Honest old Dick Reptile is the third of our society: he is a good-natured indolent man, who speaks little himself, but laughs at our jokes, and brings his young nephew along with him, a youth of eighteen years old, to show him good company, and give him a taste of the world. This young fellow sits generally silent; but whenever he opens his mouth, or laughs at anything that passes, he is constantly told by his uncle, after a jocular manner, "Ay, ay, Jack, you young men think us fools; but we old men know you are."84
The greatest wit of our company, next to myself, is a bencher of the neighbouring inn, who in his youth frequented the ordinaries about Charing Cross, and pretends to have been intimate with Jack Ogle.85 He has about ten distichs of "Hudibras" without book, and never leaves the club till he has applied them all. If any modern wit be mentioned, or any town frolic spoken of, he shakes his head at the dulness of the present age, and tells us a story of Jack Ogle.
For my own part, I am esteemed among them, because they see I am something respected by others, though at the same time I understand by their behaviour, that I am considered by them as a man of a great deal of learning, but no knowledge of the world; insomuch that the Major sometimes, in the height of his military pride, calls me the philosopher: and Sir Jeoffrey no longer ago than last night, upon a dispute what day of the month it was then in Holland, pulled his pipe out of his mouth, and cried, "What does the scholar say to it?"
Our club meets precisely at six o'clock in the evening; but I did not come last night till half an hour after seven, by which means I escaped the battle of Naseby, which the Major usually begins at about three-quarters after six; I found also, that my good friend, the bencher, had already spent three of his distichs, and only waiting an opportunity to hear a sermon spoken of, that he might introduce the couplet where "a stick" rhymes to "ecclesiastic."86 At my entrance into the room, they were naming a red petticoat and a cloak, by which I found that the bencher had been diverting them with a story of Jack Ogle.
I had no sooner taken my seat, but Sir Jeoffrey, to show his goodwill towards me, gave me a pipe of his own tobacco, and stirred up the fire. I look upon it as a point of morality, to be obliged by those who endeavour to oblige me; and therefore in requital for his kindness, and to set the conversation a-going, I took the best occasion I could, to put him upon telling us the story of old Gantlett, which he always does with very particular concern. He traced up his descent on both sides for several generations, describing his diet and manner of life, with his several battles, and particularly that in which he fell. This Gantlett was a game-cock, upon whose head the knight in his youth had won five hundred pounds, and lost two thousand. This naturally set the major upon the account of Edge Hill fight, and ended in a duel of Jack Ogle's.
Old Reptile was extremely attentive to all that was said, though it was the same he had heard every night for these twenty years, and upon all occasions, winked upon his nephew to mind what passed.
This may suffice to give the world a taste of our innocent conversation, which we spun out till about ten of the clock, when my maid87 came with a lantern to light me home. I could not but reflect with myself as I was going out upon the talkative humour of old men, and the little figure which that part of life makes in one who cannot employ this natural propensity in discourses which would make him venerable. I must own, it makes me very melancholy in company, when I hear a young man begin a story; and have often observed, that one of a quarter of an hour long in a man of five and twenty, gathers circumstances every time he tells it, till it grows into a long Canterbury tale of two hours by that time he is three-score.
The only way of avoiding such a trifling and frivolous old age, is, to lay up in our way to it such stores of knowledge and observation as may make us useful and agreeable in our declining years. The mind of man in a long life will become a magazine of wisdom or folly, and will consequently discharge itself in something impertinent or improving. For which reason, as there is nothing more ridiculous than an old trifling story-teller, so there is nothing more venerable than one who has turned his experience to the entertainment and advantage of mankind.
In short, we who are in the last stage of life, and are apt to indulge ourselves in talk, ought to consider, if what we speak be worth being heard, and endeavour to make our discourse like that of Nestor, which Homer compares to the flowing of honey for its sweetness.88
I am afraid I shall be thought guilty of this excess I am speaking of, when I cannot conclude without observing, that Milton certainly thought of this passage in Homer, when in his description of an eloquent spirit, he says, "His tongue dropped manna."89
No. 133
Dum tacent, clamant.—Tull.
Silence is sometimes more significant and sublime than the most noble and most expressive eloquence, and is on many occasions the indication of a great mind. Several authors have treated of silence as a part of duty and discretion, but none of them have considered it in this light. Homer compares the noise and clamour of the Trojans advancing towards the enemy, to the cackling of cranes when they invade an army of pigmies.90 On the contrary, he makes his countrymen and favourites, the Greeks, move forward in a regular determined march, and in the depth of silence. I find in the accounts which are given us of some of the more Eastern nations, where the inhabitants are disposed by their constitutions and climates to higher strains of thought, and more elevated raptures than what we feel in the northern regions of the world, that silence is a religious exercise among them. For when their public devotions are in the greatest fervour, and their hearts lifted up as high as words can raise them, there are certain suspensions of sound and motion for a time, in which the mind is left to itself, and supposed to swell with such secret conceptions as are too big for utterance. I have myself been wonderfully delighted with a masterpiece of music, when in the very tumult and ferment of their harmony, all the voices and instruments have stopped short on a sudden, and after a little pause recovered themselves again as it were, and renewed the concert in all its parts. Methought this short interval of silence has had more music in it than any the same space of time before or after it. There are two instances of silence in the two greatest poets that ever wrote, which have something in them as sublime as any of the speeches in their whole works. The first is that of Ajax, in the eleventh book of the Odyssey.91 Ulysses, who had been the rival of this great man in his life, as well as the occasion of his death, upon meeting his shade in the region of departed heroes, makes his submission to him with a humility next to adoration, which the other passes over with dumb sullen majesty, and such a silence, as (to use the words of Longinus) had more greatness in it than anything he could have spoken.
The next instance I shall mention is in Virgil, where the poet, doubtless, imitates this silence of Ajax in that of Dido;92 though I do not know that any of his commentators have taken notice of it. Æneas finding among the shades of despairing lovers, the ghost of her who had lately died for him, with the wound still fresh upon her, addresses himself to her with expanded arms, floods of tears, and the most passionate professions of his own innocence as to what had happened; all which Dido receives with the dignity and disdain of a resenting lover, and an injured Queen; and is so far from vouchsafing him an answer, that she does not give him a single look. The poet represents her as turning away her face from him while he spoke to her; and after having kept her eyes for some time upon the ground, as one that heard and contemned his protestations, flying from him into the grove of myrtle, and into the arms of another, whose fidelity had deserved her love.93
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