a gentleman who is by common consent the
greatest bore and buttonholer in London. He always reminds me of the
philosopher described by Sir George Trevelyan, who used to wander about
asking, "Why are we created? Whither do we tend? Have we an inner
consciousness?" till all his friends, when they saw him from afar, used
to exclaim, "Why was Tompkins created? Is he tending this way? Has he an
inner consciousness that he is a bore?"

Well, a few years ago this good man, on his return from his autumn
holiday, was telling all his acquaintances at the club that he had been
occupying a house at the Lakes not far from Mr. Ruskin, who, he added,
was in a very melancholy state, "I am truly sorry for that," said one of
his hearers. "What is the matter with him?" "Well," replied the
buttonholer, "I was walking one day in the lane which separated Ruskin's
house from mine, and I saw him coming down the lane towards me. The
moment he caught sight of me he darted into a wood which was close by,
and hid behind a tree till I had passed. Oh, very sad indeed." But the
truly pathetic part of it was one's consciousness that what Mr. Ruskin
did we should all have done, and that not all the trees in Birnam Wood
and the Forest of Arden combined would have hidden the multitude of
brother-clubmen who sought to avoid the narrator.

The faculty of boring belongs, unhappily, to no one period of life. Age
cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. Middle life is
its heyday. Perhaps infancy is free from it, but I strongly suspect that
it is a form of original sin, and shows itself very early. Boys are
notoriously rich in it; with them it takes two forms--the loquacious and
the awkward; and in some exceptionally favoured cases the two forms are
combined. I once was talking with an eminent educationist about the
characteristic qualities produced by various Public Schools, and when I
asked him what Harrow produced he replied, "A certain shy
bumptiousness." It was a judgment which wrung my Harrovian withers, but
of which I could not dispute the truth.

One of the forms which shyness takes in boyhood is an inability to get
up and go. When Dr. Vaughan was Head Master of Harrow, and had to
entertain his boys at breakfast, this inability was frequently
manifested, and was met by the Doctor in a most characteristic fashion.
When the muffins and sausages had been devoured, the perfunctory
inquiries about the health of "your people" made and answe