QUIZZING. 23 



crabbed, crusty, old cross-sticks, whose costume and opinions are as 

 venerable as the hills, I may enter upon my voluntary duty with an 

 anxious and encouraging expectation that my advice will be hearkened 

 to with deference, if not with eagerness. 



To become a superlative quizzer requires the unceasing exercise of your 

 faculty of observation, of your memory, your imagination, and judgment ; 

 the first is as necessary as a telescope to an Admiral, or turtle and venison 

 to a Lord Mayor's festival ; the second will be wanted to assist you in 

 recognising your victims ; the third in inventing new weapons and modes 

 of attack, and the fourth in arranging your battery and carrying on the 

 war. Presuming that you have been at the University (I address myself, 

 here, to the ruder half of mankind), it is natural for me to infer that you 

 have succeeded in divesting yourself of that awkward and positively 

 rustic attribute, entitled modesty ; that you seldom look down but to 

 admire your extremities, and that you never change colour but with the 

 juice of the grape, or the influence of a midsummer sun. I, further- 

 more, take it for granted that you have acquired a certain position in 

 the circles of fashion, a station preparatory to one still more enviably 

 distinguished, the ascent to which will be wonderfully aided by a suc- 

 cessful practice of the very act upon which I am about to deliver some 

 hints. 



Well — you thirst and hunger to be considered a quizzer, an unflinch- 

 ing, inveterate, and immoveable quizzer — one who shall throw a whole 

 dinner-party into a fever, and fill with alarms indescribable the ball-room 

 or card-table ; bend an ear then and listen, for as Nature, lavish though 

 she be, has not given unto all an intuitive perception of what is fit and 

 becoming in the character, the whisperings of experience cannot be 

 thrown away. 



In the first place devote yourself duly and unremittingly to the 

 practice of staring .- commence by degrees, lengthening the duration of 

 the stare until from the furtive and momentary glance, it swells into the 

 calm, cold, open-eyed, and deliberate gaze of some five minutes by your 

 repeater. You may exercise before the glass, or with a brother student : 

 the latter mode is to be preferred, as the advantage is reciprocal, and you 

 become mutually hardened. All agitation of the eye-brow, lid, or lash, 

 and all tendency to aqueous effusion will, in time, utterly subside ; but, 

 of course, until you can, despotically, command the organ of sight, 

 perfection is not attained. If you possess eyes large, dark and lustrous, 

 black or hazel, you are, very certainly, felicitous in the admirable 

 opportunity for display afforded by your quizzing operations ; and these 

 eyes, be it known, are wondrously adapted to excel in the profes- 

 sion. The one-minute stare of a deep hazel eye is an absolute 

 dead-shot, and effects on the spot, all that the piercing grey or blue 

 orb, though keen as the falcon's, can accomplish in five times the 

 period. Still much may be — indeed is — wrought by a well- sustained 

 stare from a small, round, light, or twinkling eye, and, with due 

 discipline, the ferret's-eye, owl's-eye, cat's-eye, and mouse-eye may be 

 rendered killingly impressive. Blue eyes — those which the song-makers 

 designate as ** celestial" or '* sapphire" blue, are, however, difficult of 

 management ; and it is a question whether or not it is possible to dis- 

 pense with a quizzing-glass of the most approved fashion and brilliant 

 design. * * » 



Having accomplished yourself in the first step, and found staring 

 ** made easy,'^ you may proceed to the next, and after trying the effect 

 of a laugh of sardonic character, run through a scale of sneers from the 

 slight and almost imperceptible, to the marked, withering, and con- 



