This freedom from self-knowledge which bores enjoy is one of their most striking characteristics.  One of the principal clubs in London has the misfortune to be frequented by a gentleman who is by common consent the greatest bore and buttonholer in London.  He always reminds me of the philosopher described by Sir George Trevelyan, who used to wander about asking, “Why are we created?  Whither do we tend?  Have we an inner consciousness?” till all his friends, when they saw him from afar, used to exclaim, “Why was Tompkins created?  Is he tending this way?  Has he an inner consciousness that he is a bore?”

Well, a few years ago this good man, on his return from his autumn holiday, was telling all his acquaintances at the club that he had been occupying a house at the Lakes not far from Mr. Ruskin, who, he added, was in a very melancholy state, “I am truly sorry for that,” said one of his hearers.  “What is the matter with him?” “Well,” replied the buttonholer, “I was walking one day in the lane which separated Ruskin’s house from mine, and I saw him coming down the lane towards me.  The moment he caught sight of me he darted into a wood which was close by, and hid behind a tree till I had passed.  Oh, very sad indeed.”  But the truly pathetic part of it was one’s consciousness that what Mr. Ruskin did we should all have done, and that not all the trees in Birnam Wood and the Forest of Arden combined would have hidden the multitude of brother-clubmen who sought to avoid the narrator.

The faculty of boring belongs, unhappily, to no one period of life.  Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety.  Middle life is its heyday.  Perhaps infancy is free from it, but I strongly suspect that it is a form of original sin, and shows itself very early.  Boys are notoriously rich in it; with them it takes two forms—­the loquacious and the awkward; and in some exceptionally favoured cases the two forms are combined.  I once was talking with an eminent educationist about the characteristic qualities produced by various Public Schools, and when I asked him what Harrow produced he replied, “A certain shy bumptiousness.”  It was a judgment which wrung my Harrovian withers, but of which I could not dispute the truth.

One of the forms which shyness takes in boyhood is an inability to get up and go.  When Dr. Vaughan was Head Master of Harrow, and had to entertain his boys at breakfast, this inability was frequently manifested, and was met by the Doctor in a most characteristic fashion.  When the muffins and sausages had been devoured, the perfunctory inquiries about the health of “your people” made and answered, and all permissible school topics discussed, there used to ensue a horrid silence, while “Dr. Blimber’s young friends” sat tightly glued to their chairs.  Then the Doctor would approach with Agag-like delicacy, and, extending his hand to the shyest and most loutish boy, would say, “Must you go?  Can’t you stay?” and the party broke up with magical celerity.  Such, at least, was our Harrovian tradition.