THE RHETORIC OF CONVERSATION: OB, BRIDLES AND SPURS FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF THE TONGUE. BY GEORGE WINFRED HERVEY, AUTHOR OF "THE PRINCIPLES OF COURTESY." "If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man.”—JAMES. "Knowest thou when to speak and when to hold thy peace ?" NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 329 & 331 PEARL STREET, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1853. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Clerk's Office for the Southern District of New York. เ PREFACE. THIS work is the result of a purpose to write an original monograph on Conversation which should keep clear of all irrelevant matter, and at the same time contain all the instruction as to the art and ethics of talking that the most ambitious aspirant after colloquial excellence could reasonably desire. After some laborious research, the writer came to the conclusion that no complete work on this subject exclusively has ever been published in any country, not even in France, where Conversation is deservedly ranked among the arts. There are to be found, in several languages, short essays and chapters on this subject, some of which possess great merit, though many of them are vague and commonplace, some demoralizing, and all incomplete. Their incompleteness, however, should not keep any one from reading them, for though they are small, they all, except those that have an immoral tendency, help to cure the bad habits of talkers. The writer would apologise for them and for parts of his own work, in the wellknown words of Galen, In medicinâ nihil exiguum: "In physic nothing is little." We have a variety of works on Rhetoric, which teach the art of speaking in public, but not one sufficient treatise on the art of speaking in the sundry circumstances of private and social life. Hitherto we have sought to make orators of the few, rather than conversers of the many; not duly considering that it is every way more desirable that the multitude of private citizens should talk well in their daily intercourse, than that a small number of orators should know how to address them on stated occasions. Even public speakers themselves would not find it amiss to acquire some skill in this art. Whatever design they would compass by their powers of utterance, they will, in the course of a life-time, make as many, if not as deep marks, on their generation by their frequent talks as by their few speeches; nor let them indulge the notion that the gifts and acquirements which make them orators do necessarily make them conversers also. The two characters are not often united in the same person; for this reason, among others, that the habit of addressing public bodies, though favorable in some respects, is unfavorable in others to excellence in conversation. As all our great authorities in Rhetoric hold that the orator should be a good man, so we affirm, a little more explicitly, that the conversationist should be a man of evangelical piety. Whether the assertion of Theremin that "eloquence is a virtue,” be true or untrue, depends on the meaning he attaches to the word eloquence: thus much, however, we do hazard, that the highest style of colloquial eloquence is the result of many virtues. Possibly some readers will meet with a few observations in this work which seem so agreeable to common sense, that they |