nn is the recognized relaxation
of a middle-class Englishman in the provinces. Did he not attend
such banquets his neighbours would conceive him to be constrained
by domestic tyranny. Others go to them, and therefore he goes also.
He is bored frightfully by every speech to which he listens. He is
driven to the lowest depths of dismay by every speech which he is
called upon to make. He is thoroughly disgusted when he is called on
to make no speech. He has no point of sympathy with the neighbours
between whom he sits. The wine is bad. The hot water is brought to
him cold. His seat is hard and crowded. No attempt is made at the
pleasures of conversation. He is continually called upon to stand
up that he may pretend to drink a toast in honour of some person or
institution for which he cares nothing; for the hero of the evening,
as to whom he is probably indifferent; for the church, which
perhaps he never enters; the army, which he regards as a hotbed of
aristocratic insolence; or for the Queen, whom he reveres and loves
by reason of his nature as an Englishman, but against whose fulsome
praises as repeated to him ad nauseam in the chairman's speech his
very soul unconsciously revolts. It is all a bore, trouble, ennui,
nastiness, and discomfort. But yet he goes again and again,--because
it is the relaxation natural to an Englishman. The Frenchman who sits
for three hours tilted on the hind legs of a little chair with his
back against the window-sill of the cafe, with first a cup of coffee
before him and then a glass of sugar and water, is perhaps as much to
be pitied as regards his immediate misery; but the liquids which he
imbibes are not so injurious to him.

Mr. Tappitt with the eleven other liberal electors of Baslehurst went
through the ceremony of their dinner in the usual way. They drank
the health of the Queen, and of the volunteers of the county because
there was present a podgy little grocer who had enrolled himself in
the corps and who was thus enabled to make a speech; and then they
drank the health of Mr. Hart, whose ultimate return for the borough
they pledged themselves to effect. Having done so much for business,
and having thus brought to a conclusion the political work of the
evening, they adjourned their meeting to a cosy little parlour
near the bar, and then they began to be happy. Some few of the
number, including the angry vice-president, who sold hardware, took
themselves home to their wives. "Mrs. To