the chemistry of his pigments; but educational works and periodicals give very little indication of the minute study of facts in the childmaterial now universally submitted to education. The children need to be studied, and those in charge should be able to describe and classify them, especially under an Education Code which throws upon teachers the responsibility of arranging them in the standards.

A case has, it is trusted, been made out in favour of the scientific study of the physical and mental condition of children as a basis for education. The promotion of such studies and the prosecution of further inquiry has been undertaken by a committee appointed by the International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, 1891. An interim report just issued shows that 30,000 children have been seen for them, and results tabulated preparatory to actuarial investigation. The British Medical Association, the Royal Statistical Society, the Charity Organisation Society, and other bodies have appointed representatives to the committee, and the London School Board have arranged for certain of their schools to be visited.

DOUGLAS GALTON,

BORES

ONE of Montaigne's chief charms as an essayist consists in the levity with which he handles serious subjects, and the gravity he applies to light ones. But Montaigne wrote for a limited circle of friends; it would clearly be to set at defiance all the ordinary rules of prudence were one to ape his manner and discourse lightly before the general public about that of which we all move in dread. One may speak frivolously of the influenza, for it comes and goes according to inscrutable physical conditions, not likely to be affected by any irresponsible observations; or of the crack of doom, about which nothing is known, and everybody cherishes the hope that it is a long way off. But Bores are of us and in our midst; do we not stand in peril of them every hour? Nay, who shall say that he is free from the risk of himself developing some of their most terrible attributes? It is meet, then, in submitting to analysis the subject which gives this paper its title, to apply to it only such dispassionate and penetrating consideration as becomes a weighty matter.

Bores, then, pervade every habitable, or at least every civilised, part of the globe; penetrate every layer of society; threaten the integrity of every system of human intercourse. Though intensely gregarious they abhor each other's company, and cling to association with their natural prey-ordinary men and women. It is believed, therefore, that the bore might be extinguished, either by isolation or by forced association with his own kind, for he cannot exist, even through a single winter like the bear, by sucking his own paws; but neither experiment has yet been tried, for he is equipped with unerring instinct, whereby he is ever able to elude the most crafty devices for his destruction.

Among all the men of violence who have figured on this world's stage, none has openly avowed the purpose of carrying war against the Bores. Ezzolino da Romano, Vicar of Ferdinand the Second in Northern Italy, exceeded all other tyrants, and Alexander the Third all other popes, in the sickening cruelty with which each pursued his purpose the secular ruffian aiming at selfish aggrandisement, the ecclesiastic animated by avarice, lust, and narrow nepotism; but neither they nor any of their competitors in the obscene calendar of

crime have ever been suspected of the virtuous purpose of exterminating Bores.

Yet in casting about for some palliation or intelligible motive for the monstrous offences against humanity perpetrated by the mediæval rulers of Church and State in Italy, it may be possible to detect, in reading between the lines of edicts condemning men and women to unspeakable tortures, some purpose, sedulously veiled, not unworthy of our sympathy. It may be that the family of princes whom Ezzolino walled up in their country-house in Lombardy and left to perish of famine may have been of the generation of bores, for-publish it not in the streets of Askelon—the blood of that race has been known to run in royal veins. It is even more plausible to conceive that when Paulus the Second threw certain members of the Roman Academy— Platonists-into prison and tortured them to death upon the rack, he was impelled to do so, not by blind jealousy of erudition, but because he was goaded to distraction by their interminable talk, and was ridding society of creatures who were making life a grievous burden. If this were so, then, seeing that these despotic and, in other respects, fearless rulers were fain to conceal their real purpose, and, rather than incur the vengeance of a terrible race, accept the infamy of the sordid and vicious motives usually attributed to them, so much the more reason for a humble critic, clinging to his peaceful obscurity, to frame no phrase which, by its apparent levity, may bring him into closer relations with the powerful family which is the subject of his observations. To treat this subject with less than its proper gravity might involve him in relations from the trammels of which he would probably never escape. He would afford an excuse for every bore within speaking or writing range to concentrate attention upon him, in order to prove how incompetent he was to deal with one of the most important phenomena of civilisation.

For the bore has no place in primitive stages of society. What times men go with their lives in their hands, and it is matter of concern how each day's dinner is to be come by, they are disposed to welcome any companion from whom violence need not be apprehended. Job endured his friends through many long chapters before he ventured to hint he could stand them no longer. It is so difficult to be 'not at home' when living in a tent; in fact, Achilles is the only person of any note who seems to have managed it effectively. The Athenians gave evidence of precocious culture, when, bored by interminable praise of Aristides, they sent him to Coventry, and brought the lectures of Socrates to a close by a timely dose of hemlock. But those were extreme and isolated cases; in our own country there were few signs of coming evil till wealth began to abound and foreign campaigns took the place of civil war, with result of much redundant leisure. It was probably in the reign of Queen Anne that

Englishmen first became conscious of the presence of bores. Pope sounded the first note of alarm in the Dunciad:

Still her old empire to restore she tries,

For, born a goddess, Dulness never dies.

The British essayists of the eighteenth century have suffered not at all from want of posthumous appreciation; it may be whispered, indeed, that their productions are not of a uniform degree of effulgence, and that, remarkable as that school of literature undoubtedly is, it owes much of its renown to having marked a new departure in our country, in the wake of nations earlier in culture and freer in fancy. To be perfectly candid, Addison, Johnson, even dear old disreputable lively Steele, wrote a great deal of unmitigated twaddle, wholly unworthy of the immortality for which it has been embalmed. Nevertheless one is often refreshed, in voyaging through the mellow print of last century, by papers written for that day but bearing upon all times, poignantly expressed and full of the clear spirit of philosophy. Of such are Swift's Hints towards an Essay on Conversation. Swift does not often lead his readers on lofty levels: most of his work is tainted with mordant cynicism or rank with gratuitous grossness, less palatable than open immorality; but there is fruitful thought garnered in this short essay, and one enjoys it as much as the experienced gourmet who, discouraged by the monotony of a dry, sinewy fowl, picks out those sapid morsels in the loins, aptly named les-sots-les-laissent. No mature person can peruse these hints without gaining a clearer view of the machinery of human intercourse and the impediments to its easy working. Perhaps one closes the book sighing, 'Ah! had I but seen all this when I was younger, how many blunders I might have avoided!'

The writer does not weary his readers with abstruse doctrines or complicated propositions: what he has on his mind is expressed in plain, temperate sentences, and it is no more than might have been uttered by any one of us. But it is all so true, so direct, so farreaching, that it ought to be printed as an appendix to the rules of every club in London. Swift tells us that he was moved to write his thoughts on conversation, 'by mere indignation to reflect that so useful and innocent a pleasure, so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all men's power, should be so neglected and abused.'

He goes on to analyse some of the ways in which people succeed in wearying each other in conversation. So far his task is a simple one. Anyone has but to reflect on his own experience and put it in plain words in order to show up his fellow-men as clearly as Swift has done. When the new Law Courts were about to be opened the judges assembled in conclave to prepare an address to the Sovereign. The draft submitted to them began with the words-Conscious as

we are of our own infirmities.' The question arose whether this was not just a trifle too abject; upon which Sir Charles Bowen asked, 'Would it not be more true to say, Conscious as we are of the infirmities of others?' It is not recorded that the suggestion was adopted; yet how right it was! Motes in the eyes of others are so plainly visible that everyone is impatient for their removal. It is so easy to recognise how good a thing is articulate speech; how flexible, how subtle, how obedient it ought to be-how cramped, muffled, ambiguous, it usually is. All this, and much more, we are in as good a position as Swift was to observe and deplore; but smaller men than he would be apt to make the unintelligent mistake of imagining that matters were better dans le temps. He knew men better than that he knew that the defects of one age are the defects of all. How often and how unfavourably we compare the vapid, listless chatter of the club smoking-room-its stale scandal and nerveless comment upon passing events-with the limpid stream that played through Wills' Coffee-house! It is useful to listen to Swift's description of it whereby he ruthlessly dispels the golden atmosphere with which our fancy invests that chosen resort of the wits.

The worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life was that at Wills' Coffee-house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble —that is to say, five or six men who had writ plays or had share in a miscellany came thither and entertained one another with their trifling composures, in so important an air as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature, or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them.

Here indeed is unwelcome disillusion, and were this, and other passages like it, all, one might throw the book aside and comfort oneself with the thought that some day, perhaps, our own little coteries, albeit dingy and tepid enough in the present, may acquire in virtue of distance a respectable warmth and lustre of their own. But what distinguishes this essay above all those of its period is that its author has struck out in a single bright, sharply cut sentence a profile of the malignant principle at the root of the evil. Through a score of pages he dwells on the nature of the disease; in a short paragraph he lays bare its source and prescribes the sure remedy. Here it is:

Of such mighty importance every man is to himself, and ready to think he is so to others, without once making the easy and obvious reflection that his affairs can have no more weight with other men than theirs can have with him, and how little that is he is sensible enough.

There is here none of Swift's disagreeable cynicism. He has infused this sentence with the concentrated spirit of altruism, laboriously distilled by successive moralists; the very essence of that social science elaborated by Lord Chesterfield in whole volumes of anxious letters. It is clear that it would be impossible for any human being to become a bore who should sink his own personality