dull metals need to be placed in oxygen to show off their brilliant parts.
So is it with the bore: set him in the oxygen of his native admiration,
and he will scintillate like a human St. Catherine wheel, though in your
society he was not even a Chinese cracker. Every man needs his own stage
and his own audience.

'Hath not love
Made for all these their sweet particular air
To shine in, their own beams and names to bear,
Their ways to wander and their wards to keep,
Till story and song and glory and all things sleep.'

Mr. Swinburne asked the question of lovers, but perhaps it is none the
less applicable to the bore or irrelevant person. Yet a third definition
of the latter here suggests itself. To be born for each other is,
obviously, to be lovers. Well, not to be born for each other is to be
bores. In future, let us not speak unkindly of the tame bore, let us
say--'We were not born for each other.'

Relations do not, perhaps, invariably suggest the first line of
'Endymion'; indeed, they are, one fears, but infrequently celebrated in
song. But the same word in the singular, how beautiful it is! Relation! In
that little word is the whole secret of life. To get oneself placed in
perfect harmony of relation with the world around us, to have nothing in
our lives that we wouldn't buy, to possess nothing that is not sensitive
to us, ready to ring a fairy chime of association at our slightest touch:
no irrelevant book, picture, acquaintance, or activity--ah me! you may
well say it is an ideal. Yes, it is what men have meant by El Dorado, The
Promised Land, and all such shy haunts of the Beatific Vision. Probably
the quest of the Philosopher's Stone is not more wild. Yet men still seek