This was a wise
step; for, had this rule been relaxed, those unable to pass the standard
would have joined the ranks of the originators, and thus flooded the
market.

[Illustration: "THE GENIUS CLASS AT THE BOARD SCHOOL."]

Young Bansted Downs now set himself to steadily forgetting all the
genius he had learned, feeling that it would be nothing but an
incumbrance in his new career; and he succeeded so well that in the
course of a few years he had become as dull as ditch-water.

Meanwhile a new public were growing up, a public of such brilliant
perceptions--so great a faculty of appreciation--that they were quite
bewildered with the excellences they perceived in everything around
them.

To take the sense of humour alone: they possessed it to so marvellous an
extent that they could perceive a joke in the passing cloud,
facetiousness in the growth of flowers, a choice witticism in the rates
and taxes, an incentive to mirth in strikes. Not that they were
incessantly giggling--that would have argued a something wanting; no,
they drank in and appreciated and enjoyed the universal humour, and
their eyes were bright.

So, when young Bansted Downs was middle-aged Bansted Downs he started
all over again in quite a different way: he just wrote twaddle, and
painted twaddle, and composed twaddle; and went on to a platform and
twaddled about twaddle: and the public genius detected the brilliancy
lurking in it all, and they were in ecstacies.

A terrible thing happened to the Boom Department of the Press. One day
the public arose as one man and remarked that they were capable of
finding out merit for themselves and no longer required the Department;
and they took large stones, and bad eggs, and dead cats, and fagots of
wood, and proceeded to the Boom Department; and it was in vain that the
head of the Department came out on the balcony and pleaded that the
Booming System, as practised by the Press, had nothing to do with the
finding-out of merit; for the public smashed the windows and burned the
offices, and abolished the Boom Department.

[Illustration: "A CHOICE WITTICISM IN THE RATES AND TAXES."]

However, nobody required Booming now, as absence of ability was no
longer a bar to fame; and things worked far more happily than they ever
had under the old system. Authors and others no longer pined under want
of appreciation; on the contrary, they were always wildly surprised at
the wonderful things the public discovered in t