vantages which he possesses over others, assures you that he is perfectly sensible of his own defects as every great man should be, and without thinking of what your opinion of his merits may be, he again begs you not to praise him too much. All the while he is talking so fast and so incessantly, that when you try to get in a remark he passes it over unheeded. He lives entirely in an atmosphere of his own, and never so much as guesses at what is passing in your mind. He has a very limited sympathy with what anyone else either feels or does. If however you do say anything to him, he is sure to misapprehend your meaning, and to fly off at altogether the wrong tangent. For his whole mind is so engrossed with The Theory, and his wish to inoculate it into others, that he has no space for the reception of any influx of new ideas. This intellectual and theoretic phenomenon is also a great trial in ordinary conversation. Let us suppose that you are discussing Shelley's claim to be a poet of the first order. You offer some remark on the subject: he at once contradicts you, and talking with even more than his usual volubility, he describes a circle round the question, and at last from lack of breath leaves you at the point from which you started, repeating your remark in different words, it is true, but quite unaltered in substance. Woe betide the unlucky wretch who rouses again the latent fire by pointing out this evident contradiction! Leave him alone, my friend, and say with those who know him better, I like thee not thou loud talker and mighty mouthed inventor of sonorous quibblings; Heaven deliver me from thee and birds of thy feather.

In conclusion let a passing word be uttered in favour of the dull and stupid Bore. This worthy and most proper individual is in the habit of paying you frequent visits, merely because he thinks it right and socially correct to do so. In manner he is blunt. In looks he is heavy and dull. He has no life, no fire, no enthusiasm. Of sentiment he has none. He is too dull, too cold for a kind of dish which requires to be served up hot, and is unpalatable when cold. No ray of warm invigorating light ever penetrates the ice-bound recesses of his mind, but the darkness of utter inanity reigns supreme. He comes into your room, and as he sits down he groans with the unwonted exertion, by way of breaking the silence that naturally follows on the advent of such an apparition. After a pause he tells you that he happened to be passing (which by the bye happens as a matter of course every day) and so just looked in. Seeing

your visitor looking about as if at a loss for a subject of conversation, you tell him some amusing story or make some humorous remark: but he loses the point of both, and is sure to laugh, if indeed he laughs at all, at the wrong place. When you have finished, he says Is that all? or what next? He then recurs to the weather or the approaching boat races, both of which subjects are rather heavy about this period, as it is the fourth time they have been broached. At last, after having interrupted your reading for one hour and refused to take any amount of broad hints, he departs. This quiet and slow commodity is certainly more palateable than the noisy and obtrusive specimen which we met above, but he is scarcely more agreeable. For being rather timid and shy he is insulted if you do not endeavour to entertain him, and he is sure to stay some time for fear you should think him cold towards you. I have always observed this characteristic of the slow bore, namely, the idea that frequent visits from him are a necessary consequence of an acquaintance however small.

There is yet another class of Bores which delights in conversing about subjects which can be of no possible interest to its audience, as for instance talking about racquets, boating news, or small talk about schools and any matters of school interest. This kind of conversation is known by the expressive name of shop: and is the terror of every well regulated mind. Sometimes again the Bore annoys you by stories of his brother's performances, or he tells you that his maternal uncle won a steeplechase, and forthwith proceeds to tell you the name of every horse that contended against him. This of all others is the little gnat that stings us with its venomous bite every day of our lives.

These are the most important of the numerous characters which are comprehended under the name of Bores. Any one, even the most casual observer, on looking round at the struggling swarms of humanity about him, will recognise a thousand such. Surely they are the rule and not the exception. Nor do I fear that any one will accuse me of viewing life in a mirror of my own distorted ideas and thoughts.

But my good friends, have you so soon forgotten the "blood and flesh" theory? I bid you at once call to mind and apply Mr. Gladstone's theory. What though our first acquaintance was no cousin, in spite of his protestations to that effect? Yet still you cannot deny him a place among your brethren. Yes, he is a brother. Witness the same blood

that courses through his veins and yours, the same pulse that throbs within him, and the same intellectual organization that is common to both of you. It is your duty therefore to foster and to cherish him to allow him to link his arm into your's, to follow you as a pet poodle would, and even to partake of your daily meals. You must joyfully listen to his long and spun out accounts of his brother's performances, and you must entertain him if he calls upon you seventy times seven every day.

W. L.

II. THE ABSENT MAN.

Anomalies are not uncommon in this world, but I know not whether in the whole genus there exists a more striking anomaly than the subject of my present sketch. When is he more palpably absent, than when he is present? Nay, when is his absence noted at all except when he lives and moves before our very eyes? Again, when is he so abstracted himself as when he is abstracting from his neighbours? I have often wondered that his very name should be the cloak of such a glaring falsehood. Is he called absent, I should like to know, because he is so universally present? Where will you not meet with him? Climb to the summit of Mont Blanc, and you will find him boiling his watch and anxiously timing it with his egg: dive into the eternal night of the coal-mine, and he will appear before you rendering his safety-lamp doubly safe by the simple precaution of not lighting it at all. His generous impulses are not parched by the heats of India. He is "so delighted to see you: will be so glad if you will come in to tiffin any day during the week." Do you feel grateful? Reserve your gratitude. In the course of conversation, it appears that he is going to Jumnapore next day for a month. He is not unknown in the saloons of New York; if we may believe our transatlantic cousins, he is there found in the highest state of development. Who has not heard how he once hung himself upon the peg and sent his hat and stick in to dinner? Not unlike is the story of a certain peer in the last century, who went out to dinner without stockings, and when the omission was pointed out by a friend, sent a footman to buy him a pair; having procured them, the tale proceeds, he carefully put both stockings on one leg.

But it is my intention to treat principally of the absent man as he is seen in the various pursuits of this University; to trace him, if possible, in his erratic course across our range of vision, and when he at length touches the horizon of our sky, to deduce from our observations of his career such approximate conclusions as shall enable some future savant to clear up for ever the many mysteries which now alas! enshroud his character and his history. I have observed that the absent man rarely begins his day by keeping a matutinal chapel. Whether it is that he always forgets to tell his bedmaker to call him, or whether it is due to the late hours which he almost invariably keeps, I do not pretend to say; of the fact itself I am quite certain. I have occasionally known him appear at eight o'clock lecture with traces of sleep written in every line of his eloquent countenance, but I have always found on enquiry, that he had either mistaken the time and risen from the couch of repose two hours earlier than he intended, or else that his alacrity was the result of a cogent message from the lecturer, in which, by a singular coincidence, mention has generally been made of the College gates. On the rare occasions in question, he makes a point of getting up the wrong pieces of bookwork, and has usually forgotten to bring his spectacles, which are of a construction peculiar to themselves, and without which he can see to do nothing. Finally, having borrowed from divers of his acquaintance one penknife, two pencils, a book, and a piece of india-rubber, all of which he neglects to return, he carries off his spoil in triumph to his own room, there to join the large magazine of stolen goods which a search-warrant could not fail to bring to light in its mysterious recesses. He now invests himself in a Margaret straw and a gown, and, unconscious of the singular picturesqueness of his attire, meanders across the court to breakfast with a friend. His proceedings during the meal are well worth the attention of the casual observer. It is well if he is content with upsetting his neighbour's coffee and pouring the greater part of the claretcup upon the floor. It is well if he only takes sugar three times over and spoils his fish by drenching it with the milk instead of the vinegar. It is far more probable that he will let the ducks which he is carving fall bodily under the table, and will carry off as trophies a spoon protruding from each waistcoat-pocket, under the vague impression that they represent respectively his pencil and his tobacco-pouch. Thus enriched, and feeling in his pocket the while for his pipe which is in his mouth, he returns meditatively to his rooms..

His next business is to see the Senior Dean, who has sent for him to know on what principle he usually wears his gown inside out at Chapel. He apparently considers the shortest cut to that gentleman's rooms to be through the apartments of some half-dozen of his friends, upon whom he calls by the way, finally arriving at his destination exactly an hour and three-quarters after he left his own rooms. He now returns and settles down to his reading, and becoming absorbed in his work, reads on till nearly half-past two, happily oblivious of the fact that he is due at the boat-house at two. Suddenly becoming conscious of his engagement, he hurriedly makes his toilet-a successful one in most respects, but rendered perhaps a little singular by the combination of a boot on one foot and a boating-shoe on the other, and also by the somewhat unusual prominence given to the blazer which he wears over his pea-jacket-and arrives at the river not more than thirty-five minutes behind his time. In a boat he is invaluable for it never strikes him that he is pumped, and he quite forgets to shut up. He has however an unpleasant habit of putting it on at Grassy when he is rowing two, and at Ditton when he is bow, on each occasion apparently for no other reason, than because it is not his corner. If he is stroke, he rows a casual fifty to the minute, which the 'Varsity oar, who is rowing five, says he does not much mind himself, but perhaps the others might like a rather slower stroke. But, alas, three catches a crab and the boat upsets. See how carefully our hero throws his watch into the river to save it, and carries his oar laboriously with him to the bank to prevent it from sinking. The Absent Man did I call him? What presence of mind could equal that? The happy hour when a repast of nectar and ambrosia-represented, alas! too often, by a glass of undrinkable beer and a mangled joint of beef or mutton-awaits the hungry Undergraduate, now approaches. Our hero, unconscious of the fact that grace is being read, enters the Hall with a thoughtful step; and it is not until he has walked half-way up the room that he becomes aware of that fact, and also that he has his cap on. Rectifying the latter mistake with an indifferent air, he takes his place: and, with a prudence and precaution which would do honour to the most mature deliberation, he first sends a waiter for some beef and then helps himself to the mutton; and having originally despatched another waiter for currant jelly (apparently a conventional term with him for horse-radish sauce) to the beef, he now sends off a third waiter to get him horse-radish sauce to his mutton. Having thus provided for every