their
little cities was only a large club. They had, therefore, to deal with
the problem of bores. Some of them, consequently, had the institution of
annually devoting to the infernal gods the most unpopular citizens. These
persons were called _catharmata_, which may be freely translated
"scapegoats." Could not clubs annually devote one or more scapebores to
the infernal gods? They might ballot for them, of course, on some
merciful and lenient principle. One white ball in ten or twenty-black
ones might enable the bore to keep his membership for the next year. The
warning, if he only escaped this species of ostracism very narrowly,
might do him a great deal of moral good. Of course the process would be
unpleasant, but it is seldom agreeable to be done good to. Occasionally
even the most good-natured members would stand apart, not voting, or even
would place the black ball in the mystic urn. Then the scapebore would
have his subscription returned to him, and would be obliged to seek in
other haunts servants to swear at, and sofas to snore on. Another
suggestion, that members should be balloted for anew every five years,
would simply cause clubs to be depopulated. Pall-Mall and St. James's
would be desolate, mourning their children, and refusing comfort. The
system would act like a proscription. People would give up their friends
that they might purchase aid against their enemies. Clubs are more
endurable as they are, though members do suffer grievously from the
garrulity, the coughs, the slumbrous tendencies, and the temper of their
fellow-men.

PHIZ.

Mr. Hablot K. Browne, better known as Phiz, was an artist of a departed
school to whom we all owe a great deal of amusement. He was not so
versatile nor so original as Cruickshank; he had not the genius, nor the
geniality, still less the sense of beauty, of John Leech. In his later
years his work became more and more unequal, till he was sometimes almost
as apt to scribble hasty scrawls as Constantin Guys. M. Guys was an
artist selected by M. Baudelaire as the fine flower of modern art, and
the true, though hurried, designer of the fugitive modern beauty. It is
recorded that M. Guys was once sent to draw a scene of triumph and
certain illuminations in London, probably about the end of the Crimean
War. His sketch did not reach the office of the paper for which he
worked in time, and some one went to see what the man of genius was
doing. He was f