Our young girls are nearly all of them taught music with great
expenditure of money, time, and labor; but whether we look to the
cultivation of actual talent, to the improvement of Character, or to
accomplishment as a means of making ourselves agreeable in society, how
profitably could a part of this time and labor be employed in acquiring
the power and the habit of accurate language, agreeable modulation,
distinct utterance, and courteous attention; and it can hardly be
doubted that a person who possesses the power of conversing well finds
and gives more pleasure in society than a person skilled to an equal
degree in music.
Conversation has, indeed, this advantage over all school studies; in
order to obtain its best requisites no books are needed beyond such as
are accessible to all, while its best teachers are the suggestions of
common sense, and the conscientious love of the true and the good.
Still, there are few persons whose efforts would not be crowned with a
higher success if aided by the criticism and the guidance of a competent
instructor. Those who are competent to self-instruction in this, as
in all other accomplishments, are exceptional examples, and it may be
doubted if even these might not have reached a higher excellence, aided
by the suggestions of another mind. Properly cultivated, Conversation
would have an influence in developing the whole being, of a kind and
degree that could hardly be over-estimated.
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