CLUB BORES.

The London Club has been sitting in a judicial way on one of its members.  This member of the Club seems to have been what Thackeray’s waiter called “a harbitrary gent.”  The servants of the club had to complain that he did not make “their lives so sweet to them that they (the servants) greatly cared to live,” if we may parody Arthur’s address to his erring queen.  The Club has not made a vacancy in its ranks by requesting the arbitrary member to withdraw.  But his conduct was deemed, on the report of the Committee, worthy of being considered by the Club.  And that is always something.  In an age when clubs are really almost universal, most men have had occasion to wish that their society would sit occasionally on some of the members.  The member who bullies the servants is a not uncommon specimen of the club-bore.  He may be called the bore truculent.  He has been excellently caricatured by Thackeray in the “Book of Snobs.”

There we have the club-bore who makes such a fuss about his chop, and scolds the waiter so terribly.  “Look at it, sir; is it a chop for a gentleman?  Smell it, sir; is it fit to put on a club table?” These, or such as these, are the words of the gallant terror of waiters.  Now it is clearly unjust to make a waiter responsible for the errors, however grave, of a very different character, the cook.  But this mistake the arbitrary gent is continually making.  The cook is safe in his inaccessible stronghold, down below.  He cannot be paraded for punishment on the quarter-deck, where Captain Bragg, of the Gunboat and Torpedo Club, exercises justice.  Therefore the miserable waiter is rebuked in tones of thunder because the Captain’s steak is underdone, or because Nature (or the market gardener) has not made the stalks of asparagus so green and succulent as their charming tops.  People who do not know the scolding club-bore at home are apt to be thankful that they are not favoured with his intimate acquaintance, and are doubly grateful that they are not members of his family.  For if, in a large and quiet room full of strangers, a man can give loose to his temper without provocation, and outroar the thunder, what must this noisy person do at home?  “In an English family,” says a social critic, “the father is the man who shouts.”  How the club-bore must shout when he is in his own castle, surrounded only by his trembling kindred and anxious retainers!  In his castle there is no one to resist or criticise him—­unless indeed his wife happen to be a lady, like Clytemnestra, of masculine resolution.  In that case the arbitrary gent may be a father of a family who is not allowed to shout at home, but is obliged to give nature free play by shouting abroad.