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effort, he is of little value at the dinner-table, or indeed anywhere else. I think that there is nothing to be learnt by further consideration of his habits, so we may as well dismiss him at once.

There is a curious little personage of whom mention may fitly be made just now, and without some notice of whom no list of talkers would be complete. This is the phraseologist, an imitative talker who continually introduces conventional phrases into his unmeaning, harmless chatter. This is the individual who calls a horse "a steed," and a letter "an epistle." He talks about "festive boards" and "graphic descriptions," and when he goes to see a picture in the artist's studio will, ten to one, inform the painter that he has made "a great stride" since last year. I am afraid that this variety of the talking tribe is capable of calling a physician "a son of Esculapius ;" and I know for certain that when he tells you a story in which what somebody said to him on a particular occasion has to be repeated, he always says, "He addressed me as

follows."

This little gentleman is extraordinarily polite to ladies. He jumps about like a parched-pea when a member of what he of course calls "the fair sex" enters the room. "Nay," he says, "if there are to be ladies of the party," and straightway he hugs to him, so to speak, every sort of discomfort, revelling in unnecessary and unappreciated self-sacrifice, and seeming to enjoy it. It is unnecessary to add that he calls fire the "devouring element;" and that when any one is drowned, he is spoken of as having found a "watery grave." He says of many things that they "manage this matter better in France," and Lord Macaulay's detestable New Zealander is seldom out of his mouth.

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