
to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not which is more

remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclusions the humorous
eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the

whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the
conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the

serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,
transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the

twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions
inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a

triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of
conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such

grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length
shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates,

dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy
justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with

the VIM of these impersonations, the strange scale of language,
flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell -

"As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument"

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and

bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the
admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different

calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a
man of a great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the

impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has
been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you

entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other
powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There

is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which
suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he

will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt
and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both

conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out Pistol'd,
and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain

subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and
you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutualadmiration. The outcry

only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and
precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect

intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and
an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly,

none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who
may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself,

create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on
you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and

both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I
myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we

love a bright, fierceadversary, who will hold his ground, foot by
foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give

us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these
men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a

high and hard adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass
days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and

manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and
glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk

is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind
still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still

around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more
honest; Jack gives us the animatedpoetry, Burly the romantic

prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and
makes a light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of

fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have
the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour

in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of
contradiction.

Cockshot (5) is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and
has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner

is dry, brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much.
The point about him is his extraordinaryreadiness and spirit. You

can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-
made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay

its timbers and launch it in your presence. "Let me see," he will
say. "Give me a moment. I SHOULD have some theory for that." A

blither spectacle than the vigour with which he sets about the
task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac energy,

welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete
bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort. He has, in

theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic
gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of

the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your
faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right

enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock shy
- as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and

have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious
opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures

with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but
taking punishment like a man. He knows and never forgets that

people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts
himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough

"glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary.
Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. Three-

in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and

inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives.
Athelred, on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a

sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most
unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him

sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two
together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is

something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity
with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the

works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of
inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming

from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the
more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour.

There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the
very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the

words next his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer
of particular good things that Athelred is most to he regarded,

rather as the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a
light cord often enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe;

and between us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy
has fallen. I have known him to battle the same question night

after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly
applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous or grave

intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor
taking an unfairadvantage of the facts. Jack at a given moment,

when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly
just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his

thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge
excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the

world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully
contending with his doubts.

Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion
studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against

his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled
and poetic talk of Opalstein. His various and exotic knowledge,

complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full,
discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of

talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me - PROXIME
ACCESSIT, I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and the

arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight,
serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from

his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the
upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he

still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes
interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has