But the want
of good conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he
conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he found
a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good
conversation, one's understanding and invention contract a moss on them,
like an old paling in an orchard."
Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the
nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and
social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and
superior people show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says,
that "William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain
every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one well-bred man
without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any
high point. Especially women: it requires a great many cultivated
women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease
and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to
elegant society,--in order that you should have one Madame de Stael.
The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician, is
brought into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the
country,--and those, too, the driving-wheels, the business-men of each
section,--and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a
more searching culture. Besides, we must remember the high social
possibilities of a million of men.
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