here, in this rough soldier, was the standard round which all parties and all provinces could rally for the battle of freedom and nationality. That his death endangers the monarchy in Italy we do not believe. Great as the attraction of the example of France is on Italy, the Italians know that the Constitution will secure them all a republic could. They have no Bourbons to destroy, and the new king, though not popular, is free from many of the difficulties which beset his father, especially the hatred borne to him by Ultramontanes, and enjoys the benefit of the deep devotion felt throughout Italy towards his wife, the "Pearl" of the house of Savoy. That the ministry will miss the aid of Victor Emanuel's popularity, of his rough, keen sense in affairs, and of his intimate knowledge of persons, is likely enough; but in Italy genius is endemic, and his place will be supplied. He is not a heroic figure, in our sight, but there are compensations in character; history will pardon the king's vices, as the Church has done, and there will in time, if Italy lasts, gather round the founder of her dynasty that softening halo of distance and indistinctness for which time is now too new. They are all passing, the great figures of our half of the century; and when the old priest has gone, scarcely one of the visible figures present when it began will be still before the world.
THE VICE OF TALKING SHOP.
It is very wrong to talk shop. That is one of society's most venerated precepts, even if—not wholly unlike most venerated precepts, in higher codes of morality—it is one of the least obeyed. Not to know it is not to know the rudimentary "my duty towards my neighbor" of social religion. And to enforce it—as occasion may require, of course—must be the duty of every self-respecting diner-out. For if you fall among shop-talkers whose shop is not yours you may get thrown into the background. The predicament is serious; it is not only that you may be prevented from taking part in the conversation with your accustomed excellence, but that you may have to hold your tongue altogether; and, in spite of the many compliments paid to silence by the many sages who have wished to do all the talking themselves, people are apt to assume that when a man says nothing in company it is because he can find nothing to say. And at any rate no one likes to play the part of the mummy at an Egyptian banquet, to be the blank guest whose silence conveys a protest against the whole proceedings, and concerning whom the other guests must needs feel that the best they can do with him is to let him alone. He who finds himself in such a pass will no more doubt that it is a vice to talk shop than he would doubt that it is a vice not to pay one's debts if somebody else persevered in owing him an inconveniently large sum of money.
And yet there is something to be said on behalf of shop. The rule of society no doubt is that we should talk of what we do not know rather than of what we do know; still there are many men, and perhaps some women, who are absolutely unable to obey the rule — except negatively, by not talking of anything. Women who mix at all with the world readily acquire the knack of talking companionably of what they know nothing about—a great many women indeed seem less to acquire it than to have it as a birthright; obedience to the rule sits upon them as easily and as fitly as the furbelows and gauzes in which a man would find himself like a fly in a cobweb. Therefore women, even women with specialities, rarely talk shop. In fact, partly under the dread of those fatal adjectives "blue," "gushing," "strong-minded," and partly from a sort of mental prudery—one which has its good side but also its bad—which objects, as it were, to the real woman being too accurately scanned, they more usually shrink from any discussion of subjects in which they feel a close interest. But there is a large tale of men who never arrive at being able to talk on subjects about which they have neither information nor concern; and the question is, whether in their case it is not worth while to relax the stringency of the rule. Suppose a man's shop has so engrossed him that it really is the only thing he knows or cares about. He is not uneducated, perhaps not even narrow-minded, but his intellect is not of the much-embracing order, and his profession or his purpose has so absorbed his intellectual sympathies that, just as if he were some great artist, all he sees and learns gets somehow dovetailed into the one theme of his life. Whenever circumstances have led to a man's occupying his time and his thoughts in one especial manner with any sort of zeal, he will unconsciously acquire such a readiness in detecting everything that has the remotest affinity to his paramount topic that it can never be quite out of his memory. There will always be the
