ten minutes to determine whether the boy were most like his father or mother, and in what particular he resembled either, for of course everybody differed, and everybody was astonished at the opinion of the others."
How real it is! How many of us have lived through similar half-hours, veiling with decent melancholy the impetuous protest of our souls!
Charles Greville is responsible for the rather unusual statement that a dinner at which all the guests are fools is apt to be as agreeable as a dinner at which all the guests are clever men. The fools, he says, are tolerably sure to be gay, and the clever men are perfectly sure to be heavy. How far the gayety of fools is an engaging trait it might be difficult to decide (there is a text which throws some doubt upon the subject), but Greville appears to have suffered a good deal from the ponderous society of the learned. We are struck in the first place by the very serious topics which made the table-talk of his day. Do people now discuss primogeniture in ancient Rome over their fish and game? It sounds almost as onerous as the Socratic discourses. Then again it was his special
