is well for any people to make overmuch of themselves. They
cannot do it without making themselves ridiculous, and perhaps making
themselves sick of what little real glory there is in any given affair;
they will have got that so inextricably mixed up with the vainglory that
they will have to reject the one to free themselves from the humiliating
memory of the other.

There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in the retrospect as
vainglory, and this is what the personal dinner is chiefly supposed to
inspire in the victim of it. If he is at all honest with himself, and he
probably is before he can have done anything worthy of notice, he knows
perfectly well that he has not merited all if any of the fond flatteries
with which he is heaped, as he sits helpless with meat and drink, and
suffers under them with the fatuous smile which we all have seen and
which some of us have worn. But as the flatterers keep coming on and on,
each with his garland of tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins to think
that there must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and to feel
the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly to locate. He burns
in sympathy with his ardent votaries, he becomes inevitably a partner in
his own apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold morrow, and the
sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this illusion, to compress his
head to the measure of his hat, to remove the drawn butter from his
soul.

They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is not
against a permanent _folie des grandeurs_ that we need seek to guard the
victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the
ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing to
intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself a
public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition. In
this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could strike
the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and, having
appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty and
subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and temperate. In
calling the speakers successively up, he could protest against anything
that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already spoken, and could
invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and achievements in the
speeches to follow.

X

A DAY AT BRONX PARK

In the beginning of the season which is called Si