Complete. From “Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political.”

A PRATING barber came to trim King Archelaus, and said to him, “How will you please to have me cut your hair?”—Said the king, “Silently.” And, certainly, though a man has nothing to do, but to hear and answer, yet a boundless tongue is a strange unbridled beast to be worried with. And the misery is, that those who speak much seldom speak well: it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer. Horace, I think, was to be pitied when he was put into a sweat, and almost slain in the Via Sacra, by the accidental detention of a prating tongue. There is nothing tires one more than words, when they clatter, like a loose window shaken by the wind. A talkative fellow may be compared to an unbraced drum, which beats a wise man out of his wits. Surely, nature did not guard the tongue with the double fence of teeth and lips, without meaning that it should not move too nimbly. When a scholar full of words applied to Isocrates for instruction, the latter demanded of him a double fee: one, to teach him to speak well; another, to teach him to hold his peace. Those who talk too much to others, I fear, seldom speak enough with themselves; and then, for want of acquaintance with their own bosoms, they may well be mistaken and exhibit foolishness when they think they are displaying wisdom. Loquacity is the fistula of the mind,—ever running and almost incurable. Some are blabbers of secrets, and these are traitors to society; they are vessels unfit for use, for they are bored in their bottoms.

  There are others, again, who will cloy you with their own inventions, and this is a fault of poets. He who in his epigram invited his friend to supper made him promise that he

  Some will preamble a tale impertinently, and cannot be delivered of a jest, till they have traveled an hour in trivials; as if they had taken the whole particulars in shorthand, and were reading from their notes:—thus they often spoil a good dish with improper sauce and unsavory farcements. Some are addicted to counseling, and will pour it in, even till they stop the ear. Tedious admonitions stupefy the advised, and make the giver contemptible. It is the short reproof which stays like a stab in the memory, that tells; and oftentimes three words do more good than an idle discourse of three hours. Some have varieties of stories, even to the wearing out of an auditor; and this is frequently the grave folly of old persons, whose unwatched tongues stray into the waste of words, and give us cause to blame their memories, for retaining so much of their youth. There are others also who have a leaping tongue, to jig into the tumult of discourse; and unless you have an Aristius to take you off, you are in great danger of a deep vexation. A rook yard in a spring morning is not a greater nuisance than one of these. Doubtless, the best is to be short, plain, and material. Let me hear one wise man sentence it, rather than twenty fools, garrulous in their lengthened tattle.—Est tempus quando nihil, est tempus quando aliquid; nullum autem est tempus, in quo dicenda sunt omnia. (Hug. Vict.) There is a time when we ought to be silent, and there is a time when we may speak; but there is no time in which all things should be spoken.