The ancient Greeks were well accustomed to club life, for each of their little cities was only a large club.  They had, therefore, to deal with the problem of bores.  Some of them, consequently, had the institution of annually devoting to the infernal gods the most unpopular citizens.  These persons were called catharmata, which may be freely translated “scapegoats.”  Could not clubs annually devote one or more scapebores to the infernal gods?  They might ballot for them, of course, on some merciful and lenient principle.  One white ball in ten or twenty-black ones might enable the bore to keep his membership for the next year.  The warning, if he only escaped this species of ostracism very narrowly, might do him a great deal of moral good.  Of course the process would be unpleasant, but it is seldom agreeable to be done good to.  Occasionally even the most good-natured members would stand apart, not voting, or even would place the black ball in the mystic urn.  Then the scapebore would have his subscription returned to him, and would be obliged to seek in other haunts servants to swear at, and sofas to snore on.  Another suggestion, that members should be balloted for anew every five years, would simply cause clubs to be depopulated.  Pall-Mall and St. James’s would be desolate, mourning their children, and refusing comfort.  The system would act like a proscription.  People would give up their friends that they might purchase aid against their enemies.  Clubs are more endurable as they are, though members do suffer grievously from the garrulity, the coughs, the slumbrous tendencies, and the temper of their fellow-men.

PHIZ.

Mr. Hablot K. Browne, better known as Phiz, was an artist of a departed school to whom we all owe a great deal of amusement.  He was not so versatile nor so original as Cruickshank; he had not the genius, nor the geniality, still less the sense of beauty, of John Leech.  In his later years his work became more and more unequal, till he was sometimes almost as apt to scribble hasty scrawls as Constantin Guys.  M. Guys was an artist selected by M. Baudelaire as the fine flower of modern art, and the true, though hurried, designer of the fugitive modern beauty.  It is recorded that M. Guys was once sent to draw a scene of triumph and certain illuminations in London, probably about the end of the Crimean War.  His sketch did not reach the office of the paper for which he worked in time, and some one went to see what the man of genius was doing.  He was found in bed, but he was equal to the occasion.  Snatching a sheet of paper and a pencil he drew a curve.  “There,” said he, “is the triumphal arch, and here”—­scribbling a number of scratches like eccentric comets—­“here are the fireworks.”  Mr. Browne’s drawings occasionally showed a tendency to approach the rudimentary sort of “pictograph” rather than give what a dramatic critic calls “a solid