[This truly intellectual banquet] … calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get down from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the medius lectus, – that carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bombshells from professional mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody that shows himself.

Some persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly stated propositions, is all that conversation admits … [But] conversation must have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths … One man who is a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit.