Now, since you are an unassuming youngster, and anxious to learn, you ask me probably, how you are to bear yourself in this important assembly, what you are to speak about, and how? The chief thing, I answer, is _not to be a bore_. It is so easy _not_ to be a bore if only you give a little thought to it. Nobody wants to be a bore. I cannot imagine any man consciously incurring the execration of his fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness, pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the whole world in every dull detail, regardless of the right of other men to get an occasional word in edgewise--these are the true marks of the genuine bore. He must know that you take no interest in him or his story. Even if you did, his manner of telling it would flatten you, yet he fascinates you with that glassy stare, that self-conscious and self-admiring smirk, and distils his tale into your ears at the very moment when you are burning to talk over old College-days with CHALMERS, or to discuss an article in the _Field_ with SHABRACK. I remember once finding myself, by some freak of mocking destiny, in a house in which _two_ bores had established fortified camps. On the first night, we all became so dazed with intolerable dulness, that our powers of resistance faded away to the vanishing point. Both bores sallied out from their ramparts, laid our little possessions waste, and led, each his tale of captives back with him, gagged, bound, and incapable of struggle. So next day, when the accustomed train Of things grew round our sense again,