e art. They are huskier, more
wheezing, more pertinacious in working away at a cough till they have
made it a masterpiece than any other mortals. We believe that club
Asthmats (it is quite as good a word as "AEsthetes") practise in the
Reading Room of the British Museum, where they acquire their
extraordinary compass and mastery of various notes. Be this as it may,
the cough which drives every one but its owner out of the room (though
doubtless an affliction to the proprietor) gives him rank as a club-bore
of the finest water. The bore who always enters into conversation,
though he has nothing to say, merely because you used to dislike him at
school, or college, or elsewhere, is another common annoyance. The man
who is engaged, apparently, on a large work, and who rushes about the
library hunting for Proclus and Jamblichus when other occupants of the
room wish to be quiet, is naturally detested.

Most men are the bores of some other person. People of watchful mind and
intelligent habit, who talk in the drawing-room, are regarded as bores by
fat old gentlemen who wish to sleep there. And as these gentlemen turn
the drawing-room into a dormitory, which resounds with their snoring,
they in turn are bores to people who wish to read the papers. But if
these students drop the poker with a clang, or dash down small tables in
order to waken the sleepers, they, in their turn, give a good deal of
annoyance. The man who talks about politics at great length, is only one
of the common bores of the world transported into a club. But the man
with a voice which in ordinary conversation pierces through all the hum
of voices, like a clarion note in battle, would be a bore anywhere. If
he were in the wilderness of Sinai, he would annoy the monks in the
convent near the top. His voice is one of those terrible, inscrutable
scourges of nature, like the earthquake and the mosquito, which tax our
poor human wisdom to reconcile with any monistic theory of the benevolent
government of the universe. Once admit an evil principle, however, and
the thing is clear. The club-bore with the trumpet tones, which he
cannot moderate, is possessed, on this theory, by a fiend. As men are
talking quietly of turnips in one corner of the room, of rent in another,
and of racing in a third, his awful notes blend in from the fourth corner
with strident remarks on Bulgarian philology.

The ancient Greeks were well accustomed to club life, for each of