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CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR 
 
 BARBER COX 
 
Frontispiece. 
 
 AV. M. THACKERAY 
 
 AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN 
 
 FtoWj the Bust hy J. Devile in the National Portrait Gallery. 
 
CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR 
 BARBER COX 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 
 
 With Illustrations by the Author and George Cruikshank 
 
 3Lonldjn 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 

 . / 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 (. 
 
 
NOTE. 
 
 In preceding editions of Thackeray’s Works, the Critical Papers 
 in Art are scattered throughout the numerous volumes. They are 
 now brought together and arranged in chronological order. Of 
 the sixteen articles, three are reprinted for the first time and 
 eight are for the first time included in an edition of Thackeray’s 
 Works. 
 
 When Thackeray lost his fortune he looked to Art and not to 
 Literature to provide him with the means of living, and, as late 
 as 1837, Edinburgh Keviewer Hayward well remembered seeing 
 him, day after day, engaged in copying pictures in the Louvre, in 
 order to qualify himself for his profession. Indeed, for years he 
 devoted himself to the study of Art, spending his days copying 
 pictures in the gallery or in the studios of Brine or Gros, and his 
 evening in the company of young artists. It was thus that he 
 laid the foundation of his knowledge of pictures and drawings. 
 
 ‘ Thackeray was one of the best of art-critics. He had the 
 true instinct and relish, and the nicety and directness, necessary 
 for just as well as high criticism : the white light of his intellect 
 found its way into this as into every region of his work. . . . 
 It would not be easy to imagine better criticisms of art than those 
 from Mr. Thackeray’s hand. His art ‘‘has its seat in reason,” 
 and he is more objective, cool and critical than Mr. Ruskin.’ So 
 wrote Dr. John Brown ; and his words have been echoed by many 
 good judges. 
 
 On matters artistic again and again Thackeray laid down the 
 law with no uncertain voice. His courage was prodigious. As 
 it was said of Disraeli, even at the beginning of his career, that 
 he attacked men bigger than himself, so it may be noticed that 
 Thackeray made it a rule to tilt against men of recognised position 
 of whose artistic productions he disapproved, and let the smaller 
 fry escape easily enough. 
 
 V 
 
VI 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Thackeray’s art-criticism was not pleasant reading for the 
 painters of the day. They were not accustomed to such out- 
 spoken articles, and their annoyance knew no bounds. ‘If you 
 want to know something of the Exhibition, however, read Fraser^ s 
 Magazine for this month [June, 1845] ; there Thackeray has a 
 paper \Fictnre Gossip] on the matter, full of fun,’ Edward Fitz- 
 Gerald wrote to Frederick Tennyson. ‘ I met Stone in the street 
 the other day ; he took me by the button, and told me in perfect 
 sincerity and with increasing warmth how, though he loved old 
 Thackeray, yet these yearly out-speakings of his sorely tried him ; 
 not on account of himself (Stone), but on account of some of his 
 friends, Charles Landseer, Maclise, etc. Stone worked himself 
 up to such a pitch under the pressure of forced calmness, that he 
 at last said Thackeray would get himself horsewhipped one day 
 by one of these infuriated Apelleses. At this I, who had partly 
 agreed with Stone that ridicule, though true, need not always be 
 spoken, began to laugh, and told him two could play at that game. 
 These painters cling together and bolster each other up to such a 
 degree that they have really persuaded themselves that any one 
 who ventures to laugh at one of their drawings, exhibited for the 
 express purpose of criticism, insults the whole corps. Thackeray 
 laughs at all this, and goes on in his own way ; writing hard for 
 half-a-day. Eeviews and newspapers all the morning ; dining, 
 drinking, and talking of a night ; managing to preserve a fresh 
 colour and perpetual flow of spirits under a wear and tear of 
 thinking and feeding, that would have knocked up all the other 
 men I know two years ago, at least.’ 
 
 The following is a complete list of Thackeray’s Critical Papers 
 in Art : — ■ 
 
 (i.) Strictures on Pictures {Fraser’s Magazine^ June, 1838), 
 and 
 
 (ii.) A Second Lecture on the Fine Arts {Fraser’s Magazine^ 
 June, 1839), reprinted in Miscellanies (Boston, vol. v., 1870) 
 and in a supplementary volume of the Library edition of 
 Thackeray’s Works (vol. xxiii. : Miscellaneous Essays^ etc,^ 1885). 
 
 (iii.) On the French School of Painting {Fraser’s Magazine^ 
 December, 1839), reprinted in The Paris Sketch Book (1840) and 
 in the Library edition of Thackeray’s Works (vol. xii. : The Paris 
 Sketch Book^ etc.^ 1868). See vol. vii. of this edition : The Paris 
 Sketch Book^ etc. 
 
 This article also appeared in The Corsair (New York, 
 September 28, 1839; January 18, 1840) under the title of 
 Letters from London^ Paris^ Pekin^ Petershurgh^ etc. By the 
 Author of ‘ The Yellowplush Correspondence^’ the ‘ Memoirs of 
 
NOTE 
 
 Vll 
 
 Major Gahaganj etc, — A Ramble in the Picture Galleries, The 
 first instalment was signed ‘ T. T/ ; the second ‘ M. A. T.’ It 
 was reprinted from The Corsair in The Student^ s Quarter (1870). 
 
 (iv.) A review of The Humourist, A Collection of Entertain- 
 ing Tales, Anecdotes, Epigrams, Bon-mots, etc., and other books, 
 illustrated by George Cruikshank {The Westminster Review, June, 
 1840), reprinted in book-form under the title of 
 
 An I Essay on the Genius | of | George Cruikshank. | With 
 numerous Illustrations of his works. | (From The Westminster 
 Review, No. Ixvi.) | With additional Etchings. | London : | Henry 
 Hooper, 13 Pall Mall East. | mdcccxl. 
 
 The Essay was reprinted, without the Illustrations, in 
 Miscellanies (Boston, vol. v., 1870) and in the Library edition of 
 Thackeray’s Works (vol. xxii. : Catherine, etc., 1869); and, with 
 the illustrations that appeared in The Westminster Revieiv, in 
 the cheaper Illustrated edition of Thackeray’s Works (vol. xviii. : 
 The Irish Sketch Book and Critical Reviews, 1879). It has 
 been reprinted in this volume from the issue in book-form, with 
 all the additional illustrations. 
 
 (v.) A Pictorial Rhapsody {FrasePs Magazine, June, 1840), 
 and 
 
 (vi.) A Pictorial Rhapsody : Concluded {FrasePs Magazine, 
 July, 1840), reprinted in Miscellanies (Boston, vol. v., 1870), 
 and in a supplementary volume of the Library edition of 
 Thackeray’s Works (vol. xxiii. : Miscellaneous Essays, etc., 1885). 
 
 (vii.) Caricatures and Lithography in Paris {The Paris 
 Sketch Book, 1840), reprinted in the Library edition of Thackeray’s 
 Works (vol. xii. : The Paris Sketch Book, etc., 1868). See vol. 
 vii. of this edition : The Paris Sketch Book, etc. 
 
 (viii.) On Men and Pictures. A propos of a Walk in the 
 Louvre {FrasePs Magazine, July, 1841), reprinted in Early and 
 Late Papers (Boston, 1867), in Miscellanies (Boston, vol. v., 
 1870), and in a supplementary volume of the Library edition of 
 Thackeray’s Works (vol. xxiii. : Miscellaneous Essays, etc., 1885). 
 
 (ix.) An Exhibition Gossip {AinswortKs Magazine, June, 
 1842), now reprinted for the first time. 
 
 (x.) Letters on the Fine Arts {The Pictorial Times). 
 
 No. 1. The Art Unions (March 18, 1843). 
 
 No. 2. The Objections against Art Unions (April 1, 8, 
 1843). 
 
 No. 3. The Royal Academy (May 13, 1843). 
 
 No. 4. The Royal Academy. Second Notice. (May 
 27, 1843.) 
 
CEITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 viii 
 
 Reprinted in Sultan Stor'k^ etc. (1887), and in Thackeray’s 
 Stray Papers^ collected and edited by Mr. Lewis Alelville (1901). 
 It is now included for the first time in an edition of Thackeray’s 
 Works. 
 
 (xi.) The Water-Colour Exhibition {The Pictorial Times^ 
 May 6, 1843), reprinted in Thackeray’s Sti^ay Papers (1901), 
 and now included for the first time in an edition of Thackeray’s 
 Works. 
 
 (xii.) May Gambols ; or., Titmarsh in the Picture Galleries 
 (FrasePs Magazine^ June, 1844), reprinted in Miscellanies (Boston, 
 vol. V., 1870), and in a supplementary volume of the Library 
 edition of Thackeray’s works (vol. xxiii. : Miscellaneous Essays^ 
 etc., 1885). Now first reprinted in its entirety. 
 
 (xiii.) Picture Gossip {FrasePs Magazine, June, 1845), re- 
 printed in Early and Late Papers (Boston, 1867), in Miscellanies 
 (Boston, vol. V., 1870), and in a supplementary volume of the 
 Library edition of Thackeray’s Works (vol. xxiii. : Miscellaneous 
 Essays, etc., 1885). 
 
 (xiv.) Sketches | after | English Landscape Painters. | By L. 
 Marvy. | With Short Notices by W. M. Thackeray. | London. | 
 David Bogue, 86 Fleet Street | [1850]. 
 
 This volume was subsequently reissued, undated [1851], with 
 a new title-page bearing the name of Gritfen and Co. The 
 notices by Thackeray, accompanied by reproductions of the 
 engravings by L. Marvy, are now reprinted for the first time. 
 
 (xv.) A review of Pictures of Life and Character. By John 
 Leech {The Quarterly Revieiv, December, 1854), reprinted in Early 
 and Late Papers (Boston, 1867), in Miscellanies (Boston, vol. iv., 
 1869), and in the Library edition of Thackeray’s Works (vol. 
 xxii. : Catherine . . . and Critical Revieivs, 1869). 
 
 This paper was the cause of a misunderstanding with the 
 members of the Punch staff, because in it he wrote : ‘ There is 
 no blinking the fact that in Mr. PuncEs cabinet John Leech is 
 the right-hand man. Fancy a number of Punch without Leech’s 
 pictures ! What would you give for it ? The learned gentlemen 
 Avho write the work must feel that without him it were as well 
 left alone.’ Anthony Trollope has related that for a week there 
 existed at the Punch office a grudge against Thackeray in refer- 
 ence to the awkward question : ‘ What would you give for your 
 Punch without John Leech ?’ Then he asked the confraternity to 
 dinner — more Thacherayano — and the confraternity came. 
 
 ‘ Of all the slips of iny fatal pen,’ Thackeray wrote to 
 ‘ Professor ’ Percival Leigh, one of the oldest of PuncEs con- 
 tributors and the author of The Comic Latin Grammar, ‘ there’s 
 
NOTE 
 
 IX 
 
 none I regret more than the unlucky half-line which has given 
 pain to such a kind and valued friend as you have been, and I 
 trust will be still to me. I ought never to have said, “ Punch 
 might as well be left unwritten but for Leech. It was more 
 than my meaning, which is certainly that the drawing is one 
 hundred times more popular than the writing ; but I had no 
 business to write any such thing, and forgot it so much that I 
 was quite surprised when I first heard I had been accused of 
 sneering at Punch. I knew when I came back from Paris, and 
 read the line in The Quarterly Review^ which I had forgotten as 
 utterly as many another speech which I have made and didn’t 
 ought. Jerrold has had his fire into me, and, do you know, I 
 feel rather comforted.’ 
 
 (xvi.) CruikshanPs Gallery {The Times., May 15, 1863), a 
 notice of an exhibition of Oruikshank’s works. It is said that 
 the exhibition was little better than a failure until (anxious to 
 render what help he could to an old friend fallen upon evil days) 
 
 ‘ kind Thackeray came with his grave face, and looked through 
 the little gallery, and went off to write one of his charming 
 essays.’ This paper is now for the first time reprinted. 
 
 Thackeray wrote about Kubens and Hans Hemmelinck in A 
 Roundabout Journey., Notes of a WeePs Holiday (The Cornhill 
 Magazine, November, 1860). 
 
 He also wrote of art as it was understood by editors and 
 contributors to Keepsakes and Books of Beauty in A Word on 
 the Annuals (Fraseds Alagazine, December, 1837), The Annuals 
 (The Times, November 2, 1837), and Our Annual Execution 
 (Fraseds Magazine, January, 1839). These papers are printed 
 in vol. xii. of this edition : Critical Papers in Literature. Our 
 Annuals are there reprinted for the first time : A Word on the 
 Annuals and Our Annual Execution for the first time in England. 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR, OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 appeared with twelve Illustrations by George Criiikshank, in 
 The j Comic | Almanack, | For 1839 : | An Ephemeris in Jest 
 and Earnest, | Containing | ‘ All things fitting for such a Work.’ | 
 By Rigduni Funnidos, Gent. | Adorned with a dozen of ^ Right 
 Merry ’ Cuts, pertaining to the Months, and | an Hieroglyphic, | 
 by George Criiikshank. ] London : | Imprinted for Charles Tilt, 
 Bibliopolist, | in Fleet Street. 
 
 Stuhhds Calendar was reprinted, without the Illustrations, in 
 Comic Tales and Sketches (1841); and, under the title of The 
 
X 
 
 NOTE 
 
 Fatal Boots, in Miscellanies (vol. i. : Ballads . . . The Fatal 
 Boots, 1856) ; in the Library edition of Thackeray's Works (vol. 
 xxi. : Denis Duval . . . and Other Stories, 1869); and also in 
 Miscellanies (Boston, vol. hi., 1869). It was reprinted, with the 
 Illustrations, in the Cheaper Illustrated edition of Thackeray's 
 Works (vol. xix. : The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon . . . and The 
 Fatal Boots, 1879). 
 
 Stubbs’s Calendar has been set up in this volume from Comic 
 Tales and Sketches, 
 
 BARBER COX AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 appeared with twelve Illustrations by George Cruikshank, in 
 The I Comic | Almanack, | For 1840: | An Ephemeris in Jest 
 and Earnest, | Containing | ‘All things fitting for such a Work.' | 
 By Rigdum Funnidos, Gent. | Adorned with a dozen of ‘Right 
 Merry ' Cuts, pertaining to the Months, and | an Hieroglyphic, | 
 by George Cruikshank. | London : | Imprinted for Charles Tilt, 
 Bibliopolist, | in Fleet Street. 
 
 Barber Cox and the Cutting of His Comb was reprinted, 
 without the Illustrations, under the title of Cox’s Diary, in 
 Miscellanies (vol. i. : Ballads . . . Cox’s Diary, 1855) ; in the 
 Library edition of Thackeray's Works (vol. xvi. : Burlesques 
 . . . Cox’s Diary, 1869) ; and also in Miscellanies (Boston, 
 vol. i., 1869). It was reprinted, with the Illustrations, in the 
 Cheaper Illustrated edition of Thackeray's Works (vol. xvii. : The 
 Memoirs of Mr, Charles J, Yellowplush , , , Cox’s Diary, 1879). 
 
 L. M. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CEITICAL PAPEES IN AET. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Strictures on Pictures 3 
 
 A Second Lecture on the Fine Arts . . . . . .15 
 
 An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank .... 28 
 
 A Pictorial Rhapsody ......... 105 
 
 A Pictorial Rhapsody : Concluded 127 
 
 On Men and Pictures : A propos of a Walk in the Louvre . . 152 
 
 t An Exhibition Gossip ......... 175 
 
 Letters on the Fine Arts — 
 
 *No. 1. The Art Unions ....... 184 
 
 * No. 2. The Objections against Art Unions .... 189 
 
 * No. 3. The Royal Academy (1843) ..... 196 
 
 * No. 4. The Royal Academy. (Second Notice) . , . 200 
 
 * The Water-Colour Exhibition ....... 204 
 
 May Gambols ; or, Titmarsh in the Picture Galleries . . . 207 
 
 Picture Gossip 234 
 
 * Now first included in an edition of Thackeray’s Works, 
 t Now first reprinted. 
 
 XI 
 
xii CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 PAGE 
 
 t Sketches after English Landscape Painters. By L. Marvy. With 
 Short Notices by W. M. Thackeray — 
 
 Preface . . ........ 253 
 
 Sir Augustus Wall Callcott ....... 254 
 
 Turner . 255 
 
 Holland 256 
 
 Dauby ...... .... . 257 
 
 Creswick . ......... 258 
 
 Collins 259 
 
 Redgrave . . . - 260 
 
 Lee 261 
 
 Cattermole 262 
 
 W. J. Muller 263 
 
 Harding ........... 264 
 
 Nasmyth ........... 265 
 
 Richard Wilson ......... 266 
 
 E. W. Cooke . 267 
 
 John Constable ... .... . 268 
 
 P. De Wint .......... 269 
 
 David Cox .......... 270 
 
 Gainsborough . . . . . . . . .271 
 
 Roberts 272 
 
 Stanfield . . . . 274 
 
 Pictures of Life and Character. By John Leech , . . .275 
 
 t Cruikshank’s Gallery . 
 
 286 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 xiii 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAK; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Jantjahy — T he Birth of the Year . . . , . . . 293 
 
 Februaky — C utting Weather ....... 297 
 
 March — S howery .......... 301 
 
 April — F ooling .... 305 
 
 May — R estoration Day . . . . . . . . .311 
 
 June — M arrowbones and Cleavers ...... 315 
 
 July — S ummary Proceedings . . . . . . .319 
 
 August — D ogs have their Days ....... 323 
 
 September — P lucking a Goose . 327 
 
 October — M ars and Venus in Opposition ..... 333 
 
 November — A General Post Delivery 337 
 
 December — ‘ The Winter of our Discontent ’ .... 341 
 
 BAEBEE COX, AND THE CUTTING OF 
 HIS COMB. 
 
 January — T he Announcement ....... 349 
 
 February — F irst Rout . .352 
 
 March — A Day with the Surrey Hounds ..... 357 
 
 April — T he Finishing Touch . . . . . .361 
 
 May — A New Drop Scene at the Opera ...... 366 
 
 June — S triking a Balance . . . . . . . .370 
 
 July — D own at Beulah . . . . . . . .375 
 
XIV 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 PAGE 
 
 August — A Tournament ...... 
 
 . 379 
 
 September— Over-boarded and Under-lodged 
 
 . 384 
 
 October — Notice to Quit 
 
 . 389 
 
 November — Law Life Assurance ..... 
 
 . 393 
 
 December — Christmas Bustle ... 
 
 . 399 
 
CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 1 
 
 B 
 
STEICTUEES ON PICTUEES. 
 
 A Letter from Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esq., to 
 Monsieur Anatole Victor Isidor Hyacinthe Achille 
 Hercule De Bricabrac, Peintre D’Histoire, Eue 
 Mouffetard, k Paris. 
 
 Lord's Hotels New Street, Covent Garden, 
 Tuesday, May 15. 
 
 I PROPOSE to be both learned and pleasant in my remarks upon 
 the exhibitions here ; for I know, my dear Bricabrac, that it is 
 your intention to translate this letter into French, for the benefit 
 of some of your countrymen, who are anxious about the progress 
 of the fine arts — when I say some, I mean all, for, thanks to your 
 government patronage, your magnificent public galleries, and, 
 above all, your delicious sky and sunshine, there is not a scavenger 
 in your nation who has not a feeling for the beauty of Nature, 
 which is, my dear Anatole, neither more nor less than Art. 
 
 You know nothing about art in this country — almost as little 
 as we know of French art. One Gustave Planche, who makes 
 visits to London, and writes accounts of pictures in your reviews, 
 is, believe me, an impostor. I do not mean a private impostor, 
 for I know not whether Planche is a real or assumed name, but 
 simply a quack on matters of art. Depend on it, my dear young 
 friend, that there is nobody like Titmarsh : you will learn more 
 about the arts in England from this letter, than from anything in 
 or out of print. 
 
 Well then, every year, at the commencement of this blessed 
 month of May, wide open the doors of three picture galleries, in 
 which figure all the works of genius which our brother artists 
 have produced during the whole year. I wish you could see my 
 historical picture of ‘ Heliogabalus in the ruins of Carthage,^ or 
 the full-length of ‘ Sir Samuel Hicks and his Lady,’ — sitting in a 
 garden light. Lady H. reading The Book of Beauty, Sir Samuel 
 
 ^ \^Frasers Magazine , June 1838.] 
 
 3 
 
4 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 catching a butterfly, which is settling on a flower-pot. This, 
 however, is all egotism. I am not going to speak of my works, 
 which are pretty well known in Paris already, as I flatter myself, 
 but of other artists — some of them men of merit — as well as myself 
 
 Let us commence, then, with the commencement — the Royal 
 Academy. That is held in one wing of a little building like a 
 gin-shop, which is near St. Martinis Church. In the other wing 
 is our National Gallery. As for the building, you must not take 
 that as a specimen of our skill in the fine arts ; come down the 
 Seven Dials, and I will show you many modern structures, of 
 which the architect deserves far higher credit. 
 
 But, bad as the place is — a pigmy abortion, in lieu of a noble 
 monument to the greatest school of painting in the greatest 
 country of the modern world (you may be angry, but I’m right in 
 both cases)— bad as the outside is, the interior, it must be 
 confessed, is marvellously pretty, and convenient for the reception 
 and exhibition of the pictures it will hold. Since the old pictures 
 have got their new gallery, and their new scouring, one hardly 
 knows them. 0, Ferdinand, Ferdinand, that is a treat, that 
 National Gallery, and no mistake ! I shall write to you fourteen 
 or fifteen long letters about it some day or other. The apartment 
 devoted to the Academy exhibition is equally commodious : a 
 small room for miniatures and aquarelles, another for architectural 
 drawings, and three saloons for pictures — all very small, but well 
 lighted and neat ; no interminable passage, like your five hundred 
 yards at the Louvre, with a slippery floor, and tiresome straggling 
 cross-lights. Let us buy a catalogue, and walk straight into the 
 gallery, however ; — we have been a long time talking, ‘ de omnibus 
 rebns^^ at the door. 
 
 Look, my dear Isidor, at the first names in the Catalogue, and 
 thank your stars for being in such good company. Bless us and 
 save us, what a power of knights is here 1 
 
 Sir William Beechey. 
 
 Sir Martin Shee. 
 
 Sir David Wilkie. 
 
 Sir Augustus Callcott. 
 
 Sir W. J. Newton. 
 
 Sir Geoffrey Wyattville. 
 
 Sir Francis Chantrey. 
 
 Sir Richard Westmacott. 
 
 Sir Michael Angelo Titmarsh — 
 
 not yet, that is ; but I shall be, in course, when our little liege 
 
STRICTURES ON PICTURES 
 
 5 
 
 lady — Heaven bless her ! — has seen my portrait of Sir Sam and 
 Lady Hicks. 
 
 If all these gentlemen in the list of Academicians and Associates 
 are to have titles of some sort or other, I should propose — 
 
 1. Baron Briggs. (At the very least, he is out and out the 
 best portrait-painter of the set.) 
 
 2. Daniel, Prince Maclise. (His Royal Highness’s pictures 
 place him very near to the throne indeed.) 
 
 3. Edwin, Earl of Landseer. 
 
 4. The Lord Charles Landseer. 
 
 5. The Duke of Etty. 
 
 6. Archbishop Eastlake. 
 
 7. His Majesty KING MULREADY. 
 
 King Mulready, I repeat, in double capitals ; for, if this man 
 has not the crowning picture of the exhibition, I am no better 
 than a Dutchman. His picture represents the ‘ Seven Ages,’ as 
 described by a poet whom you have heard of — one Shakespeare, a 
 Warwickshire man : and there they are, all together ; the portly 
 justice, and the quarrelsome soldier ; the lover leaning apart, and 
 whispering sweet things in his pretty mistress’s ear ; the baby 
 hanging on her gentle mother’s bosom ; the school-boy, rosy and 
 lazy ; the old man, crabbed and stingy ; and the old, old man of 
 all, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans ears, sans everything — but why 
 describe them? You will find the thing better done in Shake- 
 speare, or possibly translated by some of your Frenchmen. I can’t 
 say much about the drawing of this picture, for here and there are 
 some queer-looking limbs ; but — oh, Anatole ! — the intention is 
 godlike. Not one of those figures but has a grace and a soul of 
 his own : no conventional copies of the stony antique ; no distorted 
 caricatures, like those of your ^ classiques,^ David, Girodet, and Cp. 
 (the impostors !) — but such expressions as a great poet would 
 draw, who thinks profoundly and truly, and never forgets (he 
 could not if he would) grace and beauty withal. The colour and 
 manner of this noble picture are neither of the Venetian school, 
 nor the Florentine, nor the English, but of the Mulready school. 
 Ah ! my dear Floridor ! I wish that you and I, ere we die, may 
 have erected such a beautiful monument to hallow and perpetuate 
 our names. Our children, my boy, Sebastian Piombo Titmarsh, 
 will see this picture in his old age, hanging by the side of the 
 Raffaelles in our National Gallery. I sometimes fancy, in the 
 presence of such works of genius as this, that my picture of Sir 
 Sam and Lady Hicks is but a magnificent error after all, and that 
 it will die away, and be forgotten. 
 
6 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 To this, then, of the whole gallery, I accord the palm, and 
 cannot refrain from making a little sketch, illustrative of my 
 feelings. 
 
 TITMAKSH PLACING THE LAUEEL-WREATH ON THE BROWS OF MULEEADY. 
 
 I have done everything, you see, very accurately, except Mr. 
 Miilready’s face ; for, to say truth, I never saw that gentleman, 
 and have no idea of his personal appearance. 
 
 Near to ^ All the workPs a stage’ is a charming picture, by 
 Archbishop Eastlake ; so denominated by me, because the rank 
 is very respectable, and because there is a certain purity and 
 religious feeling in all Mr. Eastlake does, which eminently entitles 
 him to the honours of the prelacy. In this picture, Gaston de 
 Foix (he whom Titian painted, his mistress buckling on his 
 armour) is parting from his mistress. A fair, peaceful garden 
 is round about them ; and here his lady sits and clings to him, 
 as though she would cling for ever. But, look ! yonder stands 
 the page, and the horse pawing ; and, beyond the wall which 
 binds the quiet garden and flowers, you see the spears and 
 pennons of knights, the banners of King Louis and De Foix, 
 
 ^ the thunderbolt of Italy.’ Long shining rows of steel-clad men 
 are marching stately by ; and . with them must ride Count 
 Gaston — to conquer and die at Ravenna. You can read his 
 history, my dear friend, in Lacretelle, or Brantome ; only, 
 perhaps, not so Avell expressed as it has just been by me. 
 
 Yonder is Sir David Wilkie’s grand picture — ‘Queen Victoria 
 holding her First Council.’ A marvellous painting, in which 
 one admires the exquisite richness of the colour, the breadth of 
 light and shadow, the graceful dignity and beauty of the principal 
 figure, and the extraordinary skill with which all tlie figures 
 have been grouped, so as to produce a grand and simple effect. 
 What can one say more, but admire the artist who has made, 
 
STRICTURES ON PICTURES 
 
 7 
 
 out of such unpoetical materials as a table of red cloth, and 
 fifty unoccupied middle-aged gentlemen, a beautiful and interest- 
 ing picture ? Sir David has a charming portrait, too, of Mrs. 
 Maberly, in dark crimson velvet, and delicate white hat and 
 feathers ; a marvel of colour, though somewhat askew in the 
 drawing. 
 
 The Earl of Landseer’s best picture, to my thinking, is that 
 which represents her majesty’s favourite dogs and parrot. He 
 has, in painting, an absolute mastery over 
 
 K'uveo'cnv 
 
 oi(j)voL(ji re iracn ; 
 
 that is, he can paint all manner of birds and beasts as nobody 
 else can. To tell you a secret, I do not think he understands 
 how to paint the great beast, man, quite so well ; or, at least, to 
 do what is the highest quality of an artist, to place a soul under 
 the ribs as he draws them. They are, if you like, the most 
 dexterous pictures that ever were painted, but not great pictures. 
 I would much rather look at yonder rough Leslie than at all 
 the wonderful painting of parrots or greyhounds, though done to 
 a hair or a feather. 
 
 Leslie is the only man in this country who translates 
 Shakespeare into form and colour. Old Shallow and Sir Hugh, 
 Slender and his man Simple, pretty Anne Page and the Merry 
 Wives of Windsor, are here joking with the fat knight ; who, 
 with a monstrous gravity and profound brazen humour, is 
 narrating some tale of his feats with the wild Prince and Poins. 
 Master Brooke is offering a tankard to Master Slender, who 
 will not drink, forsooth. 
 
 This picture is executed with the utmost simplicity, and 
 almost rudeness ; but is charming, from its great truth of effect 
 and expression. Wilkie’s pictures (in his latter style) seem to 
 begin where Leslie’s end ; the former’s men and women look as 
 if the bodies had been tahen out of ihem^ and only the surface 
 left. Lovely as the queen’s figure is, for instance, it looks like 
 a spirit, and not a woman ; one may almost see through her 
 into the waistcoat of Lord Lansdowne, and so on through the 
 rest of the transparent heroes and statesmen of the company. 
 
 Opposite the queen is another charming performance of Sir 
 David — a bride dressing, amidst a rout of bridesmaids and relations. 
 Some are crying, some are smiling, some are pinning her gown \ 
 a back door is open, and a golden sun shines into a room which 
 contains a venerable-looking bed and tester, probably that in 
 which the dear girl is to — but parlous d'autres choses. The 
 
8 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 colour of this picture is delicious, and the effect faultless : Sir 
 David does everything for a picture nowadays but the drawing. 
 Who knows ? Perhaps it is as well left out. 
 
 Look yonder, down to the ground, and admire a most beautiful 
 fantastic Ariel. 
 
 On the bat’s hack do 1 fly, 
 
 After sunset merrily. 
 
 Merry Ariel lies at his ease, and whips with gorgeous peacock’s 
 feather his courser, ffapping lazy through the golden evening sky. 
 This exquisite little picture is the work of Mr. Severn, an 
 artist who has educated his taste and his hand in the early 
 Roman school. He has not the dash and dexterity of the latter 
 which belongs to some of our painters, but he possesses that 
 solemn earnestness and simplicity of mind and purpose which 
 makes a religion of art, and seems to be accorded only to a few 
 in our profession. I have heard a pious pupil of Mr. Ingres 
 (the head of your academy at Rome) aver stoutly, that, in 
 matters of art, Titian was anti - Christ, and Rubens, Martin 
 Luther. They came with their brilliant colours and dashing 
 
 worldly notions, upsetting that beautiful system of faith in 
 which art had lived hitherto. Portraits of saints and martyrs, 
 with pure eyes turned heavenward, and (as all true sanctity 
 will) making those pure who came within their reach, now gave 
 way to wicked likenesses of men of blood, or dangerous, devilish 
 sensual portraits of tempting women. Before Titian, a picture 
 was the labour of years. Why did this reformer ever come 
 among us, and show how it might be done in a day ? He drove 
 the good angels away from painters’ easels, and called down a 
 host of voluptuous spirits instead, who ever since have held the 
 mastery there. 
 
 Only a few artists of our country (none in yours, where the 
 so-called Catholic school is a mere theatrical folly), and some 
 among the Germans, have kept to the true faith, and eschewed 
 the temptations of Titian and his like. Mr. Eastlake is one of 
 these. Who does not recollect his portrait of Miss Bury? Not 
 a simple woman — the lovely daughter of the authoress of Love^ 
 Flirtation^ and other remarkable works, — but a glorified saint. 
 Who does not remember his Saint Sebastian ; his body bare, 
 his eyes cast melancholy down ; his limbs, as yet untouched by 
 the arrows of his persecutors, tied to the fatal tree ? Those two 
 pictures of Mr. Eastlake would merit to hang in a gallery where 
 there were only Raffaelles besides. Mr. Severn is another of the 
 school. I don’t know what hidden and indefinable charm there 
 
STRICTURES ON PICTURES 
 
 9 
 
 is in his simple pictures ; but I never can look at them without 
 a certain emotion of awe — with that thrill of the heart with 
 which one hears country children sing the Old Hundredth, for 
 instance. The singers are rude, perhaps, and the voices shrill ; 
 but the melody is still pure and godlike. Some such majestic 
 and pious harmony is there in these pictures of Mr. Severn. 
 Mr. Mulready's mind has lately gained this same kind of inspira- 
 tion. I know no one else who possesses it, except, perhaps, 
 myself. Without flattery, I may say, that my picture of 
 ‘ Heliogabalus at Carthage ^ is not in the popular taste, and has 
 about it some faint odour of celestial incense. 
 
 Do not, my dear Anatole, consider me too great an ass for 
 persisting upon this point, and exemplifying Mr. Severn’s picture 
 of the ‘ Crusaders catching a first view of J erusalem ’ as an 
 instance. Godfrey and Tancred, Raymond and Ademar, Beamond 
 and Rinaldo, with Peter and the Christian host, behold at 
 length the day dawning. 
 
 E quando il sol gli aridi campi fiede 
 Con raggi assai ferventi, e in alto sorge^ 
 
 Ecco apparir Gerusalem si mde^ 
 
 Ecco additar Gerusalem si scorge, 
 
 Ecco da mille rod unitamente 
 Gerusalemme salutar si sente ! 
 
 Well, Godfrey and Tancred, Peter, and the rest, look like little 
 wooden dolls ; and as for the horses belonging to the crusading 
 cavalry, I have seen better in gingerbread. But, what then '? 
 There is a higher ingredient in beauty than mere form ; a skilful 
 hand is only the second artistical quality, worthless, my Anatole, 
 without fhe first, which is a great heart. This picture is beautiful, 
 in spite of its defects, as many women are. Mrs. Titmarsh is 
 beautiful, though she weighs nineteen stone. 
 
 Being on the subject of religious pictures, what shall I say of 
 Mr. Ward’s ? Anything so mysteriously hideous was never seen 
 before now ; they are worse than all the horrors in your Spanish 
 Gallery at Paris. As Eastlake’s are of the Catholic, these may 
 be called of the Muggletonian school of art ; monstrous, livid, and 
 dreadful, as the dreams of a man in the scarlet fever. I would 
 much sooner buy a bottled baby with two heads as a pleasing 
 ornament for my cabinet ; and should be afraid to sit alone in a 
 room with ‘ignorance, envy, and jealousy filling the throat, and 
 widening the mouth of calumny endeavouring to bear down 
 truth ! ’ 
 
 Mr. Maclise’s picture of ‘ Christmas ’ you will find excellently 
 
10 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 described in the May Number of a periodical of much celebrity 
 among us, called Fraser'' s Magazine. Since the circulation of 
 that miscellany is almost as extensive in Paris as in London, it is 
 needless in this letter to go over beaten ground, and speak at 
 length of the plot of this remarkable picture. There are five 
 hundred merry figures painted on this canvas, gobbling, singing, 
 kissing, carousing. A line of jolly serving-men troop down the 
 hall stairs, and bear the boar’s head in procession up to the dais, 
 where sits the good old English gentleman, and his guests and 
 family ; a set of mummers and vassals are crowded round a table 
 gorging beef and wassail ; a bevy of blooming girls and young 
 men are huddled in a circle, and play at hunt the slipper. Of 
 course, there are plenty of stories told at the huge hall fire, and 
 kissing under the glistening mistletoe-bough. But I wish you 
 could see the wonderful accuracy with which all these figures are 
 drawn, and the extraordinary skill with which the artist has 
 managed to throw into a hundred different faces a hundred 
 different characters and individualities of joy. Every one of these 
 little people are smiling, but each has his own particular smile. 
 As for the colouring of the picture, it is, between ourselves, 
 atrocious ; but a man cannot have all the merits at once. Mr. 
 Maclise has for his share humour such as few painters ever 
 possessed, and a power of drawing such as never was possessed by 
 any other ; no, not by one, from Albert Diirer downwards. His 
 scene from The Vicar of Wakefield is equally charming. Moses’s 
 shining, grinning face ; the little man in red who stands on tiptoe, 
 and painfully scrawls his copy ; and the youngest of the family of 
 the Primroses, who learns his letters on his father’s knee, are 
 perfect in design and expression. What might not this man do, 
 if he would read and meditate a little, and profit by the works of 
 men whose taste and education were superior to his own. 
 
 Mr. Charles Landseer has two tableaux de genre., which 
 possess very great merit. His characters are a little too timid, 
 perhaps, as Mr. Maclise’s are too bold ; but the figures are beauti- 
 fully drawn, the colouring and effect excellent, and the accessories 
 painted with great faithfulness and skill. ‘ The Parting Benison ’ 
 is, perhaps, the most interesting picture of the two. 
 
 And now we arrive at Mr. Etty, whose rich luscious pencil 
 has covered a hundred glowing canvases, which every painter 
 must love. I don’t know whether the Duke has this year pro- 
 duced anything which one might have expected from a man of 
 his rank and consequence. He is, like great men, lazy, or in- 
 different, perhaps, about public approbation ; and also, like great 
 men, somewhat too luxurious and fond of pleasure. For instance. 
 
STRICTURES ON PICTURES 
 
 11 
 
 here is a picture of a sleepy nymph, most richly painted ; but 
 tipsy-looking, coarse, and so naked, as to be unfit for appearance 
 among respectable people at an exhibition. You will understand 
 what I mean. There are some figures, without a rag to cover 
 them, which look modest and decent for all that ; and others, 
 which may be clothed to the chin, and yet are not fit for modest 
 eyes to gaze on. Verhum sat — this naughty ‘ Somnolency ’ ought 
 to go to sleep in her night-gown. 
 
 But here is a far nobler painting, — the prodigal kneeling down 
 lonely in the stormy evening, and praying to Heaven for pardon. 
 It is a grand and touching picture ; and looks as large as if the 
 three-foot canvas had been twenty. His wan, wretched figure, 
 and clasped hands, are lighted up by the sunset ; the clouds are 
 livid and heavy ; and the wind is howling over the solitary 
 common, and numbing the chill limbs of the poor wanderer. A 
 goat and a boar are looking at him, with horrid obscene eyes. 
 They are the demons of Lust and Gluttony, which have brought 
 him to this sad pass. And there seems no hope, no succour, no 
 Ear for the prayer of this wretched, way-worn, miserable man, 
 who kneels there alone, shuddering. Only above, in the gusty 
 blue sky, you see a glistening, peaceful, silver star, which points 
 to home and hope, as clearly as if the little star were a sign-post, 
 and home at the very next turn of the road. 
 
 Away, then, 0 conscience-stricken prodigal ! and you shall find 
 a good father, who loves you ; and an elder brother, who hates 
 you — but never mind that ; and a dear, kind, stout, old mother, 
 who liked you twice as well as the elder, for all his goodness and 
 psalm-singing, and has a tear and a prayer for you night and 
 morning ; and a pair of gentle sisters, maybe ; and a poor young 
 thing down in the village, who has never forgotten your walks in 
 the quiet nut-woods, and the bird^s nest you brought her, and the 
 big boy you thrashed, because he broke the eggs : he is squire 
 now, the big boy, and would marry her, but she will not have 
 him — not she ! — her thoughts are with her dark-eyed, bold-browed, 
 devil-me-care playmate, who swore she should be his little wife — 
 and then went to college — and then came back sick and changed 
 — and then got into debt — and then — But never mind, man ! 
 down to her at once. She will pretend to be cold at first, and 
 then shiver and turn red and deadly pale ; and then she tumbles 
 into your arms, with a gush of sweet tears, and a pair of rainbows 
 in her soft eyes, welcoming the sunshine back to her bosom again. 
 To her, man ! — never fear, miss ! Hug him, and kiss him, as 
 though you would draw the heart from his lips. 
 
 When she has done, the poor thing falls stone-pale and sobbing 
 
12 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 on young ProdigaTs shoulder ; and he carries her quite gently to 
 that old bench where he carved her name fourteen years ago, and 
 steals his arm round her waist, and kisses her hand, and soothes 
 her. Then comes out the poor Avidow, her mother, who is pale 
 and tearful too, and tries to look cold and unconcerned. She 
 kisses her daughter, and leads her trembling into the house. 
 ‘You will come to us to-morrow, Tom?^ says she, as she takes 
 his hand at the gate. 
 
 To-morrow I To be sure he will ; and this very night, too, 
 after supper with the old people. (Young Squire Prodigal never 
 sups ; and has found out that he must ride into town, to arrange 
 about a missionary meeting with the Rev. Dr. Slackjaw.) To be 
 sure, Tom Prodigal will go ; the moon will be up, and who knows 
 but Lucy may be looking at it about twelve o’clock. At one, 
 back trots the young squire, and he sees two people whispering at a 
 window ; and he gives something very like a curse, as he digs into 
 the ribs of his mare, and canters, clattering, down the silent road. 
 
 Yes — but, in the meantime, there is the old housekeeper, with 
 ‘ Lord bless us ! ’ and ‘ Heaven save us ! ’ and ‘ Who’d have 
 thought ever again to see his dear face ? And master to forget it 
 all, who swore so dreadful that he would never see him ! — as for 
 missis, she always loved him.’ There, I say, is the old house- 
 keeper, logging the fire, airing the sheets, and fiapjDing the feather 
 beds — for Master Tom’s room has never been used this many a 
 day ; and the young ladies have got some floAvers for his chimney- 
 piece, and put back his mother’s portrait, which they have had 
 in their room ever since he Avent aAvay and forgot it, woe is me ! 
 And old John, the butler, coachman, footman, valet, factotum, 
 consults Avith master about supper. 
 
 ‘ What can we have ? ’ says master ; ‘ all the shops are shut, 
 and there’s nothing in the house.’ 
 
 John. — ‘No, no more there isn’t; only Guernsey’s calf. 
 Butcher kill’d’n yasterday, as your honour knoweth.’ 
 
 Master. — Come, John, a calf’s enough. Tell the cook to send 
 us up that.^ 
 
 And he gives a hoarse haw ! haw ! at his Avit ; and Mrs. 
 Prodigal smiles too, and says, ‘Ah, Tom Prodigal, you were 
 ahvays a merry fellow ! ’ 
 
 Well, John Footman carries down the message to cook, Avho is 
 a country wench, and takes people at their word ; and Avhat do 
 you think she sends up ? 
 
 Top Dish. 
 
 Fillet of veal, and bacon on the side-table. 
 
STRICTURES ON PICTURES 
 
 13 
 
 Bottom Dish. 
 
 Roast ribs of veal. 
 
 In the Middle. 
 
 Calves’-head soup (ci la tortue). 
 
 Veal broth. 
 
 Between. 
 
 Boiled knuckle of veal, and parsley sauce. 
 
 Stewed veal, with brown sauce and forcemeat balls. 
 
 Entre-mets. 
 
 Veal olives (for sauce, see stewed veal). 
 
 Veal cutlets {panees^ sauce piquante). 
 
 Ditto (en papillote^. 
 
 Scotch collops. 
 
 Fricandeau of veal {pique au lard d la chicoreei). 
 Minced veal. 
 
 Blanquet of veal. 
 
 Second Course. 
 
 Curry of calves’-head. 
 
 Sweet-breads. 
 
 Calves’-foot jelly. 
 
 See, my dear Anatole, what a world of thought can be conjured 
 up out of a few inches of painted canvas. 
 
 And now we come to the great and crowning picture of the 
 exhibition, my own historical piece, namely, ‘ Heliogabalus in the 
 Ruins of Carthage.' In this grand and finished perform — 
 
 *.* Mr. Titmarsh's letter stops, unfortunately, here. We found 
 it, at midnight, the 15th- 16th May, in a gutter of St. Martin's 
 Lane, whence a young gentleman had been just removed by the 
 police. It is to be presumed that intoxication could be his only 
 cause for choosing such a sleeping-place, at such an hour ; and it 
 had probably commenced as he was writing the above fragment. 
 We made inquiries at Lord's Coffee House, of Mr. Moth (who, 
 from being the active and experienced head-Avaiter, is now the 
 obliging landlord of that establishment), and were told that a 
 gentleman unknown had dined there at three, and had been cease- 
 lessly occupied in writing and drinking until a quarter to tAvelve, 
 
14 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 when he abruptly left the house. Mr. Moth regretted to add, 
 that the stranger had neglected to pay for thirteen glasses of gin 
 and water, half a pint of porter, a bottle of soda-water, and a 
 plate of ham-sandwiches, which he had consumed in the course of 
 the day. 
 
 We have paid Mr. Moth (whose very moderate charges and 
 excellent stock of wines and spirits cannot be too highly com- 
 mended), and shall gladly hand over to Mr. Titmarsh the remain- 
 ing sum which is his due. Has he any more of his rhapsody ? — 
 O. Y. 
 
A SECOND LECTURE ON THE FINE ARTS, 
 
 BY MICHAEL ANGELO-TITMARSH, ESQ.i 
 
 The Exhibitions. 
 
 Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead. 
 
 My Dear Bricabrac, 
 
 You, of course, remember the letter on the subject of 
 our exhibitions which I addressed to you this time last year. 
 As you are now lying at the Hotel Dieu, wounded, during the 
 late unsuccessful emeute (which I think, my dear friend, is 
 the seventeenth you have been engaged in), and as the letter 
 which I wrote last year was received with unbounded applause 
 by the people here, and caused a sale of three or four editions 
 of this Magazine, I cannot surely, my dear Bricabrac, do better 
 than send you another sheet or two, which may console you 
 under your present bereavement, and at the same time amuse 
 the British public, who now know their friend Titmarsh as well 
 as you in France know that little scamp Thiers. 
 
 Well, then, from Jack Straw’s Castle, an hotel on Hampstead’s 
 breezy heath, which Keats, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, F. W. N. 
 Bayley, and others of our choicest spirits, have often patronised, 
 and a heath of which every pool, bramble, furze-bush-with-clothes- 
 hanging-on-it-to-dry, steep, stock, stone, tree, lodging house, and 
 distant gloomy background of London city or bright green stretch 
 of sunshiny Hertfordshire meadows, has been depicted by our 
 noble English landscape painter. Constable, in his own Con- 
 stabulary way — at Jack Straw’s Castle, I say, where I at this 
 present moment am located (not that it matters in the least, but 
 the world is always interested to know where men of genius are 
 accustomed to disport themselves), I cannot do better than look 
 over the heap of picture-gallery-catalogues which I brought with 
 me from London, and communicate to you, my friend in Paris, my 
 remarks thereon. 
 
 A man, with five shillings to spare, may at this present 
 
 ^ {Fraser s Magazine^ June 1839.] 
 
 15 
 
16 
 
 CEITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 moment half kill himself with pleasure in London town, and in 
 the neighbourhood of Pall Mall, by going from one picture gallery 
 to another, and examining the beauties and absurdities which are 
 to be found in each. There is first the National Gallery (entrance, 
 nothing) in one wing of the little gin-shop of a building so styled 
 near St. Martin’s Church ; in another wing is the exhibition of 
 the Royal Academy (entrance, one shilling ; catalogue, one ditto). 
 After having seen this, you come to the Water-Colour Exhibition 
 in Pall Mall East ; then to the gallery in Sufiblk Street ; and, 
 finally, to the New Water-Colour Society in Pall Mall — a pretty 
 room, which formerly used to be a gambling-house, where many 
 a bout of seven’s-the-maiii, and iced champagne, has been had by 
 the dissipated in former days. All these collections (all the 
 modern ones, that is) deserve to be noticed, and contain a deal of 
 good, bad, and indifferent wares, as is the way with all other 
 institutions in this wicked world. 
 
 Gommenc^ons done avec le commencement — with the Exhibition 
 of the Royal Academy, which consists, as everybody knows, of 
 thirty-eight knight and esquire academicians, and nineteen simple 
 and ungenteel associates, who have not so much as a shabby 
 Mister before their names. I recollect last year facetiously 
 ranging these gentlemen in rank, according to what I conceived 
 to be their merits — King Mulready, Prince Maclise, Lord Landseer, 
 Archbishop Eastlake (according to the best of my memory, for 
 Jack Straw, strange to say, does not take in Fraser\s Magazine^ 
 and so on. At present, a great number of new-comers, not 
 associates even, ought to be elevated to these aristocratic dignities ; 
 and, perha]3s, the order ought to be somewhat changed. There 
 are many more good pictures (here and elsewhere) than there were 
 last year. A great stride has been taken in matters of art, my 
 dear friend. The young painters are stepping forward. Let the 
 old fogies look to it ; let the old Academic Olympians beware, for 
 there are fellows among the rising race who bid fair to oust them 
 from sovereignty. They have not yet arrived at the throne, to 
 be sure, but they are near it. The lads are not so good as the 
 best of the academicians ; but many of the academicians are 
 infinitely worse than the lads, and are old, stupid, and cannot 
 improve, as the younger and more active painters will. 
 
 If you are particularly anxious to know what is the best 
 picture in the room, not the biggest (Sir David Wilkie’s is the 
 biggest, and exactly contrary to the best) I must request you to 
 turn your attention to a noble riverpiece by J. W. M. Turner, Esq., 
 R.A., ‘The Fighting T^meraire’ — as grand a painting as ever 
 figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of 
 
A SECOND LECTURE ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 17 
 
 any painter. The old Temdraire is dragged to her last home by a 
 little, spiteful, diabolical steamer. A mighty red sun, amidst a 
 host of flaring clouds, sinks to rest on one side of the picture, and 
 illumines a river that seems interminable, and a countless navy 
 that fades away into such a wonderful distance as never was 
 painted before. The little demon of a steamer is belching out a 
 volume (why do I say a volume ? not a hundred volumes could 
 express it) of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke, paddling 
 furiously and lashing up the water round about it ; while behind 
 it (a cold grey moon looking down on it), slow, sad, and majestic, 
 follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her, 
 I think, my dear Bricabrac (although, to be sure, your nation 
 would be somewhat offended by such a collection of trophies) that 
 we ought not, in common gratitude, to sacrifice entirely these 
 noble old champions of ours, but that we should have somewhere 
 a museum of their skeletons which our children might visit, and 
 think of the brave deeds which were done in them. The bones 
 of the Agamemnon and the Captain, the Vanguard, the Culloden, 
 and the Victory, ought to be sacred relics, for Englishmen to 
 worship almost. Think of them when alive, and braving the 
 battle and the breeze, they carried Nelson and his heroes victorious 
 by the Cape of St. Vincent, in the dark waters of Aboukir, and 
 through the fatal conflict of Trafalgar. All these things, my dear 
 Bricabrac, are, you will say, absurd, and not to the purpose. Be 
 it so : but Bowbellites as we are, we Cockneys feel our hearts 
 leap up when we recall them to memory ; and every clerk in 
 Threadneedle Street feels the strength of a Nelson, when he thinks 
 of the mighty actions performed by him. 
 
 It is absurd, you will say (and with a great deal of reason) for 
 Titmarsh, or any other Briton, to grow so politically enthusiastic 
 about a four-foot canvas, representing a ship, a steamer, a river, 
 and a sunset. But herein surely lies the power of the great 
 artist. He makes you see and think of a great deal more than 
 the objects before you ; he knows how to soothe or to intoxicate, 
 to fire or to depress, by a few notes, or forms, or colours, of which 
 we cannot trace the effect to the source, but only acknowledge 
 the power. I recollect, some years ago, at the theatre at Weimar, 
 hearing Beethoven’s ‘Battle of Vittoria,’ in which, amidst a storm 
 of glorious music, the air of ‘ God save the King ’ was introduced. 
 The very instant it begun, every Englishman in the house was 
 bolt upright, and so stood reverently until the air was played out. 
 Why so ? From some such thrill of excitement as makes us glow 
 and rejoice over Mr. Turner and his ‘ Fighting Tdm^raire ’ ; which 
 I am sure, when the art of translating colours into music or poetry 
 
 c 
 
18 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 shall be discovered, will be found to be a magnificent national ode 
 or piece of music. 
 
 I must tell you, however, that Mr. Turner^s performances are 
 for the most part quite incomprehensible to me ; and that his 
 other pictures ; which he is pleased to call ‘ Cicero at his Villa/ 
 ‘Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus,’ ‘Pluto carrying off 
 Proserpina,’ or what you will, are not a whit more natural, or 
 less mad, than they used to be in former years, since he has 
 forsaken nature, or attempted (like your French barbers) to 
 embellish it. On n^emhellit ]xis la nature^ my dear Bricabrac ; 
 one may make pert caricatures of it ; or mad exaggerations, like 
 Mr. Turner in his fancy pieces. 0 ye gods ! why will he not 
 stick to copying her majestical countenance, instead of daubing 
 it with some absurd antics and fard of her own. P'ancy pea- 
 green skies, crimson-lake trees, and oranges and purple grass — 
 fancy cataracts, rainbows, suns, moons, and thunderbolts — shake 
 them well up, with a quantity of gamboge, and you will have 
 an idea of a fancy picture by Turner. It is worth a shilling 
 alone to go and see ‘ Pluto and Proserpina.’ Such a landscape ! 
 such figures ! such a little red-hot coal-scuttle of a chariot as 
 Nat Lee sings : — 
 
 Metliought I saw a hieroglyphic bat 
 Skim o’er the surface of a slipshod hat ; 
 
 While, to increase the tumult of the skies 
 A damned potato o’er the whirlwind flies. 
 
 If you can understand these lines, you can understand one of 
 Turner’s landscapes ; and I recommend them to him as a pretty 
 subject for a piece for next year. 
 
 Etty has a picture on the same subject as Turner’s ‘Pluto 
 carrying off Proserpina ’ ; and if one may complain that in the 
 latter the figures are not indicated, one cannot at least lay this 
 fault to Mr. Etty’s door. His figures are drawn, and a deuced 
 deal too much drawn. A great, large curtain of fig-leaves should 
 be hung over every one of this artist’s pictures, and the world 
 should pass on, content to know that there are some glorious 
 colours painted beneath. His colour, indeed, is sublime : I 
 doubt if Titian ever knew how to paint flesh better — but his 
 taste! Not David nor Girodet ever offended propriety so — 
 scarcely even Peter Paul himself, by whose side, as a colourist 
 and a magnificent heroic painter, Mr. Etty is sometimes worthy 
 to stand. I wish he would take Ariosto in hand, and give us a 
 series of designs from him. His hand would be the very one 
 for those deep luscious landscapes, and fiery scenes of love and 
 
A SECOND LECTURE ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 19 
 
 battle. Besides ‘Proserpine/ Mr. Etty has two more pictures, 
 
 ‘ Endymion,’ with a dirty, affected, beautiful, slatternly Diana, 
 and a portrait of the ‘ Lady -Mayoress of York’; which is a 
 curiosity in its way. The line of her ladyship’s eyes and mouth 
 (it is a front face) are made to meet at a point in a marabon 
 feather which she v/ears in her turban, and close to her cheek- 
 bone ; while the expression of the whole countenance is so fierce, 
 that you would imagine it a Lady Macbeth, and not a lady- 
 mayoress. The picture has, nevertheless, some very fine painting 
 about it — as which of Mr. Etty’s pieces has not ? 
 
 The artists say there is very fine painting too, in Sir David 
 Wilkie’s great ‘ Sir David Baird ’ ; for my part, I think very 
 little. You see a great quantity of brown paint ; in this is a 
 great flashing of torches, feather, and bayonets. You see in the 
 foreground, huddled up in a rich heap of corpses and drapery, 
 Tippoo Sahib ; and swaggering over him on a step waving a 
 sword, for no earthly purpose, and wearing a red jacket and 
 buckskins, the figure of Sir David Baird. The picture is poor, 
 feeble, theatrical ; and I would just as soon have Mr. Hart’s 
 great canvas of ‘Lady Jane Grey’ (which is worth exactly 
 twopence halfpenny) as Sir David’s poor picture of ‘ Seringapatam.’ 
 Some of Sir David’s portraits are worse even than his historical 
 compositions — they seem to be painted with snuff and tallow 
 grease ; the faces are merely indicated and without individuality ; 
 the forms only half- drawn, and almost always wrong. What 
 has come to the hand that painted ‘ The Blind Fiddler,’ and 
 ‘ The Chelsea Pensioners ’ ? Who would have thought that such 
 a portrait as that of ‘ Master Robert Donne,’ or the composition 
 entitled ‘ The Grandfather,’ could ever have come from the author 
 of ‘ The Rent Day ’ and ‘ The Reading of the Will ’ ? If it be but a 
 contrast to this feeble, flimsy, transparent figure of Master Donne, 
 the spectator cannot do better than cast his eyes upwards, and 
 look at Mr. Linnell’s excellent portrait of ‘ Mr. Robert Peel.’ It 
 is real, substantial nature, carefully and honestly painted and 
 without any flashy tricks of art. It may seem ungracious in ‘ us 
 youth ’ thus to fall foul of our betters ; but if Sir David has 
 taught us to like good pictures, by painting them formerly, we 
 cannot help criticising if he paints bad ones now ; and bad they 
 most surely are. 
 
 From the censure, however, must be excepted the picture of 
 ‘ Grace before Meat,’ which, a little misty and feeble, perhaps, 
 in drawing and substance, in colour, feeling, composition, and 
 expression, is exquisite. The eye loves to repose upon this 
 picture, and the heart to brood over it afterwards. When, as I 
 
20 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 said before, lines and colours come to be translated into sounds, 
 this picture, I have no doubt, will turn out to be a sweet and 
 touching hymn tune, with rude notes of cheerful voices, and 
 peal of soft, melodious organ, such as one hears stealing over the 
 meadows on sunshiny Sabbath days, while waves under cloudless 
 blue the peaceful golden corn. Some such feeling of exquisite 
 pleasure and content is to be had, too, from Mr. Eastlake’s picture 
 of ‘Our Lord and the little Children.’ You never saw such 
 tender white faces, and solemn eyes, and sweet forms of mothers 
 round their little ones bending gracefully. These pictures come 
 straight to the heart, and then all criticism and calculation 
 vanishes at once, — for the artist has attained his great end, 
 which is, to strike far deeper than the sight ; and we have no 
 business to quarrel about defects in form and colour, which are 
 but little parts of the great painter’s skill. 
 
 Look, for instance, at another piece of Mr. Eastlake’s Called, 
 somewhat affectedly, ‘ La Svegliarina.’ The defects of the 
 painter, which one does not condescend to notice when he is 
 filled with a great idea, become visible instantly when he is only 
 occupied with a small one ; and you see that the hand is too 
 scrupulous and finikin, the drawing weak, the flesh chalky and 
 unreal. The very same objections exist to the other picture, but 
 the subject and the genius overcame them. 
 
 Passing from Mr. Eastlake’s pictures to those of a greater 
 genius, though in a different line, — ^look at Mr. Leslie’s little 
 pieces. Can anything be more simple — almost rude — than their 
 manner, and more complete in their effect upon the spectator ? 
 The very soul of comedy is in them ; there is no coarseness, no 
 exaggeration ; but they gladden the eye, and the merriment which 
 they excite cannot possibly be more pure, gentlemanlike, or 
 delightful. Mr. Maclise has humour, too, and vast powers of 
 expressing it ; but whisky is not more different from rich burgundy 
 than his fun from Mr. Leslie’s. To our thinking Leslie’s little 
 head of ‘ Sancho ’ is worth the whole picture from Gil Bias, which 
 hangs by it. In point of workmanship, this is, perhaps, the best 
 picture that Mr. Maclise ever painted ; the colour is far better 
 than that usually employed by him, and the representation of 
 objects carried to such an extent as we do believe was never 
 reached before. There is a poached egg, which one could swallow ; 
 a trout, that beats all the trout that was ever seen ; a copper 
 pan, scoured so clean that you might see your face in it ; a green 
 blind, through which the sun comes ; and a wall, with the sun 
 shining on it, that De Hooglie could not surpass. This young 
 man has the greatest power of hand that was ever had, perhaps, 
 
A SECOND LECTURE ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 21 
 
 by any painter in any time or country. What does he want 1 
 Polish, I think ; thought, and cultivation. His great picture of 
 ‘ King Richard and Robin Hood ^ is a wonder of dexterity of hand ; 
 but coarse, I think, and inefficient in humour. His models repeat 
 themselves too continually. Allen-a-Dale, the harper, is the very 
 counterpart of Gil Bias ; and Robin Hood is only Apollo with 
 whiskers ; the same grin, the same display of grinders, — the same 
 coarse, luscious mouth, belongs to both. In the large picture, 
 everybody grins, and shews his whole rdtelier ; and you look at 
 them, and say, ‘ These people seem all very jolly.’ Leslie’s char- 
 acters do not laugh themselves, but they make you laugh ; and 
 this is where the experienced American artist beats the dashing 
 young Irish one. We shall say nothing of the colour of Mr. 
 Maclise’s large picture ; some part appears to us to be excellent, 
 and the whole piece, as far as execution goes, is worthy of his 
 amazing talents, and high reputation. Mr. Maclise has but one 
 portrait, it is, perhaps, the best in the exhibition ; sober in colour, 
 wonderful for truth, effect, and power of drawing. 
 
 In speaking of portraits there is never much to say ; and they 
 are fewer, and for the most part more indifferent than usual. Mr. 
 Pickersgill has a good one, a gentleman in a green chair ; and one 
 or two outrageously bad. Mr. Philips’s ‘ Doctor Shephard ’ is a 
 finely painted head and picture ; his Lady Dunraven and her son, 
 as poor, ill-drawn, and ill-coloured a performance as can possibly 
 be. Mr. Wood has a pretty head ; Mr. Stone a good portrait of 
 a very noble-looking lady, the Hon. Mrs. Blackwood ; Mr. Bewick 
 a good one ; and there are, of course, many others whose names 
 might be mentioned with praise or censure, but whom we will, if 
 you please, pass over altogether. 
 
 The great advance of the year is in the small historical com- 
 positions, of which there are many that deserve honourable 
 mention. Redgrave’s ‘ Return of Olivia to the Vicar ’ has some 
 very pretty painting and feeling in it ; ‘ Quentin Matsys,’ by the 
 same artist, is tolerably good. D. Cowper’s ‘ Othello relating his 
 Adventures,’ really beautiful ; as is Cope’s ‘ Belgian Family.’ All 
 these are painted with grace, feeling, and delicacy ; as is E. M. 
 Ward’s ‘ Cimabue and Giotto ’ (there is in Tiepolo’s etchings the 
 selfsame composition, by the way) and Herbert’s elegant picture 
 of the ‘Brides of Venice.’ Mr. Severn’s composition from the 
 Ancient Mariner is a noble performance; and the figure of the angel 
 with raised arm awful and beautiful too. It does good to see such 
 figures in pictures as those and the above, invented and drawn — 
 for they belong, as we take it, to the best school of art, of which 
 one is glad to see the daily spread among our young painters. 
 
22 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Mr, Charles Landseer’s ‘Pillage of a Jew’s House’ is a very 
 well and carefully painted picture, containing a great many figures, 
 and good points ; but we are not going to praise it ; it wants 
 vigour, to our taste, and what you call actualite. The people 
 stretch their arms and turn their eyes the proper way, but as if 
 they were in a tableau, and paid for standing there ; one longs to 
 see them all in motion, and naturally employed. 
 
 I feel, I confess, a kind of delight in finding out Mr. Edwin 
 Landseer in a bad picture ; for the man paints so wonderfully 
 well, that one is angry that he does not paint better, which he 
 might with half his talent, and without half his facility. ‘Van 
 Amburgh and the Lions ’ is a bad picture, and no mistake ; 
 dexterous, of course, but flat and washy : the drawing even of the 
 animals is careless ; that of the man bad, though the head is very 
 like, and very smartly painted. Then there are other dog-and-man 
 portraits; ‘ Miss Peel with Fido,’ for instance. Fido is wonderful, 
 and so are the sponges, and hair-brushes, and looking-glass, pre- 
 pared for the dog’s bath ; and the drawing of the child’s face, as 
 far as the lines and expression go, is very good ; but the face is 
 covered with flesh-coloured paint, and not flesh, and the child 
 looks like a wonderful doll, or imitation child, and not a real 
 young lady, daughter of a gentleman who was prime minister last 
 week (by the bye, my dear Bricabrac, did you ever read of such 
 a pretty Whig game as that, and such a nice coup dJetat ?). 
 There, again, is the beautiful little Princess of Cambridge, with 
 a dog, and a piece of biscuit : the dog and the biscuit are just 
 perfection ; but the princess is no such thing, — only a beautiful 
 apology for a princess, like that which Princess Penelope didnH 
 send the other day to the lord-mayor of London. 
 
 We have to thank you (and not our Academy, which has hung 
 the picture in a most scurvy way) for Mr. Scheffer’s ‘ Preche 
 Protestante.’ This fine composition has been thrust down on the 
 ground, and trampled under foot, as it were, by a great number 
 of worthless academics ; but it merits one of the very best places 
 in the gallery ; and I mention it to hint an idea to your worship, 
 which only could come from a great mind like that of Titmarsh, 
 — to have, namely, some day, a great European congress of 
 paintings, which might be exhibited at one place, — Paris, say, as 
 the most central ; or, better still, travel about, under the care of 
 trusty superintendents, as they might, without fear of injury. I 
 think such a circuit would do much to make the brethren known 
 to one another, and we should hear quickly of much manly 
 emulation, and stout training for the contest. If you will mention 
 this to Louis Philippe the next time you see that roi citoyen 
 
A SECOND LECTURE ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 23 
 
 (mention it soon, — for, egad ! the next emeute may be successful ; 
 and who knows when it will happen ?) — if you will mention this 
 at the Tuileries, we will take care of St. James’s ; for I suppose 
 that you know, in spite of the Whigs, her most sacred majesty 
 reads every word of Fraser’s Magazine^ and will be as sure to see 
 this on the first of next month, as Lord Melbourne will be to dine 
 with her on that day. 
 
 But let us return to our muttons. I think there are few more 
 of the oil pictures about which it is necessary to speak ; and 
 besides them, there are a host of miniatures, difficult to expiate 
 upon, but pleasing to behold. There are Chalon’s ogling beauties, 
 half-a-dozen of them ; and the skill with which their silks and 
 satins are dashed in by the painter is a marvel to the beholder. 
 There are Ross’s heads, that to be seen must be seen through a 
 microscope. There is Saunders, who runs the best of the 
 miniature men very hard ; and Thor burn, with Newton, Robert- 
 son, Rochard, and a host of others, and, finally, there is the 
 sculpture-room, containing many pieces of clay and marble, and, 
 to my notions, but two good things, a sleeping child (ridiculously 
 called the Lady Susan Somebody) by Westmacott ; and the bust 
 of Miss Stuart, by Macdonald ; never was anything on earth more 
 exquisitely lovely. 
 
 These things seen, take your stick from the porter at the hall 
 door, cut it, and go to fresh picture galleries ; but ere you go, 
 just by way of contrast, and to soothe your mind after the glare 
 and bustle of the modern collection, take half an hour’s repose in 
 the National Gallery ; where, before the ‘ Bacchus and Ariadne,’ 
 you may see what the magic of colour is ; before ‘ Christ and 
 Lazarus,’ what is majestic, solemn grace and awful beauty ; and 
 before the new ‘ St. Catharine ’ what is the real divinity of art. 
 0, Eastlake and Turner ! — 0, Maclise and Mulready ! you are all 
 very nice men ; but what are you to the men of old ? 
 
 Issuing then from the National Gallery — you may step over to 
 Farrance’s by the way, if you like, and sip an ice, or bolt a 
 couple of dozen forcemeat balls in a basin of mock turtle-soup — 
 issuing, I say, from the National Gallery, and after refreshing 
 yourself or not, as your purse or appetite permits, you arrive 
 speedily at the Water-Colour Exhibition, and cannot do better 
 than enter. I know nothing more cheerful or sparkling than the 
 first coug) dJoeil of this little gallery. In the first place, you never 
 can enter it without finding four or five pretty women, that’s a 
 fact ; pretty women with pretty pink bonnets peeping at pretty 
 pictures, and with sweet whispers vowing that Mrs. Seyffarth is 
 
24 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 a dear, delicious painter and that her style is ‘so soft’; and that 
 Miss Sharpe paints every bit as well as her sister ; and that Mr. 
 Jean Paul Frederick Richter draws the loveliest things, to be 
 sure, that ever were seen. Well, very likely the ladies are right, 
 and it would be impolite to argue the matter ; but I wish 
 Mrs. Seyifarth’s gentlemen and ladies were not so dreadfully 
 handsome, with such white pillars of necks, such long eyes and 
 lashes and such dabs of carmine at the mouth and nostrils. I 
 wish Miss Sharpe would not paint Scripture subjects, and Mr. 
 Richter great goggle-eyed, red-cheeked, simpering wenches, whose 
 ogling has become odious from its repetition. However, the 
 ladies like it, and, of course, must have their way. 
 
 If you want to see real nature, now, real expression, real 
 startling home poetry, look at every one of Hunt’s heads. 
 Hogarth never painted anything better than these figures, taken 
 singly. That man rushing away frightened from the beer-barrel, 
 is a noble head of terror ; that Miss Jemima Crow, whose whole 
 body is a grin, regards you with an ogle that all the race of 
 Richters could never hope to imitate. Look at yonder card- 
 players ; they have a penny pack of the devil’s hooks, and one 
 has just laid down the king of trumps ! I defy you to look at 
 him without laughing, or to examine the wondrous puzzled face 
 of his adversary without longing to hug the greasy rogue. Come 
 hither, Mr. Maclise, and see what genuine comedy is ; you who 
 can paint better than all the Hunts and Leslies, and yet not near 
 so well. If I were the Duke of Devonshire, I would have a 
 couple of Hunts in every room in all my houses ; if I had the 
 blue devils (and even their graces are, I suppose, occasionally so 
 troubled) I would but cast my eyes upon these grand, good- 
 humoured pictures, and defy care. Who does not recollect ‘ Before 
 and After the Mutton Pie,’ the two pictures of that wondrous 
 boy ? Where Mr. Hunt finds his models, I cannot tell ; they are 
 the very flower of the British youth ; each of them is as good as 
 ‘ Sancho ’ ; blessed is he that has his portfolio full of them. 
 
 There is no need to mention to you the charming landscapes of 
 Cox, Copley Fielding, De Wint, Gastineau, and the rest. A new 
 painter, somewhat in the style of Harding, is Mr. Callow ; and 
 better, I think, than his master or original, whose colours are too 
 gaudy, to my taste, and effects too glaringly theatrical. 
 
 Mr. Cattermole has, among others, two very fine drawings, a 
 large one, the most finished and the best coloured of any which 
 have been exhibited by this fine artist ; and a smaller one, ‘ The 
 Portrait,’ which is charming. The portrait is that of Jane 
 Seymour, or Anne Boleyn ; and Henry the Vlllth is the person 
 
A SECOND LECTURE ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 25 
 
 examining it, with the cardinal at his side, the painter before him, 
 and one or two attendants. The picture seems to me a perfect 
 masterpiece, very simply coloured and composed, but delicious in 
 effect and tone, and telling the story to a wonder. It is much 
 more gratifying, I think, to let a painter tell his own story in 
 this way, than to bind him down to a scene of Ivanhoe or Uncle 
 Toby ; or worse still, to an illustration of some wretched story in 
 some wretched fribble Annual. Wo to the painter who falls into 
 the hands of Mr. Charles Heath (I speak, of course, not of Mr. 
 Heath personally, but in a Pickwickian sense — of Mr. Heath the 
 Annual-monger) ; he ruins the young artist, sucks his brains out, 
 emasculates his genius so as to make it fit company for the 
 purchasers of Annuals. Take, for instance, that unfortunate 
 young man, Mr. Corbould, who gave great j)romise two years since, 
 painted a pretty picture last year, and now — he has been in the 
 hands of the Annual-mongers, and has left well nigh all his vigour 
 behind him. Numerous Zuleikhas and Lalla Rookhs, which are 
 hanging about the walls of the Academy and the New Water- 
 Colour Gallery, give lamentable proofs of this : such handsome 
 Turks and leering sultanas ; such Moors, with straight noses and 
 pretty curled beards ! Away, Mr. Corbould ! away while it is 
 yet time, out of the hands of these sickly, heartless Annual 
 syrens ! and ten years hence, when you have painted a good, 
 vigorous, healthy picture, bestow the tear of gratitude upon 
 Titmarsh, who tore you from the lap of your crimson-silk-and-gilt- 
 edged Armida. 
 
 Mr. Cattermole has a couple, we will not say of imitators, but 
 of friends, who admire his works very much ; these are, Mr. 
 Nash, and Mr. Lake Price ; the former paints furniture and old 
 houses, the latter old houses and furniture, and both very pretty. 
 No harm can be said of these miniature scene-painters ; on the 
 contrary, Mr. Price’s ‘ Gallery at Hardwicke ’ is really remarkably 
 dexterous ; and the chairs, tables, curtains, and pictures are 
 nicked off with extraordinary neatness and sharpness — and then 
 why then, no more is to be said. Cobalt, sepia, and a sable 
 pencil, will do a deal of work, to be sure : and very pretty it is, 
 too, when done ; and as for finding fault with it, that nobody 
 will and can ; but an artist wants something more than sepia, 
 cobalt, and sable pencils, and the knowledge how to use them. 
 What do you think, my dear Bricabrac of a little genius ? — thafs 
 the picture-painter, depend on it. 
 
 Being on the subject of water-colours, we may as well step into 
 the New Water-Colour Exhibition : not so good as the old, but very 
 good. You will see here a large drawing by Mr. Corbould of a 
 
26 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 tournament, which will shew at once how clever that young artist 
 is, and how weak and 7iianiere, You will see some charming un- 
 affected English landscapes by Mr. Sims ; and a capital Spanish 
 Girl by Hicks, of which the flesh-painting cannot be too much 
 approved. It is done without the heavy white, with which water- 
 colour artists are now wont to belabour their pictures ; and is, 
 therefore, frankly and clearly painted, as all transparent water- 
 colour drawing must be. The same praise of clearness, boldness, 
 and depth of tone must be given to Mr. Absolon, who uses no 
 white, and only just so much stippling as is necessary ; his 
 picture has the force of oil, and we should be glad to see his 
 manner more followed. 
 
 Mr. Haghe's ‘ Town Hall of Courtray ^ has attracted, and 
 deservedly, a great deal of notice. It is a very fine and masterly 
 architectural drawing, rich and sombre in effect, the figure intro- 
 duced being very nearly as good as the rest of the picture. Mr. 
 Haghe, we suppose, will be called to the upper house of water- 
 colour painters, who might well be anxious to receive into their 
 ranks many persons belonging to the new society. We hope, 
 however, the latter will be faithful to themselves ; there is plenty 
 of room for two galleries, and the public must, ere long, learn to 
 appreciate the merits of the new one. Having spoken a word in 
 favour of Mr. Johnston’s pleasing and quaintly coloured South 
 American sketches, we have but to bend our steps to Suffolk 
 Street, and draw this discourse to a close. 
 
 Here is a very fine picture, indeed, by Mr. Hurlstone, ‘ Olympia 
 attacked by Bourbon’s Soldiers in Saint Peter’s, and flying to the 
 Cross.’ Seen from the further room, this picture is grand in effect 
 and colour, and the rush of the armed men towards the girl, finely 
 and vigorously expressed. The head of Olympia has been called 
 too calm by the critics ; it seems to me most beautiful, and the 
 action of the figure springing forward and flinging its arms round 
 the cross, nobly conceived and executed. There is a good deal of 
 fine Titianic painting in the soldiers’ figures (Oh, that Mr. Hurl- 
 stone would throw away his lamp-black !), and the background of 
 the church is fine, vast, and gloomy. This is the best historical 
 picture to be seen anywhere this year ; perhaps the worst is the 
 one which stands at the other end of the room, and which strikes 
 upon the eye as if it were an immense water-colour sketch, of a 
 feeble picture by President West. Speaking of historical paint- 
 ings, I forgot to mention a large and fine picture by Mr. Dyce, the 
 ‘ Separation of Edwy and Elgiva ^ ; somewhat crude and odd in 
 colour, with a good deal of exaggeration in the countenances of the 
 figures, but having grandeur in it, and unmistakable genius ; 
 
A SECOND LECTURE ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 27 
 
 there is a figure of an old woman seated, which would pass 
 muster very well in a group of Sebastian Piombo. 
 
 A capitally painted head by Mr. Stone, called the ‘ Sword- 
 bearer,’ almost as fresh, bright, and vigorous as a Vandyke, is the 
 portrait, we believe, of a brother -artist, the clever actor Mr. 
 MHan. The latter’s picture of ‘Sir Tristram in the Cave’ 
 deserves especial remark and praise ; and is really as fine a 
 dramatic composition as one will often see. The figures of the 
 knight and the lady asleep in the foreground, are novel, striking, 
 and beautifully easy. The advance of the old king, who comes 
 upon the lovers ; the look of the hideous dwarf, who finds them 
 out ; and behind, the line of spears that are seen glancing over the 
 rocks, and indicating the march of the unseen troops, are all very 
 well conceived and arranged. The piece deserves engraving ; it is 
 wild, poetic, and original. To how many pictures, nowadays, can 
 one apply the two last terms ? 
 
 There are some more new pictures, in the midst of a great 
 quantity of trash, that deserve notice. Mr. D. Cowper is always 
 good ; Mr. Stewart’s ‘ Grandfather ’ contains two excellent like- 
 nesses, and is a pleasing little picture. Mr. Hurlstone’s ‘ Italian 
 Boy,’ and ‘ Girl with a Dog,’ are excellent ; and, in this pleasant 
 mood, for fear of falling into an angry fit on coming to look further 
 into the gallery, it will be as well to conclude. Wishing many 
 remembrances to Mrs. Bricabrac, and better luck to you in the 
 next emeute^ I beg here to bid you farewell, and entreat you to 
 accept the assurances of my distinguished consideration. 
 
 M. A. T. 
 
 Au Citoyen Brutus Napoleon Bricabrac, Refugie dJAvril^ Blesse 
 de Ma% Condamne de Juin^ Decore de Juillet^ etc.^ etc. Hotel 
 Dieu^ d Paris, 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OE GEOKGE 
 CEUIKSHANK.^ 
 
 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK’S WORKS. 
 
 1. The Humourist. A Collection of Entertaining Tales, Anecdotes, 
 
 Epigrams, Bon Mots, etc. J. Robins and Co. London, 1819. 
 
 2. The Political House that Jack Built. With Thirteen Cuts ; Forty- 
 
 seventh Edition. William Hone. 1819. 
 o. The Queen^s Matrimonial Ladder; a National Toy, with Fourteen 
 Stc23 Scenes and Illustrations in Verse, and Eighteen other Cuts. 
 Forty-fourth Edition. W. Hone. 1820. 
 
 4. ^ Non mi ricordod With Cuts. Thirty-first Edition. William 
 
 Hone. 1820. 
 
 5. Boll Tear Sheets alias the Countess Me ne me rappelle pas,' a match 
 
 for ^ Non mi ricordo.' With Cuts by George Cruikshank. John 
 Fairburn. 1820. 
 
 6. The Political Showman. 'With Twenty-four Cuts. Twenty-first 
 
 Edition. William Hone. 1821. 
 
 7. Life in London ; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, 
 
 Esp , Corinthian Tom, and Boh Logic in their Hambies through the 
 Metropolis. By Pierce Egan, with Coloured Plates by G. and R. 
 Cruikshank. Sherwood. London, 1821. 
 
 8. A Slap at Slop and the Bridge Street Gang. With Twenty-seven 
 
 Cuts. William Hone. 1822. 
 
 9. Life in Paris ; or. The Rambles of Dick Wildfire, etc. Illustrated 
 
 by George Cruikshank. London, 1822. 
 
 10. Italian Tales of Humour, Gallantry and Romance. Selected and 
 
 translated from the Italian. With Sixteen Illustrative Drawings 
 by George Cruikshank. Charles Baldwyn. 8vo, London, 1824. 
 J. Robins. 1840, 
 
 11. Tales of Irish Life. Illustrative of the Manners, Customs, and 
 
 Condition of the People. With Designs by George Cruikshank. 
 J. Robins. London, 2 vols., 1824. 
 
 ^ [The Westminster Review, June 1840.] 
 
 28 
 
ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 
 
 29 
 
 12. Points of Humour {Pieces partly original and selected). 
 
 Illustrated by a Series of Plates Drawn and Engraved by George 
 Cruiksliank. Parts 1 and 2. 0. Baldwyn. London, 1824. 
 
 13. Peter Schlemihl. A New Translation from the German, 8vo. 
 
 Whittaker. London, 1824. 
 
 14. Popular German Stories. Translated from the Kinder- und Haus- 
 
 Maerchen^ collected by M. M. Grimm from oral tradition. James 
 Robins and Co. London, 1825. 
 
 15. The Universal Songster, or, Museum of Mirth, With Illustrations 
 
 by George Cruikshank. Fairburn. London, 1825. 
 
 16. Mornings at Bow Street. With Illustrations by George Cruikshank. 
 
 Wheatley and Adlard. London, 1825. 
 
 17. More Mornings at Bow Street. With Twenty-five Illustrations by 
 
 George Cruikshank. J. Robins and Co. London, 1827. 
 
 18. iPans of Iceland. A Tale. With Four highly-finished Etchings by 
 
 George Cruikshank. Price, 7s. 6d. J. Robins. 
 
 19. Greenwich Hospital, A Series of Naval Sketches descriptive of the 
 
 Life of a Man of Wars Man. By an Old Sailor. With Illustra- 
 tions by George Cruikshank. J. Robins and Co. London, 
 1826. 
 
 20. Three Courses and a Dessert. With Decorations by George Cruik- 
 
 shank. Vizetelly and Co. London, 1830. 
 
 21. Tales of Other Days. With Illustrations by George Cruikshauk. 
 
 Effingham Wilson. London, 1830. 
 
 22. The Gentleman i7i Black, With Illustratious by George Cruikshank. 
 
 William Kidd. London, 1831. Daly, 1840. 
 
 23. Tom Thumb; and Bomhastes Furioso. Illustrated by George 
 
 Cruikshank. Reprinted in Thomas’s Burlesque Drama. Thomas. 
 London. 
 
 24. Sunday in London, Illustrated in Fourteen Cuts by George Cruik- 
 
 shank, and a few words by a friend of his, with a copy of Sir 
 Andrew Agnew's Bill. E. Wilson. London, 1833. Darton and 
 Clark, 1840. 
 
 25. Mirth and Morality. A Collection of Original Tales by Carlton 
 
 Bruce. Embellished with Engravings by George Cruikshank. 
 Tegg. London, 1835. 
 
 26. The Comic Almanac, from 1835 to 1840 ; containing Seventy-two 
 
 Plates on Steel, two vols. 17s. bound. C. Tilt. 
 
 27. The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. With Twelve Humorous 
 
 Plates, neatly bound in cloth; price 2s. C. Tilt. 
 
 28. My Sketch Book; containing Two Hundred Groups. Cloth, 15s. 
 
 plain ; 21s. coloured. C. Tilt. 
 
 29. More Hints on Etiquette. With Humorous Guts, 2s. 6d. C. Tilt. 
 
 30. The Comic Alphabet. Twenty-four Plates. 2s. 6d. plain ; 4s. 
 
 coloured. C. Tilt. 
 
!0 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 31. Scraps and Sketches, In four Parts, 8s, each. C. Tilt. 
 
 32. Illustrations of Phrenology, 8s. C. Tilt. 
 
 33. Illustrations of Time. 8s. C. Tilt. 
 
 34. Demonology and Witchcraft. In Twelve Plates. 2s. sewed. C. 
 
 Tilt. 
 
 35. Illustrations of the English Novelists; containing Humorous Scenes 
 
 from Humphrey Clinker, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, 
 Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Vicar of Wakefield, etc., etc. Forty- 
 one Plates, with Descriptive Extracts, 7s. cloth. C. Tilt. 
 
 36. The Bee and the Wasp. A Comic Tale. Four Plates, Is. C. 
 
 Tilt. 
 
 37. Hood's ^ Epping Hunt.' Six Engravings by G. Cruikshank. New 
 
 and Cheap Edition. Price, Is. 6d. C. Tilt. 
 
 38. Coioper's ‘ John Gilpin ' ; with Six Engravings. Price, Is. C. Tilt. 
 
 39. Punch and Judy, ^yith Illustrations by George Cruikshank. 
 
 Septimus Prowitt. London, 1828. 
 
 40. Bentley s Miscellany. Vols. I. to YI. Richard Bentley. London. 
 
 41. Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. Edited by Boz, with Illustrations by 
 
 George Cruikshank. 2 vols. 8vo. R. Bentley. London, 1838. 
 
 42. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy s Progress. By ‘ Boz.’ 3 vols. R. 
 
 Bentley. London, 1838. 
 
 43. Minor Morals for Young People. By John Bowring. With Illustra- 
 
 tions by George Cruikshank. Parts I., II., and III. W. Tait. 
 Edinburgh, 1839. 
 
 44. Sketches hy Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. 8vo. Chap- 
 
 man and Hall. London, 1839. 
 
 45. Jack Sheppard; a Romance. By W. H. Ainsworth, Esq. With 
 
 Twenty-seven Illustrations by George Cruikshank. R. Bentley. 
 8vo. London, 1840. 
 
 46. The Toiver of London ; an Historical Romance. By W. H. Ains- 
 
 worth. With Illustrations on Steel and Wood by G. Cruikshank. 
 Parts I. to V. Richard Bentley. London, 8vo. 1840. 
 
MAY — OLD MAY DAY 
 
32 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 GEOEGE CRUIKSHANK. 
 
 Accusations of ingratitude, and just accusations no doubt, are 
 made against every inhabitant of this wicked world, and the fact 
 is, that a man who is ceaselessly engaged in its trouble and 
 turmoil, borne hither and thither upon the fierce waves of the 
 crowd, bustling, shifting, struggling to keep himself somewhat 
 above water — fighting for reputation, or more likely for bread, and 
 ceaselessly occupied to-day with plans for appeasing the eternal 
 appetite of inevitable hunger to-morrow — a man in such straits 
 has hardly time to think of anything but himself, and, as in a 
 sinking ship, must make his own rush for the boats, and fight, 
 struggle, and trample for safety. In the midst of such a combat 
 as this, the ‘ingenuous arts, which prevent the ferocity of the 
 manners, and act upon them as an emollient ’ (as the philosophic 
 bard remarks in the Latin Grammar) are likely to be jostled to 
 death, and then forgotten. The world will allow no such com- 
 promises between it and that which does not belong to it — no two 
 gods must we serve ; but (as one has seen in some old portraits) 
 the horrible glazed eyes of Necessity are always fixed upon you ; 
 fly away as you will, black Care sits behind you, and with his 
 ceaseless gloomy croaking drowns the voice of all more cheerful 
 companions. Happy he whose fortune has placed him where there 
 is calm and plenty, and who has the wisdom not to give up his 
 quiet in quest of visionary gain. 
 
 Here is, no doubt, the reason why a man, after the period of 
 his boyhood, or first youth, makes so few friends. Want and 
 ambition (new acquaintances which are introduced to him along 
 with his beard) thrust away all other society from him. Some 
 old friends remain, it is true, but these are become as a habit — a 
 part of your selfishness — and, for new ones, they are selfish as you 
 are ; neither member of the new partnership has the capital of 
 affection and kindly feeling, or can even afford the time that is 
 requisite for the establishment of the new firm. Damp and chill 
 the shades of the prison-house begin to close round us, and that 
 ‘ vision splendid ’ which has accompanied our steps in our journey 
 daily farther from the east, fades away and dies into the light of 
 common day. 
 
 And what a common day ! what a foggy, dull, shivering 
 apology for light is this kind of muddy twilight through which we 
 ave about to tramp and flounder for the rest of our existence. 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 33 
 
 wandering farther and farther from the beauty and freshness and 
 from the kindly gushing springs of clear gladness that made all 
 around us green in our youth ! One wanders and gropes in a 
 slough of stock-jobbing, one sinks or rises in a storm of politics, 
 and in either case it is as good to fall as to rise — to mount a 
 bubble on the crest of the wave, as to sink a stone to the bottom. 
 
 The reader who has seen the name affixed to the head of this 
 article did scarcely expect to be entertained with a declamation 
 upon ingratitude, youth and the vanity of human pursuits, which 
 may seem at first sight to have little to do with the subject in 
 hand. But (although we reserve the privilege of discoursing upon 
 whatever subject shall suit us, and by no means admit the public 
 has any right to ask in our sentences for any meaning, or any 
 connexion whatever) it happens that, in this particular instance, 
 there is an undoubted connexion. In Susaif s case, as recorded by 
 Wordsworth, what connexion had the corner of Wood Street with 
 a mountain ascending, a vision of trees, and a nest by the Dove ? 
 Why should the song of a thrush cause bright volumes of vapour 
 to glide through Lothbury and a river to flow on through the vale 
 of Cheapside ? As she stood at that corner of Wood Street, a mop 
 and a pail in her hand most likely, she heard the bird singing, and 
 straightway began pining and yearning for the days of her youth, 
 forgetting the proper business of the pail and mop. Even so we 
 are moved by the sight of some of Mr. Cruikshank's works — 
 the ‘ husen fuhlt sick jugendlicli erscliuUert^^ the ‘ schwanhende 
 Gestalten^ of youth flit before one again — Cruikshank’s thrush 
 begins to pipe and carol, as in the days of boyhood ; hence misty 
 moralities, reflections, and sad and pleasant remembrances arise. 
 He is the friend of the young especially. Have we not read all 
 the story-books that his wonderful pencil has illustrated ? Did 
 we not forego tarts, in order to buy his ‘Breaking-up,^ or his 
 ‘ Fashionable Monstrosities,^ of the year eighteen hundred and 
 something ? Have we not before us, at this very moment, a print 
 — one of the admirable ‘ Illustrations of Phrenology ’ — which entire 
 work was purchased by a joint stock company of boys, each 
 drawing lots afterwards for the separate prints, and taking his 
 choice in rotation ? The writer of this, too, had the honour of 
 drawing the first lot, and seized immediately upon ‘ Philopro- 
 genitiveness ’ — a marvellous print (our copy is not at all improved 
 by being coloured, which operation we performed on it ourselves) 
 — a marvellous print, indeed, — full of ingenuity and fine jovial 
 humour. A father, possessor of an enormous nose and family, is 
 surrounded by the latter, who are, some of them, embracing the 
 former. The composition writhes and twists about like the 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 CKITICAL PAPERS IlST ART 
 
 Kermes of Rubens. No less than seven little men and women in 
 night-caps, in frocks, in bibs, in breeches, are clambering about 
 the head, knees, and arms of the man with the nose ; their 
 noses, too, are preternaturally developed — the twins in the cradle 
 have noses of the most considerable kind : the second daughter, 
 who is watching them ; the youngest but two, who sits squalling 
 in a certain wicker chair ; the eldest son, who is yawning ; the 
 eldest daughter, who is preparing with the gravy of two mutton 
 chops a savory dish of Yorkshire pudding for eighteen persons ; 
 the youths who are examining her operations (one a literary gentle- 
 man, in a remarkably neat night-cap and pinafore, who has just 
 had his finger in the pudding) ; the genius who is at work on the 
 slate, and the two honest lads who are hugging the good-humoured 
 washerwoman, their mother — all, all, save this worthy woman, 
 have noses of the largest size. Not handsome certainly are they, 
 and yet everybody must be charmed with the picture. It is full of 
 grotesque beauty. The artist has at the back of his own skull, 
 we are certain, a huge bump of philoprogenitiveness. He loves 
 children in his heart ; every one of those he has drawn is perfectly 
 happy, and jovial, and affectionate, and innocent as possible. He 
 makes them with large noses, but he loves them, and you always 
 find something kind in the midst of his humour, and the ugliness 
 redeemed by a sly touch of beauty. The smiling mother reconciles 
 one with all the hideous family ; they h^ve all something of the 
 mother in them — something kind, and generous, and tender. 
 
 KnighPs, in Sweeting’s Alley ; Fairburn’s, in a court off Ludgate 
 Hill ; Hone’s, in Fleet Street — bright, enchanted palaces, which 
 George Cruikshank used to people with grinning, fantastical imps, 
 and merry, harmless sprites — where are they? Fairburn’s shop 
 knows him no more ; not only has Knight disappeared from 
 Sweeting’s Alley, but, as we are given to understand. Sweeting’s 
 Alley has disappeared from the face of the globe — Slop, the 
 atrocious Castlereagh, the sainted Caroline (in a tight pelisse, 
 with feathers in her head), the ‘ Dandy of sixty ’ who used to 
 glance at us from Hone’s friendly windows — where are they? 
 Mr. Cruikshank may have drawn a thousand better things since 
 the days when these were ; but they are to us a thousand times 
 more pleasing than anything else he has done. How we used to 
 believe in them? to stray miles out of the way on holidays, in 
 order to ponder for an hour before that delightful window in 
 Sweeting’s Alley ! in walks through Fleet Street, to vanish abruptly 
 down Fairburn s passage, and there make one at his ‘ charming 
 gratis ’ exhibition. There used to be a crowd round the window 
 in those days of grinning, good-natured mechanics, who spelt the 
 
ATT ESSAY OTT THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 35 
 
 songs, and spoke them out for the benefit of the company, and 
 who received the points of humour with a general sympathising 
 roar. Where are these people now ? You never hear any laughing 
 at H.B. ; his pictures are a great deal too genteel for that — polite 
 points of wit, which strike one as exceedingly clever and pretty, 
 and cause one to smile in a quiet, gentlemanlike kind of way. 
 
 There must be no smiling with Cruikshank. A man who 
 does not laugh outright is a dullard, and has no heart ; even the 
 old Dandy of sixty must have laughed at his own wondrous 
 grotesque image, as they say Louis Philippe did, who saw all the 
 caricatures that were made of himself. And there are some of 
 Cruikshank’s designs which have the blessed faculty of creating 
 laughter as often as you see them. As Diggory says in the play, 
 who is bidden by his master not to laugh while waiting at table 
 — ‘ Don’t tell the story of Grouse in the Gun-room, master, or I 
 can’t help laughing.’ Repeat that history ever so often, and at 
 the proper moment, honest Diggory is sure to explode. Every 
 man, no doubt, who loves Cruikshank has his Grouse in the Gun- 
 room. There is a fellow in the ‘Points of Humour’ who is offering 
 to eat up a certain little general, that has made us happy any 
 time these sixteen years ; his huge mouth is a perpetual well of 
 laughter — buckets full of fun can be drawn from it. We have 
 formed no such friendships as that boyish one of the man with 
 the mouth. But though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached 
 his apogee some eighteen years since, it must not be imagined 
 that such is really the case. Eighteen sets of children have since 
 then learned to love and admire him, and may many more of 
 their successors be brought up in the same delightful faith. It 
 is not the artist who fails, but the men who grow cold — the men, 
 from whom the illusions (why illusions ? realities) of youth dis- 
 appear one by one ; who have no leisure to be happy, no blessed 
 holidays, but only fresh cares at Midsummer and Christmas, 
 being the inevitable seasons which bring us bills instead of 
 pleasures. Tom, who comes bounding home from school, has 
 the doctor’s account in his trunk, and his father goes to sleep at 
 the pantomime to which he takes him. Pater infelix^ you too 
 have laughed at clown, and the magic wand of spangled harlequin ; 
 what delightful enchantment did it wave around you, in the 
 golden days ‘ when George the Third was king ! ’ But our clown 
 lies in his grave ; and our harlequin, Ellar, prince of how many 
 enchanted islands, was he not at Bow Street the other day, at 
 Bow Street, in his dirty, tattered, faded motley — seized as a law- 
 breaker, for acting at a penny theatre, after having well-nigh 
 starved in the streets, where nobody would listen to his old guitar. 
 
36 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 No one gave a shilling to bless him, not one of us who owe him 
 so much. 
 
 We know not if Mr. Cruikshank will be very well pleased at 
 finding his name in such company as that of Clown and Harlequin, 
 but he, like them, is certainly the children’s friend. His drawings 
 abound in feeling for these little ones, and hideous, as in the 
 course of his duty, he is from time to time compelled to design 
 them, he never sketches one without a certain pity for it, and 
 imparting to the figure a certain grotesque grace. In happy 
 school-boys he revels ; plum-pudding and holidays his needle has 
 engraved over and over again ; — there is a design in one of the 
 Comic Almanacs of some young gentlemen who are employed in 
 administering to a schoolfellow the correction of the pump, which 
 is as graceful and elegant as a drawing of Stothard. Dull books 
 about children George Cruikshank makes bright with illustrations 
 —there is one published by the ingenious and opulent Mr. Tegg, 
 of Cheapside, from which we should have been charmed to steal 
 a few wood-cuts. It is entitled ‘ Mirth and Morality,’ the mirth 
 being, for the most part, on the side of the designer — the morality, 
 unexceptionable certainly, the author’s capital. Here are then, 
 to these moralities, a smiling train of mirths supplied by George 
 Cruikshank — see yonder little fellows butterfly-hunting across a 
 common ! Such a light, brisk, airy, gentleman-like drawing was 
 never made upon such a theme. Who, cries the author, 
 
 Who has not chased the butterfly 
 
 And crushed its slender legs and wings, 
 
 And heaved a moralising sigh ; 
 
 Alas ! how frail are human things ? 
 
 A very unexceptionable morality truly, but it would have puzzled 
 another than George Cruikshank to make mirth out of it as he 
 has done. Away, surely not on the wings of these verses, Cruik- 
 shank’s imagination begins to soar ; and he makes us three 
 darling little men on a green common, backed by old farm-houses, 
 somewhere about May. A great mixture of blue and clouds in 
 the air, a strong fresh breeze stirring, Tom’s jacket flapping in 
 the same, in order to bring down the insect queen or king of 
 spring that is fluttering above him,— he renders all this with a 
 few strokes on a little block of wood not two inches square, upon 
 which one may gaze for hours, so merry and life-like a scene does 
 it present. What a charming creative power is this, what a 
 privilege — to be a god, and create little worlds upon paper, and 
 whole generations of smiling, jovial men, women, and children 
 half-inch high, whose portraits are carried abroad, and have the 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 37 
 
 faculty of making us monsters of six feet curious and happy in 
 our turn. Now, who would imagine that an artist could make 
 anything of such a subject as this? The writer begins by stating — 
 
 I love to go back to the days of my youth, 
 
 And to reckon my joys to the letter, 
 
 And to count o’er the friends that I have in the world, 
 
 Ay, and those %oho are gone to a better . 
 
 This brings him to the consideration of his uncle. ‘ Of all the 
 men I have ever known,’ says he, ‘ my uncle united the greatest 
 degree of cheerfulness with the sobriety of manhood. Though a 
 man when I was a boy, he was yet one of the most agreeable 
 companions I ever possessed. ... He embarked for America, 
 and nearly twenty years passed by before he came back again ; . . . 
 but oh, how altered ! — he was in every sense of the word an old 
 man, his body and mind were enfeebled, and second childishness 
 had come upon him. How often have I bent over him, vainly 
 endeavouring to recal to his memory the scenes we had shared 
 together ; and how frequently, with an aching heart, have I gazed 
 on his vacant and lustreless eye while he has amused himself in 
 clapping his hands and singing with a quavering voice a verse of 
 a psalm.’ Alas ! such are the consequences of long residences in 
 America, and of old age even in uncles ! Well, the point of this 
 morality is, that the uncle one day in the morning of life vowed 
 that he would catch his two nephews and tie them together, ay, 
 and actually did so, for all the efforts the rogues made to run 
 away from him ; but he was so fatigued that he declared he never 
 would make the attempt again, whereupon the nephew remarks, 
 — ‘ Often since then, when engaged in enterprises beyond my 
 strength, have I called to mind the determination of my uncle.’ 
 
 Does it not seem impossible to make a picture out of this ? 
 And yet George Cruikshank has produced a charming design, in 
 which the uncles and nephews are so prettily portrayed that one 
 is reconciled to their existence, with all their moralities. Many 
 more of the mirths in this little book are excellent, especially a 
 great figure of a parson entering church on horseback, — an 
 enormous parson truly, calm, unconscious, unwieldy. As Zeuxis 
 had a bevy of virgins in order to make his famous picture — his 
 express virgin, a clerical host must have passed under Cruikshank’s 
 eyes before he sketched this little, enormous parson of parsons. 
 
 Being on the subject of children’s books, how shall we enough 
 praise the delightful German nursery tales, and Cruikshank’s 
 illustrations of them? We coupled his name with pantomime 
 awhile since, and sure never, pantomimes were more charming 
 
38 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 than these. Of all the artists that ever drew, from Michael 
 Angelo upwards, and downwards, Cruikshank was the man to 
 illustrate these tales, and give them just the proper admixture of 
 the grotesque, the wonderful, and the graceful. May all Mother 
 Bunch’s collection be similarly indebted to him ; may Jach the 
 Giant Killer^ may Tom Thumbs may Fuss in Boots be one 
 day revivified by his pencil. Is not Whittington sitting yet on 
 Highgate Hill, and poor Cinderella (in that sweetest of all fairy 
 stories) still pining in her lonely chimney-nook ? A man who has 
 a true affection for these delightful companions of his youth is 
 bound to be grateful to them if he can, and we pray Mr. Cruik- 
 shank to remember them. 
 
 It is folly to say that this or that kind of humour is too good 
 for the public, that only a chosen few can relish it. The best 
 humour that we know of has been as eagerly received by the 
 public as by the most delicate connoisseur. There is hardly a 
 man in England who can read but will laugh at Falstaff and the 
 humour of Joseph Andrews ; and honest Mr. Pickwick’s story 
 can be felt and loved by any person above the age of six. Some 
 may have a keener enjoyment of it than others, but all the world 
 can be merry over it, and is always ready to welcome it. The 
 best criterion of good-humour is success, and what a share of this 
 has Mr. Cruikshank had ! how many millions of mortals has he 
 made happy ! AVe have heard very profound persons talk philo- 
 sophically of the marvellous and mysterious manner in which he 
 has suited himself to the time — -fait vihrer la fibre pojmlaire (as 
 Napoleon boasted of himself), supplied a peculiar want felt at a 
 peculiar period, the simple secret of which is, as we take it, that 
 he, living amongst the public, has with them a general wide- 
 hearted sympathy, that he laughs at what they laugh at, that he 
 has a kindly spirit of enjoyment, with not a morsel of mysticism 
 in his composition ; that he pities and loves the poor, and jokes 
 at the follies of the great, and that he addresses all in a perfectly 
 sincere and manly way. To be greatly successful as a professional 
 humourist, as in any other calling, a man must be quite honest, 
 and show that his heart is in his work. A bad preacher will get 
 admiration and a hearing with this point in his favour, where a 
 man of three times his acquirements will only find indifference 
 and coldness. Is any man more remarkable than our artist for 
 telling the truth after his own manner? Hogarth’s honesty of 
 purpose was as conspicuous in an earlier time, and we fancy that 
 Gilray would have been far more successful and more powerful 
 but for that unhappy bribe, which turned the whole course of his 
 humour into an unnatural channel. Cruikshank would not for 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 39 
 
 any bribe say what he did not think, or lend his aid to sneer 
 down anything meritorious, or to praise anything or person that 
 deserves censure. When he levelled his wit against the Regent, 
 and did his very prettiest for the Princess, he most certainly 
 believed, along with the great body of the people whom he re- 
 presents, that the Princess was the most spotless, pure-mannered 
 darling of a Princess that ever married a heartless debauchee of a 
 Prince Royal. Did not millions believe with him, and noble and 
 learned lords take their oaths to her Royal Highness’s innocence ? 
 Cruikshank would not stand by and see a woman ill-used, and so 
 struck in for her rescue, he and the people belabouring with all 
 their might the party who were making the attack, and deter- 
 mining, from pure sympathy and indignation, that the woman 
 must be innocent because her husband treated her so foully. 
 
 To be sure we have never heard so much from Mr. Cruik- 
 shank’s own lips, but any man who will examine these odd 
 drawings, which first made him famous, will see what an honest, 
 hearty hatred the champion of woman has for all who abuse her, 
 and will admire the energy with which he flings his wood-blocks 
 at all who side against her. Canning, Castlereagh, Bexley, Sid- 
 mouth, he is at them, one and all ; and as for the Prince, up to 
 what a whipping-post of ridicule did he tie that unfortunate old 
 man. And do not let squeamish Tories cry out about disloyalty ; 
 if the crown does wrong, the crown must be corrected by the 
 nation, out of respect, of course, for the crown. In those days, 
 and by those people who so bitterly attacked the son, no word 
 was ever breathed against the father, simply because he was a 
 good husband, and a sober, thrifty, pious, orderly man. 
 
 This attack upon the Prince Regent we believe to have been 
 Mr. Cruikshank’s only effort as a party politician. Some early 
 manifestoes against Napoleon we find, it is true, done in the 
 regular John Bull style, with the Gilray model for the little up- 
 start Corsican ; but as soon as the Emperor had yielded to stern 
 fortune our artist’s heart relented (as B^ranger’s did on the other 
 side of the water), and many of our readers will doubtless recollect 
 a fine drawing of ‘ Louis XYIII. trying on Napoleon’s boots,’ which 
 did not certainly fit the gouty son of Saint Louis. Such satirical 
 hits as these, however, must not be considered as political, or as 
 anything more than the expression of the artist’s national British 
 idea of Frenchmen. 
 
 It must be confessed that for that great nation Mr. Cruikshank 
 entertains a considerable contempt. Let the reader examine the 
 Life in Paris^ or the five hundred designs in which Frenchmen 
 are introduced, and he will find them almost invariably thin, with 
 
40 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 ludicrous spindle-shanks, pigtails, outstretched hands, shrugging 
 shoulders, and queer hair and moustachios. He has the British 
 idea of a Frenchman, and if he does not believe that the inhabitants 
 of France are for the most part dancing-masters and barbers, yet 
 takes care to depict such in preference, and would not speak too 
 well of them. It is curious how these traditions endure. In 
 France, at the present moment, the Englishman on the stage is 
 the caricatured Englishman at the time of the war, with a shock 
 red head, a long white coat, and invariable gaiters. Those who 
 wish to study this subject should peruse Monsieur Paul de Kock’s 
 histories of Lord Boulingrog and Lady Crochmilove, On the 
 other hand, the old emigre has taken his station amongst us, and 
 we doubt if a good British Gallery would understand that such 
 and such a character ivas a Frenchman unless he appeared in the 
 ancient traditional costume. 
 
 A curious book, called Life in Paris, published in 1822, con- 
 tains a number of the artistes plates in the aquatint style ; and 
 though we believe he had never been in that capital, the designs 
 have a great deal of life in them, and pass muster very well. We 
 had thoughts of giving a few copies of French heads from this 
 book and others, which would amply show Mr. Cruikshank's anti- 
 Gallican spirit. A villainous race of shoulder-shrugging mortals 
 are his Frenchmen indeed. And the heroes of the tale, a certain 
 Mr. Dick Wildfire, Squire Jenkins, and Captain O'Shuffleton, are 
 made to show the true British superiority on every occasion when 
 Britons and French are brought together. This book was one 
 among the many that the designer’s genius has caused to be 
 popular ; the plates are not carefully executed, but, being coloured, 
 have a pleasant, lively look. The same style was adopted in the 
 once famous book called Tom and Jerry, or, IJfe in London, 
 which must have a word of notice here, for, although by no means 
 Mr. Oruikshank’s best work, his reputation was extraordinarily 
 raised by it. Tom and Jerry were as popular twenty years since 
 as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller now are ; and often have we 
 wished, while reading the biographies of the latter celebrated per- 
 sonages, that they had been described as well by Mr. Cruikshank’s 
 pencil as by Mr. Dickens’s pen. 
 
 As for Tom and Jerry, to show the mutability of human affairs 
 and the evanescent nature of reputation, we have been to the 
 British Museum and no less than five circulating libraries in quest 
 of the book, and Life in London, alas, is not to be found at any 
 one of them. We can only, therefore, speak of the work from 
 recollection, hut have still a very clear remembrance of the leather 
 gaiters of Jerry Hawthorn, the green spectacles of Logic, and the 
 
AK ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 41 
 
 hooked nose of Corinthian Tom. They were the schoolboys’ 
 delight ; and in the days when the work appeared we firmly 
 believed the three heroes aboved named to be types of the most 
 elegant, fashionable young fellows the town afibrded, and thought 
 their occupations and amusements were those of all high-bred 
 English gentlemen. Tom knocking down the watchman at 
 Temple Bar; Tom and Jerry dancing at Almack’s ; or flirting in 
 the saloon at the theatre ; at the night-houses, after the play ; at 
 Tom Oribb’s, examining the silver cup then in the possession of 
 that champion ; at Bob Logic’s chambers, where, if we mistake 
 not, ‘ Corinthian Kate ’ was at a cabinet piano, singing a song ; 
 ambling gallantly in Rotten Row, or examining the poor fellow 
 at Newgate who was having his chains knocked off* before hang- 
 ing ; all these scenes remain indelibly engraved upon the mind, 
 and so far we are independent of all the circulating libraries in 
 London. 
 
 As to the literary contents of the book, they have passed sheer 
 away. It was, most likely, not particularly refined ; nay, the 
 chances are that it was absolutely vulgar. But it must have had 
 some merit of its own, that is clear ; it must have given striking 
 descriptions of life in some part or other of London, for all London 
 read it, and went to see it in its dramatic shape. The artist, it is 
 said, wished to close the career of the three heroes by bringing 
 them all to ruin, but the writer, or publishers, would not allow 
 any such melancholy subjects to dash the merriment of the public, 
 and we believe Tom, Jerry, and Logic were married off* at the end 
 of the tale, as if they had been the most moral personages in the 
 world. There is some goodness in this pity which authors and 
 the public are disposed to show towards certain agreeable, dis- 
 reputable characters of romance. Who would mar the prospects 
 of honest Roderick Random, or Charles Surface, or Tom Jones ? 
 only a very stern moralist indeed. And in regard of Jerry Haw- 
 thorn and that hero without a surname, Corinthian Tom, Mr. 
 Cruikshank, we make little doubt, was glad in his heart that he 
 w^as not allowed to have his own way. 
 
 Soon after the Tom and Jerry and the Life in Paris^ Mr. 
 Cruikshank produced a much more elaborate set of prints, in a 
 work which was called Points of Humour. These ‘ Points ’ were 
 selected from various comic works, and did not, we believe, extend 
 beyond a couple of numbers, containing about a score of copper- 
 plates. The collector of humorous designs cannot fail to have 
 them in his portfolio, for they contain some of the very best efforts 
 of Mr. Cruikshank’s genius, and though not quite so highly 
 laboured as some of his later productions, are none the worse, in 
 
42 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 our opinion, for their comparative want of finish. All the effects 
 are perfectly given, and the expression as good as it could be in 
 the most delicate engraving upon steel. The artist’s style, too, 
 was then completely formed ; and, for our parts, we should say 
 that we preferred his manner of 1825 to any other which he has 
 adopted since. The first picture, which is called ‘ The Point of 
 Honour,’ illustrates the old story of the officer who, on being 
 accused of cowardice for refusing to fight a duel, came among his 
 brother officers and flung a lighted grenade down upon the floor, 
 before which his comrades fled ignominiously. This design is 
 capital, and the outward rush of heroes, walking, trampling, twist- 
 ing, scuffling at the door, is in the best style of the grotesque. 
 You see but the back of most of these gentlemen, into which, 
 nevertheless, the artist has managed to throw an expression of 
 ludicrous agony that one could scarcely have expected to find in 
 such a part of the human figure. The next plate is not less good. 
 It represents a couple who, having been found one night tipsy, 
 and lying in the same gutter, were, by a charitable though mis- 
 guided gentleman, supposed to be man and wife, and put comfort- 
 ably to bed together. The morning came ; fancy the surprise of 
 this interesting pair when they awoke and discovered their situation. 
 Fancy the manner, too, in which Cruikshank has depicted them, 
 to which words cannot do justice. It is needless to state that 
 this fortuitous and temporary union was followed by one more 
 lasting and sentimental, and that these two worthy persons were 
 married, and lived happily ever after. 
 
 We should like to go through every one of these prints. There 
 is the jolly miller, who, returning home at night, calls upon his 
 wife to get him a supper, and falls too upon rashers of bacon and 
 ale. How he gormandises, that jolly miller ! rasher after rasher, 
 how they pass away frizzling and smoking from the gridiron down 
 that immense grinning gulf of a mouth. Poor wife ! how she 
 pines and frets at that untimely hour of midnight to be obliged 
 to fry, fry, fry perpetually, and minister to the monster’s appetite. 
 And yonder in the clock, what agonised face is that we see ? By 
 heavens, it is the squire of the parish. What business has he 
 there ? Let us not ask. Suffice it to say that he has, in the 
 hurry of the moment, left upstairs his br--, his — psha ! a part of 
 his dress, in short, with a number of bank-notes in the pockets. 
 Look in the next page, and you will see the ferocious, bacon- 
 devouring ruffian of a miller is actually causing this garment to 
 be carried through the village and cried by the town-crier. And 
 we blush to be obliged to say that the demoralised miller never 
 offered to return the bank-notes, although he was so mighty 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 43 
 
 scrupulous in endeavouring to find an owner for the corduroy 
 portfolio in which he had found them. 
 
 Passing from this painful subject we come, we regret to state, 
 to a series of prints representing personages not a whit more 
 moral. Burns’s famous Jolly Beggars have all had their 
 portraits drawn by Cruikshank. There is the lovely ‘hempen 
 widow,’ quite as interesting and romantic as the famous Mrs. 
 Sheppard, who has at the lamented demise of her husband 
 adopted the very same consolation. 
 
 My curse upon them every one, 
 
 They’ve hanged my braw John Highlandman ; 
 
 And now a widow I must mourn 
 Departed joys that ne’er return ; 
 
 No comfort hut a hearty can 
 When I think on John Highlandman. 
 
 Sweet ‘ raucle carlin,’ she has none of the sentimentality of the 
 English highwayman’s lady ; but being wooed by a tinker and 
 
 A pigmy scraper wi’ his fiddle, 
 
 Wha us’d at trystes and fairs to driddle, 
 
 prefers the practical to the merely musical man. The tinker sings 
 with a noble candour, worthy of a fellow of his strength of body 
 and station in life — 
 
 My bonnie lass, I work in brass, 
 
 A tinker is my station ; 
 
 I’ve travell’d round all Christian ground 
 In this my occupation : 
 
 I’ve ta’en the gold. I’ve been enroll’d 
 In many a noble squadron ; 
 
 But vain they search’d when off I march’d 
 To go an’ clout the cauldron. 
 
 It was his ruling passion. What was military glory to him, 
 forsooth ? He had the greatest contempt for it, and loved 
 freedom and his copper kettle a thousand times better— a kind of 
 hardware Diogenes. Of fiddling he has no better opinion. The 
 picture represents the ‘ sturdy caird ’ taking ‘ poor gut-scraper ’ by 
 the beard, — drawing his ‘ roosty rapier,’ and swearing to ‘ speet 
 him like a pliver ’ unless he would relinquish the bonnie lassie 
 for ever — 
 
 Wi’ ghastly e’e, poor tweedle-dee 
 Upon his hunkers bended. 
 
 An’ pray’d for grace wi’ ruefu’ face. 
 
 An’ so the quarrel ended. 
 
44 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Hark how the tinker apostrophises the violinist, stating to the 
 widow at the same time the advantages which she might expect 
 from an alliance with himself : — 
 
 Despise that shrimp, that withered imp, 
 
 Wi’ a’ his noise and caperin. 
 
 And take a share with those that bear 
 The budget an’ the apron ! 
 
 And by that stoup, my faith an’ houpe. 
 
 An’ by that dear Kilbaigie, 
 
 If e’er ye want, or meet wi’ scant, 
 
 ^lay I ne’er weet my craigie. 
 
 Cruikshank’s caird is a noble creature ; his face and figure 
 show him to be fully capable of doing and saying all that is 
 above written of him. 
 
 In the second part, the old tale of The Three Hunchhacked 
 Fiddlers is illustrated with equal felicity. The famous classical 
 dinners and duel in Peregrine Pickle are also excellent in their 
 way ; and the connoisseur of prints and etchings may see in the 
 latter plate, and in another in this volume, how great the artist’s 
 mechanical skill is as an etcher. The distant view of the city in 
 the duel, and of a market-place in The Quack Doctor^ are 
 delightful specimens of the artist’s skill in depicting buildings and 
 backgrounds. They are touched with a grace, truth, and 
 
 dexterity of workmanship that leave nothing to desire. We have 
 before mentioned the man with the mouth which appears in this 
 number, and should be glad to give a little vignette emblematical 
 of gout and indigestion, in which the artist has shown all the fancy 
 of Callot. Little demons, with long saws for noses, are making 
 dreadful incisions into the toes of the unhappy sufferer ; some are 
 bringing pans of hot coals to keep the wounded member warm ; 
 a huge, solemn nightmare sits on the invalid’s chest, staring 
 solemnly into his eyes ; a monster, with a pair of drumsticks, is 
 banging a devil’s tattoo on his forehead ; a.nd a pair of imps are 
 nailing great tenpenny nails into his hands to make his happiness 
 complete. 
 
 But, though not able to seize upon all we wish, we have been 
 able to provide a tolerably large Cruikshank gallery for the 
 reader’s amusement, and must hasten to show off our wares. 
 Like the worthy who figures below, there is such a choice of 
 pleasures here, that we are puzzled with which to begin. 
 
 The Cruikshank collector will recognise this old friend as 
 coming from the late Mr. Clark’s excellent work, l^hree Courses 
 
AUGUST — ^SIO OMNES’ 
 
PHILOPKOGENITIVENESS 
 
THE ELECTION FOR BEADLE. 
 
 P. 47 . 
 
the parish engine. 
 
 ■p 48. 
 
SCOTLAND YAUD, 
 
 49 . 
 
 E 
 
THE STREETS — MORNING. 
 
 P, 50 . 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 51 
 
 and a Dessert, The work was published at a time when the rage 
 for comic stories was not so great as it since has been, and Messrs. 
 Clark and Cruikshank only sold their hundreds where Messrs. 
 
 Dickens and Phiz dispose of their thousands. But if our recom- 
 mendation can in any way influence the reader, we would enjoin 
 him to have a copy of the Three Courses^ that contains some of 
 the best designs of our artist, and some of the most amusing tales 
 in our language. The invention of the pictures, for which Mr. 
 
 Clark takes credit to himself, says a great deal for his wit and 
 fancy. Can we, for instance, praise too highly the man who 
 invented this wonderful oyster ? 
 
6 ^ 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 Examine him well; his beard, his pearl, his little round 
 stomach, and his sweet smile. Only oysters know how to smile 
 in this way ; cool, gentle, waggish, and yet inexpressibly innocent 
 and winning. Dando himself must have allowed such an artless 
 native to go free, and consigned him to the glassy, cool, translucent 
 wave again. 
 
 In writing upon such subjects as these with which we have 
 been furnished, it can hardly be expected that we should follow 
 any fixed plan and order — we must therefore take such advantage 
 
 as we may, and seize upon our subject when and wherever we can 
 lay hold of him. 
 
 For Jews, sailors. Irishmen, Hessian boots, little boys, beadles, 
 policemen, tall Life-guardsmen, charity children, pumps, dustmen, 
 very short pantaloons, dandies in spectacles, and ladies with 
 aquiline noses, remarkably taper waists and wonderfully long 
 ringlets, Mr. Cruikshank has a special predilection. The tribe of 
 Israelites he has studied with amazing gusto ; witness the Jew in 
 Mr. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, and the immortal Fagin of 
 Oliver Twist, Whereabouts lies the comic vis in these persons 
 and things ? Why should a beadle be comic, and his opposite a 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 53 
 
 charity boy ? Why should a tall Life-guardsman have something 
 in him essentially absurd ? Why are short breeches more 
 ridiculous than long ? What is there particularly jocose about a 
 pump, and wherefore does a long nose always provoke the beholder 
 to laughter ? These points may be metaphysically elucidated by 
 those who list. It is probable that Mr. Cruikshank could not 
 give an accurate definition of that which is ridiculous in these 
 objects, but his instinct has told him that fun lurks in them, and 
 cold must be the heart that can pass by the pantaloons of his 
 charity boys, the Hessian boots of his dandies, and the fan-tail 
 hats of his dustmen, without respectful wonder. 
 
 We can submit to public notice a complete little gallery of 
 dustmen. Here is, in the first place, the professional dustman, 
 
 who, having in the enthusiastic exercise of his delightful trade, 
 laid hands upon property not strictly his own, is pursued, we 
 presume, by the right owner, from whom he flies as fast as his 
 crooked shanks will carry him. 
 
 What a curious picture it is — the horrid rickety houses in some 
 dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered 
 butcher, the very trees which are covered with dust — it is fine to 
 look at the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. 
 The fiery charioteer who belabours yonder poor donkey has still a 
 glance for his brother on foot, on whom punishment is about to 
 descend. And not a little curious is it to think of the creative 
 power of the man who has arranged this little tale of low life. 
 How logically it is conducted, how cleverly each one of the 
 accessories is made to contribute to the effect of the whole. What 
 a deal of thought and humour has the artist expended on this 
 
54 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 little block of wood ; a large picture might have been painted out 
 of the very same materials, which Mr. Cruikshank, out of his 
 wondrous fund of merriment and observation, can afford to throw 
 away upon a drawing not two inches long. From the practical 
 dustmen we pass to those purely poetical. Here are three of them 
 who rise on clouds of their own raising, the very genii of the 
 sack and shovel. 
 
 Is there no one to write a sonnet to these ? — and yet a whole 
 poem was written about Peter Bell the Waggoner, a character by 
 no means so poetic. 
 
 And lastly, we have the dustman in love, the honest fellow is 
 on the spectator’s right hand, and having seen a young beauty 
 stepping out of a gin-shop on a Sunday morning, is pressing 
 eagerly his suit. 
 
 Gin has furnished many subjects to Mr. Cruikshank, who 
 labours in his own sound and hearty way to teach his countrymen 
 the dangers of that drink. In the Sketch-Book is a plate upon the 
 subject, remarkable for fancy and beauty of design ; it is called the 
 ‘ Gin Juggernaut,’ and represents a hideous moving palace, with a 
 reeking still at the roof and vast gin-barrels for wheels, under 
 which unhappy millions are crushed to death. An immense black 
 cloud of desolation covers over the country through which the gin 
 monster had passed, dimly looming through the darkness whereof 
 you see an agreeable prospect of gibbets with men dangling, burnt 
 houses, etc. The vast cloud comes sweeping on in the wake of 
 this horrible body-crusher ; and you see, by way of contrast, a 
 distant, smiling, sunshiny tract of old English country, where gin 
 as yet is not known. The allegory is as good, as earnest, and as 
 fanciful as one of John Bunyan’s, and we have often fancied there 
 was a similarity between the men. 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 55 
 
 The reader will examine the work called My Sketch-Booh with 
 not a little amusement, and may gather from it, as we fancy, a 
 good deal of information regarding the character of the individual 
 man, George Cruikshank. What points strike his eye as a 
 painter ; what move his anger or admiration as a moralist ; what 
 classes he seems most especially disposed to observe, and what to 
 ridicule. There are quacks of all kinds, to whom he has a mortal 
 hatred ; quack dandies, who assume under his pencil, perhaps in 
 his eye, the most grotesque appearance possible — their hats grow 
 larger, their legs infinitely more crooked and lean ; the tassels of 
 
 their canes swell out to a most preposterous size ; the tails of 
 their coats dwindle away, and finish where coat tails generally 
 begin. Let us lay a wager that Cruikshank, a man of the people 
 if ever there was one, heartily hates and despises these supercilious, 
 swaggering young gentlemen ; and his contempt is not a whit the 
 less laudable because there may taut soit -pen of prejudice in it. 
 It is right and wholesome to scorn dandies, as Nelson said it was 
 to hate Frenchmen ; in which sentiment (as we have before said) 
 George Cruikshank undoubtedly shares. Look at this fellow 
 from the Sunday in London} 
 
 Monsieur the Chief is instructing a kitchen-maid how to com- 
 pound some rascally French kickshaw or the other — a pretty 
 
 ^ The following lines — ever fresh — by the author of Headlong 
 
50 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 scoundrel truly with what an air he wears that night-cap of his, 
 and shrugs his lank shoulders, and chatters, and ogles, and grins ; 
 they are all the same, these mounseers ; look at those other two 
 fellows — morbleu I one is putting his dirty fingers into the 
 saucepan ; there are frogs cooking in it, no doubt ; and see, just 
 over some other dish of abomination, another dirty rascal is taking 
 
 published years ago in the Globe and Traveller^ are an excellent comment on 
 several of the cuts from the Sunday in London : — 
 
 I 
 
 The poor man’s sins are glaring ; 
 
 In the face of ghostly warning 
 He is caught in the fact 
 Of an overt act, 
 
 Buying greens on Sunday morning. 
 
 II 
 
 The rich man’s sins are hidden 
 In the pomp of wealth and station, 
 And escape the sight 
 Of the children of light, 
 
 Who are wise in their generation. 
 
 III 
 
 The rich man has a kitchen, 
 
 And cooks to dress his dinner ; 
 
 The poor who would roast 
 To the baker’s must post. 
 
 And thus becomes a sinner. 
 
 IV 
 
 The rich man’s painted windows 
 Hide the concerts of the quality ; 
 
 The poor can but share 
 A crack’d fiddle in the air. 
 
 Which offends all sound morality . 
 
 V 
 
 The rich man has a cellar. 
 
 And a ready butler by him ; 
 
 The poor must steer 
 For his pint of beer 
 
 Where the saint can’t choose but spy him. 
 
 VI 
 
 The rich man is invisible 
 In the crowd of his gay society ; 
 
 But the poor man’s deliglit 
 Is a sore in the sight. 
 
 And a stench in the nose of piety. 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 57 
 
 snuff! Never mind, the sauce won’t be hurt by a few ingredients, 
 more or less. Three such fellows as these are not worth one 
 Englishman, that’s clear. See, there is one in the very midst of 
 them, the great burly fellow with the beef, he could beat all 
 three in five minutes. We cannot be certain that such was the 
 process going on in Mr. Cruikshank’s mind when he made the 
 
 design ; but some feelings of the sort were no doubt entertained 
 by him. 
 
 Against dandy footmen he is particularly severe. He hates 
 idlers, pretenders, boasters, and punishes these fellows as best he 
 may. Who does not recollect the famous picture, ‘ What is Taxes, 
 Thomas ? ’ What is taxes indeed ; well may that vast, over-fed, 
 lounging fiunky ask the question of his associate Thomas, and yet 
 
68 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 not well, for all that Thomas says in reply is, ‘ I don’t know.’ ‘ 0 
 heati plushicolcs,^ what a charming state of ignorance is yours 1 
 In the Sketch-Book many footmen make their appearance ; one is 
 a huge fat Hercules of a Portman Square porter, who calmly 
 surveys another poor fellow, a porter likewise, but out of livery, 
 who comes staggering forward with a box that Hercules might lift 
 with his little finger. Will Hercules do so ? not he. The giant 
 can carry nothing heavier than a cocked-hat note on a silver tray, 
 and his labours are to walk from his sentry-box to door, and from 
 the door back to his sentry-box, and to read the Sunday paper, and 
 to poke the hall fire twice or thrice, and to make five meals a 
 day. Such a fellow does Cruikshank hate and scorn worse even 
 than a Frenchman. 
 
 ‘ MISERABLE SINNERS ! ’ 
 
 The man’s master, too, comes in for no small share of our 
 artist’s wrath. See, here is a company of them at church, who 
 humbly designate themselves ‘ Miserable sinners ! ’ 
 
 Miserable sinners indeed ! 0 what floods of turtle -soup ; 
 
 what tons of turbot and lobster-sauce must have been sacrificed 
 to make those sinners properly miserable. My lady there, with 
 the ermine tippet and dragging feather, can we not see that she 
 lives in Portland Place, and is the wife of an East India Director '? 
 She has been to the Opera over-night (indeed her husband, on 
 her right, with his fat hand dangling over the pew-door, is at 
 this minute thinking of Mademoiselle Leocadie, whom he saw 
 behind the scenes) — she has been at the Opera over-night, which 
 
AN ESSAY ON TPIE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 59 
 
 with a trifle of supper afterwards— a white and brown soup, a 
 lobster salad, some woodcocks, and a little champagne — sent her 
 to bed quite comfortable. At half-past eight her maid brings 
 her chocolate in bed, at ten she has fresh eggs and muffins, with, 
 perhaps, a half-hundred of prawns for breakfast, and so can get 
 over the day and the sermon till lunch-time pretty well. What 
 an odour of musk and bergamot exhales from the pew ! — how it 
 is wadded and stuffed, and spangled over with brass nails ! what 
 hassocks are there for those who are not too fat to kneel ! what 
 a flustering and flapping of gilt prayer-books ; and what a pious 
 whirring of bible-leaves one hears all over the church, as the 
 doctor blandly gives out the text ! To be miserable at this rate 
 
 you must, at the very least, have four thousand a year; and 
 many persons are there so enamoured of grief and sin, that they 
 would willingly take the risk of the misery to have a life-interest 
 in the consols that accompany it, quite careless about consequences, 
 and sceptical as to the notion that a day is at hand when you 
 must fulfil your share of the bargain. 
 
 Our artist loves to joke at a soldier ; in whose livery there 
 appears to him to be something almost as ridiculous as in the 
 uniform of the gentleman of the shoulder-knot. Tall life-guards- 
 men and fierce grenadiers figure in many of his designs, and 
 almost always in a ridiculous way. Here again we have the 
 honest popular English feeling which jeers at pomp or pretension 
 of all kinds, and is especially jealous of all display of military 
 authority. ‘Raw Recruit,’ ‘ditto dressed,’ ditto ‘served up,’ as 
 
60 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 we see them in the Sketch-Book^ are so many satires upon the 
 army : Hodge with his ribbons flaunting in his hat, or with red 
 coat and musket, drilled stiff and pompous, or that last, minus 
 leg and arm, tottering about on crutches, do not fill our English 
 artist with the enthusiasm that follows the soldier in every other 
 part of Europe. Jeanjean, the conscript in France, is laughed 
 
 at, to be sure, but then it is because he is a bad soldier ; when 
 he comes to have a huge pair of moustachios and the croix 
 (Bhonneur to hriller on his 'poitrine cicatrisee^ Jeanjean becomes a 
 member of a class that is more respected than any other in the 
 French nation. The veteran soldier inspires our people with no 
 such awe — we hold that democratic weapon the fist in much 
 more honour than the sabre and bayonet, and laugh at a man 
 tricked out in scarlet and pipe-clay. Look at this regiment of 
 
ATT ESSAY OTT THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHAKK 61 
 
 heroes ‘ marching to divine service/ to the tune of ‘ The British 
 Grenadiers/ 
 
 There they march in state, and a pretty contempt our artist 
 shows for all their grimcracks and trumpery. He has drawn a 
 
 perfectly English scene — the little blackguard boys are playing 
 pranks round about the men, and shouting ‘heads up, soldier,^ 
 ‘ eyes right, lobster,^ as little British urchins will do. Did one 
 
62 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 ever hear the like sentiments expressed in France? Shade of 
 Napoleon, we insult you by asking the question. In England, 
 however, see how different the case is : and designedly or un- 
 designedly, the artist has opened to us a piece of his mind. Look 
 in the crowd — the only person who admires the soldiers is the 
 poor idiot, whose pocket a rogue is picking. Here is another 
 picture, in which the sentiment is much the same, only, as in 
 the former drawing we see Englishmen laughing at the troops 
 of the line, here are Irishmen giggling at the militia. 
 
 We have said that our artist has a great love for the drolleries 
 of the Green Island. Would any one doubt what was the 
 country of the merry fellows depicted in the following group ? 
 
 Place me amid O’Rourkes, O’Tooles, 
 
 The ragged, royal race of Tara ; 
 
 - Or place me where Dick Martin rules 
 The pathless wilds of Connemara. 
 
 We know not. if Mr. Cruikshank has ever had any such good 
 luck as to see the Irish in Ireland itself, but he certainly has 
 obtained a knowledge of their looks, as if the country had been 
 all his life familiar to him. Could Mr. O’Connell himself desire 
 anything more national than the following scene, or could Father 
 Matthew have a better text to preach upon ? 
 
 There is not a broken nose in the room that is not thoroughly 
 Irish. Here we have a couple of compositions treated in a 
 graver manner, as characteristic too as the other. 
 
 And with one more little Hibernian specimen we must bid 
 farewell to Ireland altogether, having many other pictures in 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 63 
 
 our gallery that deserve particular notice ; and we give this, not 
 so much for the comical look of poor Teague, who has been 
 
 pursued and beaten by the witch's stick, but in order to point 
 the singular neatness of the workmanship, and the pretty, fanciful, 
 
64 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 little glimpse of landscape that the artist has introduced in the 
 background. 
 
 Mr. Cruikshank has a fine eye for such homely landscapes, 
 and renders them with great delicacy and taste. Old villages, 
 farm -yards, groups of stack, queer chimneys, churches, gable- 
 
 ended cottages, Elizabethan mansion - houses, and other old 
 English scenes, he depicts with evident enthusiasm. 
 
 Famous books in their day were Cruikshank’s John Gilpin 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 65 
 
 and Epping Hunt ; for though our artist does not draw horses 
 very scientifically — to use a phrase of the atelier — he feels them 
 very keenly ; and his queer animals, after one is used to them, 
 answer quite as well as better. Neither is he very happy in 
 trees, and such rustical produce ; or rather, we should say, he 
 is very original, his trees being decidedly of his own make and 
 composition, not imitated from any master. Here is a notable 
 instance. 
 
 oirj Trep <pvXX(i)v y€V€7], roirj 8c Ka\ irnreiv : Trees or horse-flesh, 
 which is the worst ? it is impossible to say which is the most 
 villainous. 
 
 But what then ? Suppose yonder horned animal near the 
 postchaise has not a very bovine look, it matters not the least. 
 Can a man be supposed to imitate everything'! We know what 
 the noblest study of mankind is, and to this Mr. Cruikshank has 
 confined himself. Look at that postillion ; the people in the 
 
 F 
 
66 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 broken-down chaise are roaring after him; he is as deaf as the 
 post by which he passes. Suppose all the accessories were away, 
 could not one swear that the man was stone-deaf, beyond the 
 reach of trumpet ? What is the peculiar character in a deaf 
 man's physiognomy? — can any person define it satisfactorily in 
 words ?— not in pages, and Mr. Cruikshank has expressed it on a 
 piece of paper not so big as the tenth part of your thumb-nail. 
 The horses of John Gilpin are much more of the equestrian order, 
 and, as here, the artist has only his favourite suburban buildings 
 to draw ; not a word is to be said against his design. The inn 
 and old buildings in this cut are charmingly designed, and nothing 
 can be more prettily or playfully touched. 
 
 At Edmonton his loving wife 
 From the balcony spied 
 Her tender husband, wond’ring much 
 To see how he did ride. 
 
 ‘Stop, stop, John Gilpin ! Here’s the house ! ’ 
 They all at once did cry ; 
 
 ‘The dinner waits, and we are tired — 
 
 Said Gilpin — ‘So am I ! ’ 
 
A'N ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 67 
 
 Six gentlemen upon the road 
 Thus seeing Gilpin fly, 
 
 With post-boy scamp’ring in the rear, 
 
 They raised the hue and cry : — 
 
 ‘ Stop thief ! stop thief ! — a highwayman ! ’ 
 Not one of them was mute ; 
 
 And all and each that passed that way 
 Did join in the pursuit. 
 
 And now the turnpike gates again 
 Flew open in short space ; 
 
 The toll-men thinking, as before. 
 
 That Gilpin rode a race. 
 
 The rush, and shouting, and clatter are here excellently 
 depicted by the artist ; and we, who have been scoflhng at his 
 manner of designing animals, must here make a special exception 
 in favour of the hens and chickens ; each has a different action 
 and is curiously natural. 
 
 Happy are children of all ages who have such a ballad and 
 such pictures as this in store for them ! It is a comfort to think 
 that wood-cuts never wear out, and that the book still may be 
 had at Mr. Tilt’s for a shilling, for those who can command that 
 sum of money. 
 
 In The Epinng Hunt^ which we owe to the facetious pen of 
 
68 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 69 
 
 the portrait of Roundings the huntsman is an excellent sketch, 
 and a couple of the designs contain great humour. The first 
 represents the cockney hero, who ‘like a bird, was singing out 
 while sitting on a tree.’ 
 
 And in the second the natural order is reversed. The stag 
 having taken heart, is hunting the huntsman, and the Cheapside 
 Nimrod is most ignominiously running away. 
 
 The Easter Hunt, we are told, is no more; and as the 
 Quarterly Review recommends the British public to purchase 
 Mr. Gatlin’s pictures, as they form the only record of an interest- 
 
 ing race now rapidly passing away, in like manner we should 
 exhort all our friends to purchase Mr. Cruikshank’s designs of 
 another interesting race, that is run already and for the last time. 
 
 Besides these, we must mention, in the line of our duty, the 
 notable tragedies of Tom Thumb and Bomhastes Furioso^ both of 
 which have aj^peared with many illustrations by Mr. Cruikshank. 
 The ‘brave army’ of Bombastes exhibits a terrific display of 
 brutal force, which must shock the sensibilities of an English 
 radical. And we can well understand the caution of the general, 
 who bids this soldatesque effrenee to begone, and not to kick up 
 such a row. 
 
 Such a troop of lawless ruffians let loose upon a populous city 
 would play sad havoc in it ; and we fancy the massacres of 
 
70 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Birmingham renewed, or at least of Badajoz, which, though not 
 quite so dreadful, if we may believe his Grace the Duke of 
 Wellington, as the former scenes of slaughter, were nevertheless 
 severe enough ; but we must not venture upon any ill-timed 
 pleasantries in presence of the disturbed King Arthur, and the 
 awful ghost of Gaffer Thumb. 
 
 We are thus carried at once into the supernatural, and here 
 we find Cruikshank reigning supreme. He has invented in his 
 time a little comic pandemonium, peopled with the most droll, 
 good-natured fiends possible. We have before us Chamisso’s 
 
 Peter Schlemihl^ with Cruikshank’s designs translated into 
 German, and gaining nothing by the change. The Kinder- und 
 Haus-Maerchen of Grimm are likewise ornamented with a frontis- 
 piece, copied from that one which appeared to the amusing 
 version of the English work. The books on Phrenology and 
 Time have been imitated by the same nation, and even in France, 
 whither reputation travels more slowly than to any country except 
 China, we have seen copies of the works of George Cruikshank. 
 
 He in return has complimented the French by illustrating a 
 couple of lives of Napoleon, and the Life in Paris before 
 mentioned. He has also made designs for Victor Hugo’s Hans 
 of Iceland. Strange, wild etchings were those, on a strange, 
 mad subject ; not so good in our notion as the designs for the 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEOKGE CRUIKSHANE ?1 
 
 German books, the peculiar humour of which latter seemed to 
 suit the artist exactly. There is a mixture of the awful and the 
 ridiculous in these, which perpetually excites and keeps awake 
 th3 reader’s attention; the German writer and the English artist 
 seem to have an entire faith in their subject. The reader, no 
 doubt, remembers the awful passage in Feter Schlemihl where 
 the little gentleman purchases the shadow of that hero — ‘ “Have 
 the kindness, noble sir, to examine and try this bag.” He put 
 
 I his hand into his pocket, and drew thence a tolerably large bag 
 
 1 of Cordovan leather, to which a couple of thongs were fixed. I 
 
 I took it from him, and immediately counted ten gold pieces, and 
 ! ten more, and ten more, and still other ten, whereupon I held 
 
 ! out my hand to him. Done, said I, it is a bargain ; you shall 
 
 I have my shadow for your bag. The bargain was concluded : he 
 I knelt down before me, and I saw him with a wonderful neatness 
 take my shadow from head to foot, lightly lift it up from the 
 ' grass, roll and fold it up neatly, and at last pocket it. He then 
 I rose up, bowed to me once more, and walked away again, dis- 
 
72 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 appearing behind the rose-bushes. I don’t know, but I thought I 
 heard him laughing a little. I, however, kept fast hold of the 
 bag. Everything around me was bright in the sun, and as yet I 
 gave no thought to what I had done.’ 
 
 This marvellous event, narrated by Peter with such a faithful, 
 circumstantial detail, is painted by Cruikshank in the most 
 wonderful poetic way, with that happy mixture of the real and 
 supernatural that makes the narrative so curious, and like truth. 
 The sun is shining with the utmost brilliancy in a great quiet park 
 or garden ; there is a palace in the background ; and a statue 
 basking in the sun quite lonely and melancholy ; there is a sun- 
 dial, on which is a deep shadow, and in the front stands Peter 
 Schlemihl, bag in hand, the old gentleman is down on his knees 
 to him, and has just lifted off the ground the shadoiv of one leg ; 
 he is going to fold it back neatly as one does the tails of a coat, 
 and will stow it, without any creases or crumples, along with the 
 other black garments that lie in that immense pocket of his. 
 Cruikshank has designed all this as if he had a very serious belief 
 in the story ; he laughs, to be sure, but one fancies that he is a 
 little frightened in his heart, in spite of all his fun and 
 joking. 
 
 The German tales we have mentioned before. ‘ The Prince 
 riding on the Fox,’ ‘Hans in Luck,’ ‘The Fiddler and his Goose,’ 
 ‘ Heads off,’ are all drawings which, albeit not before us now, nor 
 seen for ten years, remain indelibly fixed on the memory — 
 ‘ heisst du etiua Rumpelstilzchen ? ’ There sits the queen on her 
 throne, surrounded by grinning beef-eaters, and little Rumpelstilts- 
 kin stamps his foot through the floor in the excess of his 
 tremendous despair. In one of these German tales, if we 
 remember rightly, there is an account of a little orphan who is 
 carried away by a pitying fairy for a term of seven years, and 
 passing that period of sweet apprenticeship among the imps and 
 sprites of fairyland. Has our artist been among the same 
 company, and brought back their portraits in his sketch-book? 
 He is the only designer fairyland has had. Callot’s imps, for all 
 their strangeness, are only of the earth earthy. Fuseli’s fairies 
 belong to the infernal regions ; they are monstrous, lurid, and 
 hideously melancholy. Mr. Cruikshank alone has had a true 
 insight into the character of the ‘ little people.’ They are some- 
 thing like men and women, and yet not flesh and blood ; they 
 are laughing and mischievous, but why we know not. Mr. 
 Cruikshank, however, has had some dream or the other, or else a 
 natural mysterious instinct (as the Seherin of Prevorst had for 
 beholding ghosts) or else some preternatural fairy revelation, 
 
ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 73 
 
 which has made him acquainted with the looks and ways of the 
 h ntastical subjects of Oberon and Titania. 
 
 We have, unfortunately, no fairy portraits in the gallery which 
 we have been enabled to provide for the public ; but, on the 
 other hand, can descend lower than fairyland, and have procured 
 some fine specimens of devils. One has already been raised, and 
 the reader has seen him tempting a fat Dutch burgomaster, in 
 ancient gloomy market-place, such as George Cruikshank can 
 draw as well as Mr. Front, Mr. Nash, or any man living. Here 
 is our friend once more ; our friend the burgomaster, in a highly 
 excited state, and running as hard as his great legs will carry 
 him, with our mutual enemy at his tail. 
 
 What are the bets? Will that long-legged bondholder of a 
 devil come up with the honest Dutchman ? It serves him right, 
 why did he put his name to stamped paper ? And yet we should 
 not wonder that some lucky chance will turn up in burgomaster’s 
 favour, and that his infernal creditor will lose his labour ; for one 
 so proverbially cunning as yonder tall individual with the saucer 
 eyes, it must be confessed that he has been very often out- 
 witted. 
 
 There is, for instance, the case of ^ The Gentleman in Black,’ 
 which has been illustrated by our artist. A young French gentle- 
 man, by name M. Desonge, who having expended his patrimony 
 in a variety of taverns and gaming-houses, was one day pondering 
 upon the exhausted state of his finances ; and utterly at a loss 
 to think how he should provide means for future support, ex- 
 claimed, very naturally, ^ What the devil shall I do ? ’ He had 
 no sooner spoken, when a Gentleman in Black made his 
 appearance, whose authentic portrait Mr. Cruikshank has had the 
 honour to paint. This gentleman produced a black-edged book 
 out of a black bag, some black-edged papers tied up with black 
 
74 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 crape, and sitting down familiarly opposite M. Desonge, began 
 conversing with him on the state of his affairs. 
 
 It is needless to state what was the result of the interview. 
 M. Desonge was induced by the gentleman to sign his name to 
 one of the black-edged papers, and found himself at the close of 
 the conversation to be possessed of an unlimited command of 
 capital. This arrangement completed, the Gentleman in Black 
 posted (in an extraordinarily rapid manner) from Paris to London, 
 there found a young English merchant in exactly the same 
 
 situation in which M. Desonge had been, and concluded a bargain 
 with the Briton of exactly the same nature. 
 
 The book goes on to relate how these young men spent the 
 money so miraculously handed over to them, and how both, when 
 the period drew near that was to witness the performance of their 
 part of the bargain, grew melancholy, wretched, nay, so absolutely 
 dishonourable as to seek for every means of breaking through 
 their agreement. The Englishman living in a country where the 
 lawyers are more astute than any other lawyers in the world, took 
 advice of a Mr. Bagsby, of Lyoffs Inn, whose name, as we cannot 
 find it in the ‘ Law List/ we presume to be fictitious. Who 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 75 
 
 could it be that was a match for the devil? ' Lord very 
 
 likely ; we shall not give his name, but let every reader of this 
 Review fill up the blank according to his own fancy, and on 
 comparing it with the copy purchased by his neighbours, he will 
 find that fifteen out of twenty have written down the same 
 honoured name. 
 
 Well, the Gentleman in Black was anxious for the fulfilment of 
 his bond. The parties met at Mr. Bagsby’s chambers, to consult, 
 the Black Gentleman foolishly thinking that he could act as his 
 own counsel and fearing no attorney alive. But mark the 
 
 superiority of British law, and see how the black pettifogger was 
 defeated. 
 
 Mr. Bagsby simply stated that he would take the case into 
 Chancery, and his antagonist, utterly humiliated and defeated, 
 refused to move a step farther in the matter. 
 
 And now the French gentleman, M. Desonge, hearing of his 
 friend^s escape, became anxious to be free from his own rash 
 engagements. He employed the same counsel who had been 
 successful in the former instance, but the Gentleman in Black 
 was a great deal wiser by this time, and whether M. Desonge 
 escaped, or whether he is now in that extensive place which is 
 
>. 76 . 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 77 
 
 paved with good intentions, we shall not say. Those who are 
 anxious to know had better purchase the book of Mr. Daly, of 
 Leicester Square, wherein all these interesting matters are duly 
 set down. We have one more diabolical picture in our budget, 
 engraved by Mr. Thompson, the same dexterous artist who has 
 rendered the former diahleries so well. 
 
 We may mention Mr. Thompson’s name as among the first of 
 the engravers to whom Cruikshank’s designs have been entrusted ; 
 and next to him (if we may be allowed to make such arbitrary 
 distinctions) we may place Mr. Williams ; and the reader is not 
 possibly aware of the immense difficulties to be overcome in the 
 
 rendering of these little sketches, which, traced by the designer 
 in a few hours, require weeks’ labour from the engraver. Mr. 
 Cruikshank has not been educated in the regular schools of 
 drawing, very luckily for him, as we think, and consequently has 
 had to make a manner for himself, which is quite unlike that of 
 any other draughtsman. There is nothing in the least mechanical 
 about it ; to produce his particular effects he uses his own 
 particular lines, which are queer, free, fantastical, and must be 
 followed in all their infinite twists and vagaries by the careful 
 tool of the engraver. Look at these three lovely smiling heads 
 for instance. 
 
 Let us examine them, not so much for the jovial humour and 
 wonderful variety of feature exhibited in these darling counte- 
 nances, as for the engraver’s part of the work. See the infinite 
 
 
78 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 delicate cross lines and hatchings which he is obliged to render ; 
 let him go, not a hair’s breadth, but the hundredth part of a 
 hair’s breadth, beyond the given line, and the feeling of it is 
 ruined. He receives these little dots and specks, and fantastical 
 quirks of the pencil, and cuts away with a little knife round each 
 nor too much nor too little. Antonio’s pound of flesh did not 
 puzzle the Jew so much ; and so well does the engraver succeed 
 at last, that we never remember to have met with a single artist 
 who did not vow that the wood-cutter had utterly ruined his 
 design. 
 
 Of Messrs. Thompson and Williams we have spoken as the 
 first engravers in point of rank ; however, the regulations of 
 professional precedence are certainly very difficult, and the rest of 
 
 their brethren we shall not endeavour to class. Why should the 
 artists who executed the cuts of the admirable ‘ Three Courses ’ 
 yield the pas to any one ? If the reader will turn back to the 
 second cut in p. 64, he will agree with us that it is a very 
 brilliant and faithful imitation of the artist’s manner, and admire 
 the pretty glimpse of landscape and the manner in which it is 
 rendered ; the oyster cut is likewise very delicately engraved, and 
 indeed we should be puzzled, were there no signatures, to assign 
 the prize at all. 
 
 Here, for instance, is an engraving by Mr. Landells, nearly as 
 good in our opinion as the very best woodcut that ever was made 
 after Cruikshank, and curiously happy in rendering the artist’s 
 peculiar manner : this cut does not come from the facetious 
 publications which we have consulted, and from which we have 
 borrowed ; but is a contribution by Mr. Cruikshank to an elaborate 
 and splendid botanical work upon the Orchidacese of Mexico, by 
 
80 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Mr. Bateman. Mr. Bateman dispatched some extremely choice 
 roots of this valuable plant to a friend in England, who, on the 
 arrival of the case, consigned it to his gardener to unpack. A 
 great deal of anxiety with regard to the contents was manifested 
 by all concerned, but on the lid of the box being removed, there 
 issued from it three or four fine specimens of the enormous Blatta 
 beetle that had been preying upon the plants during the voyage ; 
 against these the gardeners, the grooms, the porters, and the 
 porter’s children issued forth in arms, and which the artist has 
 immortalised, as we see. 
 
 We have spoken of the admirable way in which Mr. Cruikshank 
 has depicted Irish character and Cockney character; here is 
 
 English country character quite as faithfully delineated in the 
 person of the stout porteress and her children, and of yonder 
 ‘ Chawbacon ’ with the shovel, on whose face is written 
 ‘ Zummerzetsheer.’ Is it hypercriticism to say that the gardener 
 on the ground is a Scotchman? there is a well-known Scotch 
 gentleman in London who must surely have stretched for the 
 portrait. Chawbacon appears in another plate, or else Chaw- 
 bacon’s brother. He has come up to Lunnon, and is looking 
 about him at raaces. 
 
 How distinct are these rustics from those whom we have just 
 been examining ! They hang about the purlieus of the metropolis; 
 Brook Green, Epsom, Greenwich, Ascot, Goodwood, are their 
 haunts. They visit London professionally once a year, and that 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 81 
 
 is at the time of Bartholomew fair. How one may speculate 
 upon the different degrees of rascality, as exhibited in each face 
 of the thimblerigging trio, and form little histories for these 
 worthies, charming Newgate romances, such as have been of late 
 the fashion ! Is any man so blind that he cannot see the exact 
 face that is writhing under the thimblerigged hero’s hat ? Like 
 Timanthes of old, our artist expresses great passions without the 
 aid of the human countenance. Here is another specimen. 
 
 SPIRITS OF WINE. 
 
 Is there any need of having a face after this? ‘Come on,’ 
 says Claret-bottle, a dashing, genteel fellow, with his hat on one 
 ear, ‘ come on, has any man a mind to tap me ? ’ Claret-bottle is 
 a little screwed (as one may see by his legs), but full of gaiety 
 and courage ; not so that stout, apoplectic Bottle-of-rum, who has 
 staggered against the wall, and has his hand upon his liver ; the 
 fellow hurts himself with smoking, that is clear, and is as sick as 
 sick can be. See, Port is making away from the storm, and 
 Double X. is as flat as ditch-water. Against these, awful in 
 their white robes, the sober watchmen come. 
 
 Our artist then can cover up faces, and yet show them quite 
 clearly, as in the thimblerig group ; or he can do without faces 
 altogether, as we see above ; or he can, at a pinch, provide 
 a countenance for a gentleman out of any given object, as we 
 see here a beautiful Irish physiognomy being moulded upon a 
 keg of whiskey; or here, where a jolly English countenance 
 froths out of a pot of ale (the spirit of brave Toby Philpot come 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 back to reanimate his clay). Not to recognise in this fungus the 
 physiognomy of that mushroom peer. Lord , would argue 
 
 oneself unknown. Finally, if he is at a loss, he can make a living 
 head, body, and legs out of steel or tortoise-shell, as in the case of 
 
JANUARY — LAST YEAR’S BILLS, P. 83. 
 
84 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 this vivacious pair of spectacles, that are jockeying the nose of 
 Caddy Cuddle. 
 
 Of late years Mr. Cruikshank has busied himself very much 
 
 with steel engraving, and the consequences of that lucky invention 
 have been, that his plates are now sold by thousands, where they 
 could only be produced by hundreds before. He has made many 
 a bookseller's and author's fortune (we trust that in so doing he 
 
 may not have neglected his own). Twelve admirable plates, 
 furnished yearly to that facetious little publication, the Comic 
 Almanac^ have gained for it a sale, as we hear, of nearly twenty 
 thousand copies. The idea of the work was novel ; there was, in 
 the first number especially, a great deal of comic power, and 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 85 
 
 Cruikshank’s designs were so admirable, that the Almanac at 
 once became a vast favourite with the public, and has so remained 
 ever since. 
 
 Besides the twelve plates, this Almanac contains a prophetic 
 wood-cut, accompanying an awful Blarneyhum Astrologicum that 
 appears in this and other Almanacs. Here is one that hints in 
 pretty clear terms that with the Reform of Municipal Corpora- 
 tions the ruin of the great Lord Mayor of London is at hand. 
 
 See his lordship here, he is meekly going to dine at an eight- 
 penny ordinary, — his giants in pawn, his men in armour, 
 dwindled to ‘ one poor knight,’ his carriage to be sold, his stalwart 
 aldermen vanished, his sheriffs, alas ! and alas ! in gaol ! 
 Another design shows that Rigdum, if a true, is also a moral and 
 instructive prophet. Behold John Bull asleep, or rather in a 
 vision ; the cunning demon. Speculation, blowing a thousand 
 bright bubbles about him. 
 
 Meanwhile the rooks are busy at his fob, a knave has cut a 
 cruel hole in his pocket, a rattlesnake has coiled safe round his 
 feet, and will in a trice swallow Bull, chair, money, and all ; the 
 rats are at his corn-bags, (as if, poor devil, he had corn to spare), 
 his faithful dog is bolting his leg of mutton, nay, a thief has 
 
CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 gotten hold of his very candle, and there, by way of moral, is his 
 ale-pot, which looks and winks in his face, and seems to say, 0 
 
 Bull, all this is froth, and a cruel satirical picture of a certain 
 rustic who had a goose that laid certain golden eggs, which goose 
 the rustic slew in expectation of finding all the eggs at once. 
 
 This is goose and sage too, to borrow the pun of ^ learned Doctor 
 Gill ^ ; but we shrewdly suspect that Mr. Cruikshank is becoming 
 a little conservative in his notions. 
 
 We love these pictures so, that it is hard to part us, and v/e 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 87 
 
 still fondly endeavour to hold on, but this wild word, farewell, 
 must be spoken by the best friends at last, and so good-bye, brave 
 wood-cuts : we feel quite a sadness in coming to the last of our 
 collection. A word or two more have we to say, but no more 
 pretty pictures, — take your last look of the wood-cuts then, for 
 not one more will appear after this page, — not one more with 
 which the pleased traveller may comfort his eye — a smiling oasis 
 in a desert of text. What could we have done without these 
 excellent merry pictures ? Reader and reviewer would have been 
 tired of listening long since and would have been comfortably asleep. 
 
 In the earlier numbers of the Comic Almanac all the manners 
 and customs of Londoners that would afford food for fun were 
 noted down ; and if during the last two years the mysterious 
 personage who, under the title of ‘ Rigdum Funnidos,’ compiles 
 this ephemeris, has been compelled to resort to romantic tales, we 
 must suppose that he did so because the great metropolis was 
 exhausted, and it was necessary to discover new worlds in the 
 cloud land of fancy. The character of Mr. Stubbs, who made 
 his appearance in the Almanac for 1839,^ had, we think, great 
 merit, although his adventures were somewhat of too tragical a 
 description to provoke pure laughter. The publishers have 
 allowed us to give a reprint of that admirable design before 
 mentioned, in which Master Stubbs is represented under the 
 school-pump, to which place of punishment his associates have 
 brought him. In the following naive way the worthy gentleman 
 describes his own mishap : — 
 
 ‘ This did very well, but still I was dissatisfied. I wanted a 
 
 ^ Stubbs's Calendar ; or, The Fatal Boots [by W. M. Thackeray], appeared 
 in The Comic Almanac for 1839, v/ith illustrations by George Cruikshank. 
 
88 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 •pair of hoots. Three boys in the school had boots — I was mad 
 to have them too. 
 
 ‘ But my papa, when I wrote to him, would not hear of it ; 
 and three pounds, the price of a pair, was too large a sum for my 
 mother to take from the house-keeping, or for me to pay, in the 
 present impoverished state of my exchequer ; but the desire for 
 the boots was so strong, that have them I must at any rate. 
 
 ‘ There was a German bootmaker who had just set up in our 
 town in those days, who afterwards made his fortune in London. 
 I determined to have the boots from him, and did not despair, 
 before the end of a year or two, either to leave the school, when I 
 should not mind his dunning me, or to screw the money from 
 mamma, and so pay him. 
 
 ‘ So I called upon this man — Stiffelkind was his name — and 
 he took my measure for a pair. 
 
 ‘‘‘You are a vary yong gentleman to wear dop-boots,’’ said 
 the shoemaker. 
 
 ‘“I suppose, fellow,’’ says I, “that is my business and not 
 yours. Either make the boots or not — but when you speak to a 
 man of my rank, speak respectfully ! ” and I poured out a number of 
 oaths, in order to impress him with a notion of my respect- 
 ability. 
 
 ‘ They had the desired effect. “ Stay, sir,” says he. “ I have a 
 nice littel pair of dop-boots dat I tink will jost do for you.” And 
 he produced, sure enough, the most elegant things I ever saw. 
 “Dey were made,” said he, “for de Honorable Mr. Stiffney, of de 
 Gards, but were too small.” 
 
 ‘ “ Ah, indeed ! ” said I. “ Stiffney is a relation of mine. And 
 what, you scoundrel, will you have the impudence to ask for these 
 things ? ” He replied, “ Three pounds.” 
 
 ‘ ‘"Well,” said I, “they are confoundedly dear, but as you will 
 have a long time to wait for your money, why, I shall have my 
 revenge, you see.” The man looked alarmed, and began a speech : 
 
 “ Sare, — I cannot let dem go vidout ” but a bright thought 
 
 struck me, and I interrupted — “ Sir ! don’t sir me. Take off the 
 boots, fellow, and, harkye, when you speak to a nobleman, don’t 
 say Sir.” 
 
 ‘ “A hundert tousand pardons, my Lort,” says he : “if I had 
 known you were a lort, I vood never have called you Sir. Vat 
 name shall I put down in my books ? ” 
 
 ‘ “ Name ? — Oh ! why. Lord Cornwallis, to be sure,” said I, 
 as I walked off in the boots. 
 
 ‘ “ And vat shall I do vid my Lort’s shoes ? ” 
 
 ‘ “ Keej) them until I send for them,” said I. And giving him 
 
MABCH — SHOWEKY, P* 89, 
 
90 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 a patronising bow, I walked out of the shop, as the German 
 tied up my shoes in paper. 
 
 ‘This story I would not have told, but that my whole life 
 turned upon these accursed boots. I walked back to school as 
 proud as a peacock, and easily succeeded in satisfying the boys as 
 to the manner in which I came by my new ornaments. 
 
 ‘Well, one fatal Monday morning — the blackest of all black- 
 Mondays that ever I knew, — as we were all of us playing between 
 school-hours, I saw a posse of boys round a stranger, who seemed 
 to be looking out for one of us. A sudden trembling seized me — I 
 knew it was Stiffelkind. What had brought him here ? He talked 
 loud, and seemed angry. So I rushed into the schoolroom, and, 
 burying my head between my hands, began reading for dear life. 
 
 ‘ “ I vant Lort Cornvallis,’’ said the horrid bootmaker. “ His 
 Lortship belongs, I know, to dis honourable school, for I saw him 
 vid de boys at church yesterday. 
 
 ‘ “ Lord who 
 
 ‘ “ Vy, Lort Cornvallis, to be sure — a very fat young nobleman, 
 vid red hair : he squints a little, and svears dreadfully.'^ 
 
 ‘ “ There's no Lord Cornwallis here," said one ; and there was 
 a pause. 
 
 ‘ “ Stop ! I have it," says that odious Bunting. “ It must he 
 Stuhhs ! " And “ Stubbs ! Stubbs ! " every one cried out, while I 
 was so busy at my book as not to hear a word. 
 
 ‘ At last, two of the biggest chaps rushed into the schoolroom, 
 and seizing each an arm, ran me into the playground — bolt up 
 against the shoemaker. 
 
 ‘ “Dis is my man — I beg your Lortship's pardon,'’ says he, “I 
 have brought your Lortship's shoes, vich you left. See, dey have 
 been in dis parcel ever since you vent away in my boots." 
 
 ‘ “ Shoes, fellow ! " says I, “ I never saw your face before " — for 
 I knew there was nothing for it but brazening it out. “ Upon the 
 honour of a gentleman ! " said I, turning round to the boys. They 
 hesitated ; and if the trick had turned in my favour, fifty of them 
 would have seized hold of Stiffelkind and drubbed him soundly. 
 
 ‘ “ Stop ! " says Bunting (hang him !). “ Let's see the shoes. 
 
 If they fit him, why, then, the cobbler's right." They did fit me ; 
 and not only that, but the name of Stubbs was written in them 
 at full length. 
 
 ‘“Vat!" said Stiffelkind. “Is he not a lort? So help me 
 Himmel, I never did vonce tink of looking at de shoes, which 
 have been lying, ever since, in dis piece of brown paper." And 
 then, gathering anger as he went on, thundered out so much of his 
 
MAY — BEATING THE BOUNDS. P. 91. 
 
D2 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 abuse at me^ in his German-English, that the boys roared with 
 laughter. Swishtail came in in the midst of the disturbance, and 
 asked what the noise meant. 
 
 ‘ “ It’s only Lord Cornwallis, sir,” said the boys, “ battling 
 with his shoemaker about the price of a pair of top-boots.” 
 
 ‘ “ 0 sir,” said I, it was only in fun that I called myself Lord 
 Cornwallis.” 
 
 ‘ ‘‘ In fun ! — Where are the boots ? And you, sir, give me your 
 bill.” My beautiful boots were brought ; and Stiffelkind produced 
 his bill. Lord Cornwallis to Samuel Stiffelkind, for a pair of 
 boots — four guineas.” 
 
 ‘“You have been fool enough, sir,” says the doctor, looking 
 very stern, “ to let this boy impose upon you as a lord ; and knave 
 enough to charge him double the value of the article you sold him. 
 Take back the boots, sir ! I won’t pay a penny of your bill; nor can 
 you get a penny. As for you, sir, you miserable swindler and 
 cheat, I shall not flog you as I did before, but I shall send you 
 home : you are not fit to be the companion of honest boys.” 
 
 ‘ “ Suppose we duck him before he goes ? ” piped out a very small 
 voice. The doctor grinned significantly, and left the schoolroom ; 
 and the boys knew by this they might have their will. They 
 seized me, and carried me to the playground pump : they pumped 
 upon me until I was half dead ; and the monster, Stiffelkind, stood 
 looking on for the half-hour the operation lasted.’ 
 
 If the pictures which Vv^e are enabled to give at the conclusion 
 of this notice are not quite so brilliant and clear as they were on 
 the first appearance in the Almanac^ the critic must be pleased to 
 remember that we have been compelled to transfer to stone, having 
 no other means of adapting them to the size of this review. When 
 we recollect, too, that twenty thousand impressions were previously 
 taken from the steels, the public will not be disposed to judge of 
 the engravings in their present condition, but will see what they 
 must have been when first they issued from the hands of the 
 artist. 1 One or two have withstood the transfer operation very 
 well, especially the pleasant plate of ‘ beating the bounds ’ (how 
 
 ^ A propos of the ^ Holiday at the Public Offices ’ — (a delightful picture of 
 real life) — we are reminded of the diary kept by a certain clerk in a certain 
 public office eastward of Cornhill, whose daily duties began with a good break- 
 fast provided for him whilst the monopoly of the China trade lasted. 
 
 From 10 till 11 — ate a breakfast for seven, 
 
 From 11 till noon, — to begin, ’twas too soon. 
 
 From 12 till 1 — asked what’s to be done ? 
 
 From 1 till 2 — found nothing to do. 
 
 From 2 till 3 — began to foresee 
 That from 3 till 4 would be a great bore 
 
NOVEMBER- 
 
94 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 kindly and good-humoured it is !) and the ‘ scene in court/ from 
 last year’s Almanac^ in which the celebrated Mr. Mulligan appears 
 in the act of addressing the bench in favour of his client, the 
 famous Tuggeridge Coxe Tuggeridge. 
 
 ‘Standing here, (says the orator) on the pedestal of secred 
 Themis (we follow the peculiar mode of spelling that is adopted in 
 the Almanac)^ seeing around me the ornyments of a profission I 
 rispect, a vinnerable judge, an enlightened jury — the netion’s 
 glory, the counthry’s cheap defendther, the poor man’s priceless 
 palladium, how must I thremble, my Lard, how must the blush of 
 modesty befew my cheeks (somebody in court made an allusion to 
 cheeks in the court, which caused a dreadful roar of laughter, and 
 when order was established Mr. Mulligan continued) : My Lard, 
 I heed them not, I come from a counthry accustomed to opprission, 
 and as that counthry, yes, my Lard, that Ireland (do not laugh, I 
 am proud of it) is ever, in spite of her tyrants, green, lovely, and 
 beautiful ; in like manner my client’s cause will rise superior to 
 the malignant imbecility, I repeat, me Lard, the malignant 
 IMBECILITY of those who would thrample it down, and in whose 
 teeth, in my client’s name, in my counthry’s, aye, and in my own, 
 I with folded arrums hurl a scornful and eternal defiance ! ’ 
 
 We should be glad to devote a few pages to the Illustrations 
 of Time^ the Scraps and Sketches^ and the Illustrations of 
 Phrenology^ which are among the most famous of our artist’s 
 publications ; but it is very difiicult to find new terms of praise, 
 as find them one must, when reviewing Mr. Cruikshank’s publica- 
 tions, and more difiicult still (as the reader of this notice will no 
 doubt have perceived for himself long since) to translate his 
 designs into words, and go to the printer’s box for a description of 
 all that fun and humour which the artist can produce by a few 
 skilful turns of his needle. A famous article upon the Illustrations 
 of Time appeared some dozen years since in Blackwood’s Magazine^ 
 of which the conductors have always been great admirers of our 
 artist, as became men of humour and genius. To these grand 
 qualities do not let it be supposed that we are laying claim, but, 
 thank Heaven, Cruikshank’s humour is so good and benevolent 
 that any man must love it, and on this score we may speak as 
 well as another. 
 
 Then there are the Greenwich Hospital designs, which must 
 not be passed over. Greenwich Hospital is a hearty, good-natured 
 book, in the Tom Dibdin school, treating of the virtues of British 
 tars, in approved nautical language. They maul Frenchmen and 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 95 
 
 Spaniards, they go out in brigs and take frigates, they relieve 
 women in distress, and are yard-arm and yard-arming, athwart- 
 hawsing, marlinspiking, binnacling, and helm^s-a-leeing, as honest 
 seamen invariably do in novels, on the stage, and doubtless on 
 board ship. This we cannot take upon us to say, but the artist, 
 like a true Englishman, as he is, loves dearly these brave guardians 
 of Old England, and chronicles their rare or fanciful exploits with 
 the greatest good-will. Let any one look at the noble head of 
 Nelson, in The Family Library^ and they will, we are sure, think 
 with us that the designer must have felt and loved what he drew. 
 There are to this abridgment of Southey’s admirable book many 
 more cuts after Cruikshank ; and about a dozen pieces by the 
 same hand will be found in a work equally popular, Lockhart’s 
 excellent Life of Napoleon, Among these the retreat from 
 Moscow is very fine ; the Mamlouks most vigorous, furious, and 
 barbarous as they should be. At the end of these three volumes 
 Mr. Cruikshank’s contributions to The Family Library seem 
 suddenly to have ceased ; the work, which was then the property 
 of Mr. Murray, has since that period passed into the hands of 
 Mr. Tegg, whose shop seems to be the bourne to which most 
 books travel — the fatal retreat of the unfortunate brave. Mr. 
 Tegg, like death, will never give up his prey. We implored of 
 him a loan of the precious wood-blocks that are buried in 
 his warehouses ; but no, Tegg was inexorable, and such of Mr. 
 Cruikshank’s charming little children as have found their way to 
 him, have not been permitted to take a holiday with many of 
 their brethren whose guardians are not so severe. 
 
 Let us offer our thanks to Messrs. Whitehead, Tilt, Robins, 
 Carton and Clark, Thomas and Caly, proprietors of the Cruikshank 
 cuts, who have lent us of their store. Only one man has imitated 
 Mr. Tegg, and he, we are sorry to say, is no other than George 
 Cruikshank himself, who, although besought by humble am- 
 bassadors, pestered by printers’-devils and penny post letters, did 
 resolutely refuse to have any share in the blowing of his own 
 trumpet, and showed our messengers to the door. 
 
 Our stock of plate has also been increased by the kindness of 
 Messrs. Chapman and Hall, who have lent us some of the designs 
 for the Boz sketches, not the worst among Mr. Dickens’s books, 
 as we think, and containing some of the best of Mr. Cruikshank’s 
 designs. 
 
 We are not at all disposed to undervalue the works and genius 
 of Mr. Dickens, and we are sure that he would admit as readily 
 as any man the wonderful assistance that he has derived from the 
 artist who has given us the portraits of his ideal personages, and 
 
96 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 made them familiar to all the world. Once seen, these figures 
 remain impressed on the memory, which otherwise would have 
 had no hold upon them, and the Jew, and Bumble, and the heroes 
 and heroines of the Boz sketches, become personal acquaintances 
 with each of us. 0 that Hogarth could have illustrated Fielding 
 in the same way ! and fixed down on paper those grand figures 
 of Parson Adams, and Squire All worthy, and the great Jonathan 
 Wild. 
 
 With regard to the modern romance of Jack Sheppard, in 
 which the latter personage makes a second appearance, it seems 
 to us that Mr. Cruikshank really created the tale, and that Mr. 
 Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it. Let any reader of 
 the novel think over it for a while, now that it is some months 
 since he has perused and laid it down — let him think, and tell 
 us what he remembers of the tale h George Cruikshank^s pictures 
 — always George Cruikshank’s pictures. The storm in the Thames, 
 for instance ; all the author’s laboured description of that event 
 has passed clean away — we have only before the mind’s eye the 
 fine plates of Cruikshank. The poor wretch cowering under the 
 bridge arch, as the waves come rushing in, and the boats are 
 whirling away in the drift of the great swollen black waters ; and 
 let any man look at that second plate of the murder on the 
 Thames, and he must acknowledge how much more brilliant the 
 artist’s description is than the writer’s, and what a real genius for 
 the terrible as well as for the ridiculous the former has ; how 
 awful is the gloom of the old bridge, a few lights glimmering from 
 the houses here and there, but not so as to be reflected on the 
 water at all, which is too turbid and raging ; a great heavy rack 
 of clouds goes sweeping over the bridge, and men with flaring 
 torches, the murderers, are borne away with the stream. 
 
 The author requires many pages to describe the fury of the 
 storm, which Mr. Cruikshank has represented in one. First, he 
 has to prepare you with the something inexpressibly melancholy 
 in sailing on a dark night upon the Thames ; ‘ the ripple of the 
 water,’ ‘the darkling current,’ ‘the indistinctively seen craft,’ 
 
 ‘ the solemn shadows,’ and other phenomena visible on rivers at 
 night are detailed, ‘ with not unskilful rhetoric,’ in order to bring 
 the reader into a proper frame of mind for the deeper gloom and 
 horror which is to ensue. Then follow pages of description. 
 
 ‘ As Rowland sprang to the helm, and gave the signal for pursuit, 
 a war like a volley of ordnance was heard aloft, and the wind 
 again burst its bondage. A moment before the surface of the 
 stream was as black as ink. It was now whitening, hissing, and 
 seething, like an enormous cauldron. The blast once more swept 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 97 
 
 over the agitated riverj whirled off the sheets of foam, scattered 
 them far and wide in rain drops, and left the raging torrent 
 blacker than before. Destruction everywhere marked the course 
 of the gale. Steeples toppled and towers reeled beneath its fury. 
 All was darkness, horror, confusion, ruin. Men fled from their 
 tottering habitations and returned to them, scared by greater 
 danger. The end of the world seemed at hand. . . . The hurri- 
 cane had now reached its climax. The blast shrieked, as if 
 exulting in its wrathful mission. Stunning and continuous, the 
 din seemed almost to take away the power of hearing. He who 
 had faced the gale would have been instantly stifled,'^ etc., etc. 
 See with what a tremendous war of words (and good loud words 
 too ; Mr. Ainsworth^s description is a good and spirited one) the 
 author is obliged to pour in upon the reader before he can effect 
 his purpose upon the latter, and inspire him with a proper terror. 
 The painter does it at a glance, and old Wood^s dilemma in the 
 midst of that tremendous storm, with the little infant at his 
 bosom, is remembered afterwards, not from the words, but from 
 the visible image of them that the artist has left us. 
 
 It would not, perhaps, be out of place to glance through the 
 whole of the Jack Sheppard plates, which are among the most 
 finished and the most successful of Mr. OruikshankA performances, 
 and say a word or two concerning them. Let us begin with 
 finding fault with No. 1. ^Mr. Wood offers to adopt little Jack 
 Sheppard.' A poor print, on a poor subject ; the figure of the 
 woman is not as carefully designed as it might be, and the ex- 
 pression of the eyes (not an uncommon fault with our artist) much 
 caricatured. The print is cut up, to use the artist's phrase, by the 
 numbers of accessories which the engraver has thought proper, 
 after the author's elaborate description, elaborately to reproduce. 
 The plate of ‘ Wild discovering Darrell in the loft ' is admirable — 
 ghastly, terrible, and the treatment of it extraordinarily skilful, 
 minute, and bold. The intricacies of the tile-work, and the 
 mysterious twinkling of light among the beams, are excellently felt 
 and rendered, and one sees here, as in the two next plates of the 
 storm and murder, what a fine eye the artist has, what a skilful 
 hand and what a sympathy for the wild and dreadful. As a mere 
 imitation of nature, the clouds, and the bridge in the murder 
 picture may be examined by painters who make far higher pre- 
 tensions than Mr. Cruikshank. In point of workmanship they 
 are equally good, the manner quite unaffected, the effect produced 
 without any violent contrast, the whole scene evidently well and 
 philosophically arranged in the artist's brain, before he began to 
 put it upon copper. 
 
 H 
 
98 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IX ART 
 
 The famous drawing of ^ Jack carving the name on the beam/ 
 which has been transferred to half the play-bills in town, is over- 
 loaded with accessories, as the first plate ; but they are much better 
 arranged than in the last-named engraving and do not injure the 
 effect of the principal figure. Remark, too, the conscientiousness 
 of the artist, and that shrewd pervading idea of form which is one 
 of his principal characteristics. Jack is surrounded by all sorts of 
 implements of his profession ; he stands on a regular carpenter’s 
 table, away in the shadow under it lie shavings and a couple of 
 carpenter’s hampers. The glue-pot, the mallet, the chisel-handle, 
 the planes, the saws, the hone with its cover, and the other 
 paraphernalia are all represented with extraordinary accuracy and 
 forethought. The man’s mind has retained the exact drawing of 
 all these minute objects (unconsciously perhaps to himself), but we 
 can see with what keen eyes he must go through the world, and 
 what a fund of facts (as such a knowledge of the shape of objects is 
 in his profession) this keen student of nature has stored away in 
 his brain. In the next plate, where Jack is escaping from his 
 mistress, the figure of that lady, one of the deepest of the 
 BaOvKoXTTOi, strikes us as disagreeable and unrefined ; that of 
 Winifred is, on the contrary, very pretty and graceful ; and 
 Jack’s puzzled, slinking look must not be forgotten. All the 
 accessories are good, and the apartment has a snug, cosy air, which 
 is not remarkable, except that it shows how faithfully the designer 
 has performed his work, and how curiously he has entered into all 
 the particulars of the subject. 
 
 Master Thames Darrell, the handsome young man of the book, 
 is, in Mr. Cruikshank’s portraits of him, no favourite of ours. 
 The lad seems to wish to make up for the natural insignificance 
 of his face by frowning on all occasions most portentously. 
 
 This figure, borrowed from the compositor’s desk, will give a 
 notion of what we mean. Wild’s face is too violent for the great 
 man of history (if we may call Fielding history), but this is in 
 consonance with the ranting, frowning, braggadocio character that 
 Mr. Ainsworth has given him. 
 
 The ‘ Interior of Willesden Church ’ is excellent as a composi- 
 tion, and a piece of artistical workmanship ; the groups well 
 arranged, anrl the figure of Mrs. Sheppard looking round alarmed, 
 as her son is robbing the dandy Kneeboiie, is charming, simple. 
 
100 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 and unaffected. Not so ‘ Mrs. Sheppard ill in bed/ v/hose face 
 is screwed up to an expression vastly too tragic. The little 
 glimpse of the church seen through the open door of the room is 
 very beautiful and poetical ; it is in such small hints that an 
 artist especially excels ; they are the morals which he loves to 
 append to his stories, and are always appropriate and welcome. 
 The boozing ken is not to our liking ; Mrs. Sheppard is there with 
 her horrified eyebrows again. Why this exaggeration — is it 
 necessary for the public? We think not, or if they require such 
 excitement, let our artist, like a true painter as he is, teach them 
 better things.^ 
 
 The ‘ Escape from Willesden cage ^ is excellent, the ^ Burglary 
 in Wood’s house,’ has not less merit ; ^ Mrs. Sheppard in Bedlam,’ 
 a ghastly picture, indeed, is finely conceived, but not, as we fancy, 
 so carefully executed ; it would be better for a little more careful 
 drawing in the female figure. 
 
 ‘Jack sitting for his picture’ is a very pleasing group, and 
 savours of the manner of Hogarth, who is introduced in the 
 company. The ‘ Murder of Trenchard ’ must be noticed too as 
 remarkable for the effect a terrible vigour which the artist has 
 given to the scene. The ‘ Willesden Churchyard ’ has great merit 
 too, but the gems of the book are the little vignettes illustrating 
 the escape from Newgate. Here, too, much anatomical care of 
 drawing is not required ; the figures are so small that the outline 
 and attitude need only to be indicated, and the designer has pro- 
 duced a series of figures quite remarkable for reality and poetry 
 too. There are no less than ten of Jack’s feats so described by 
 Mr. Cruikshank (let us say a word here in praise of the excellent 
 manner in which the author has carried us through the adventure). 
 Here is Jack clattering up the chimney, now peering into the 
 lonely red room, now opening ‘ the door between the red 
 room and the chapel.’ What a wild, fierce, scared look he 
 has, the young ruffian, as cautiously he steps in, holding tight 
 his bar of iron. You can see by his face how his heart is beating ! 
 If any one were there ! but no ! And this is a very fine charac- 
 
 ^ A gentleman (whose wit is so celebrated that one should be very cautious 
 in repeating his stories) gave the writer a good illustration of the philosophy 
 
 of exaggeration. Mr. was once behind the scenes at the Opera when the 
 
 scene-shifters were preparing for the ballet. Flora was to sleep under a bush, 
 whereon were growing a number of roses, and amidst which was fluttering a 
 gay covey of butterflies. In size the roses exceeded the most expansive sun- 
 flowers, and the butterflies were as large as cocked-hats ; — the scene-shifter 
 
 explained to Mr. , who asked the reason why everything was so magnified, 
 
 that the galleries could never see the objects unless they were enormously 
 exaggerated. How many of our writers and designers work for the galleries ? 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK 101 
 
 teristic of the prints, the extreme loneliness of them all. Not a 
 soul is there to disturb him — woe to him who should — and Jack 
 drives in the chapel gate, and shatters down the passage door, 
 and theie you have him on the leads, up he goes, it is but a spring 
 of a few feet from the blanket, and he is gone — abiit^ evasit^ 
 erupit. Mr. Wild must catch him again if he can. 
 
 We must not forget to mention Oliver Twisty and Mr. Cruik- 
 shank’s famous designs to that work.^ The sausage scene at 
 Fagin’s. Nancy seizing the boy ; that capital j)iece of humour, 
 Mr. Bumble’s courtship, which is even better in Cruikshank’s 
 version than in Boz’s exquisite account of the interview ; Sikes’s 
 farewell to the dog ; and the Jew — the dreadful Jew — that 
 Cruikshank drew 1 What a fine touching picture of melancholy 
 desolation is that of Sikes and the dog ! The poor cur is not 
 too well drawn, the landscape is stift‘ and formal ; but in this 
 case the faults, if faults they be, of execution rather add to than 
 diminish the eftect of the picture : it has a strange, wild, dreary, 
 broken-hearted look ; we fancy we see the landscape as it must 
 have appeared to Sikes, when ghastly and with bloodshot eyes 
 he looked at it. As for the Jew in the dungeon, let us say 
 nothing of it — what can we say to describe it ? What a fine 
 homely poet is the man who can produce this little world of 
 mirth or woe for us ! Does he elaborate his effects by slow 
 process of thoughts, or do they come to him by instinct ? Does 
 the painter ever arrange in his brain an image so complete, that 
 he afterwards can copy it exactly on the canvas, or does the 
 hand work in spite of him ? 
 
 A great deal of this random work of course every artist has 
 done in his time, many men produce effects of which they never 
 dreamed, and strike off excellencies, hap-hazard, which gain for 
 them reputation ; but a fine quality in Mr. Cruikshank, the 
 quality of his success, as we have said before, is the extraordinary 
 earnestness and good faith with which he executes all he attempts 
 — the ludicrous, the polite, the low, the terrible. In the second 
 of these he often, in our fancy, fails, his figures lacking elegance 
 and descending to caricature; but there is something fine in this 
 too ; it is good that he should fail ; that he should have these 
 honest naive notions regarding the beau monde, the characteristics 
 of which a namby-pamby tea-party painter could hit off far better 
 than he. He is a great deal too downright and manly to ap- 
 preciate the flimsy delicacies of small society — you cannot expect 
 
 ^ Or his new work, The Tower of London^ which promises even to surpass 
 Mr. Cruikshank ’s former productions. 
 
102 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 a lion to roar you like any sucking dove, or frisk about a drawing- 
 room like a lady’s little spaniel. 
 
 If then, in the course of his life and business, he has been 
 occasionally obliged to imitate the ways of such small animals, 
 he has done so, let us say it at once, clumsily, and like as a lion 
 should. Many artists, we hear, hold his works rather cheap ; 
 they prate about bad drawing, want of scientific knowledge ; — 
 they would have something vastly more neat, regular, anatomical. 
 
 Not one of the whole band most likely but can paint an 
 academy figure better than himself ; nay, or a portrait of an 
 alderman’s lady and family of children. But look down the list 
 of the painters and tell us who are they? How many among 
 these men are poets, makers, possessing the faculty to create, the 
 greatest among the gifts with which Providence has endowed the 
 mind of man ? Say how many there are, count up what they 
 have done, and see what in the course of some nine-and-twenty 
 years has been done by this indefatigable man. 
 
 What amazing energetic fecundity do we find in him ! As a 
 boy he began to fight for bread, has been hungry (twice a day, we 
 trust) ever since, and has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread 
 week by week. And his wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no 
 such purchasers as the fashionable painter’s thin pinchbeck, who 
 can live comfortably for six weeks, when paid for and painting a 
 portrait, and fancies his mind prodigiously occupied all the while. 
 There was an artist in Paris, an artist hair-dresser, who used to 
 be fatigued and take restoratives after inventing a new coifiure. 
 By no such gentle operation of head-dressing has Cruikshank 
 lived ; time was (we are told so in print) when for a picture 
 with thirty heads in it he was paid three guineas — a poor week’s 
 pittance truly, and a dire week’s labour. We make no doubt 
 that the same labour would at present bring him twenty times 
 the sum, but whether it be ill-paid or well, what labour has Mr. 
 Cruikshank’s been ! Week by week, for thirty years, to produce 
 something new ; some smiling offspring of painful labour, quite 
 independent and distinct from its ten thousand jovial brethren ; 
 in what hours of sorrow and ill-health to be told by the world 
 ‘ Make us laugh, or you starve — Give us fresh fun ; we have eaten 
 up the old and are hungry.’ And all this has he been obliged to 
 do — to wring laughter day by day, sometimes, perhaps, out of 
 want, often certainly from ill-health or depression — to keep the 
 fire of his brain perpetually alight, for the greedy public will give 
 it no leisure to cool. This he has done and done well. He has 
 told a thousand truths in as many strange and fascinating ways ; 
 he has given a thousand new and pleasant thoughts to millions of 
 
JUNE 
 
104 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 people ; he has never used his wit dishonestly ; he has never, in 
 all the exuberance of his frolicsome humour, caused a single 
 painful or guilty blush ; how little do we think of the extraordinary 
 power of this man, and how ungrateful we are to him ! 
 
 Here, as we are come round to the charge of ingratitude, the 
 starting-post from which we set out, perhaps we had better con- 
 clude. The reader will perhaps wonder at the high-flown tone in 
 which we speak of the services and merits of an individual, whom 
 he considers a humble scraper on steel, that is wonderfully popular 
 already. But none of us remember all the benefits we owe him ; 
 they have come one by one, one driving out the memory of 
 the other ; it is only when we come to examine them altogether 
 as the writer has done, who has a pile of books on the table 
 before him ^ — a heap of personal kindnesses from George Cruik- 
 shank (not presents, if you please, for we bought, borrowed, or 
 stole every one of them), that we feel what we owe him. Look 
 at one of Mr. Cruikshank’s works, and we pronounce him an 
 excellent humourist. Look at all, his reputation is increased by 
 a kind of geometrical progression ; as a whole diamond is a 
 hundred times more valuable than the hundred sj^linters into 
 which it might be broken would be. A fine rough English 
 diamond is this about which we have been writing. 
 
 ^ The long list of Mr. Cruikshank’s works which heads this article is, we 
 fear, far from complete, though we have tried hard to make it so. 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY.i 
 
 By MICHAEL ANGELO TITMARSH. 
 
 With an Inteoductoky Lettee to Me. Yoeke. 
 
 My deae Yoeke, 
 
 Do you remember the orders which you gave m.e at the 
 close of our dinner last week at the Clarendon — that dinner 
 which you always provide upon my arrival in town from 
 my country-seat ; knowing full well that Titmarsh before he 
 works must dine, and when he dines must dine well ? Do you, I 
 say, remember the remarks which you addressed to me ? Probably 
 not; for that third bottle of Clos-Yougeot had evidently done 
 your business, and you were too tipsy, even to pay the bill. 
 
 Well, let bills be bills, and wRat care we ? There is Mr. 
 James Fraser, our employer, master, publisher, purse-bearer, and 
 friend, who has such a pleasure in paying that it is a pity to 
 balk him; and I never saw a man look more happy than he 
 when he lugged out four five-pound notes to pay for that dinner 
 of ours. What a scene it was ! You asleep with your head in a 
 dish of melted raspberry -ice ; Mr. Fraser calm, beneficent, 
 majestic, counting out the thirteens to the waiters ; the Doctor 
 and Mr. John Abraham Heraud, singing, ^ Suoni la tromba 
 intrepida^ each clutching the other’s hand, and waving a punch- 
 ladle or a dessert-knife in the unemployed paw, and the rest of us 
 joining in chorus when they came to ^ gridando liherta.^ — But I 
 am wandering from the point ; the address which you delivered 
 to me on drinking my health was in substance this : 
 
 ‘ Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh, the splendid feast of which 
 you have partaken, and the celebrated company of individuals 
 whom you see around you, will show you in what estimation 
 myself and Mr. Fraser hold your talents, — not that the latter 
 point is of any consequence, as I am the sole editor of the Magazine. 
 Sir, you have been called to the metropolis from a very distant 
 part of the country, your coach-hire and personal expenses have 
 
 ^ [Fraser s Magazine^ June 1840.] 
 
 105 
 
106 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 been defrayed, you have been provided with a suit of clothes that 
 ought to become you, for they have been for at least six months 
 the wonder of the town while exhibited on my own person ; and 
 you may well fancy that all these charges have not been incurred 
 on our parts, without an expectation of some corresponding 
 return from you. You are a devilish bad painter, sir ; but never 
 mind, Hazlitt was another, and old Peter Pindar was a miserable 
 dauber ; Mr. Alexander Pope, who wrote several pretty poems, 
 was always busy with brush and palette, and made sad work of 
 them. You, then, in common with these before-named illustra- 
 tions, as my friend. Lady Morgan, calls them (Sir Charles returned 
 thanks), are a wretched artist ; but a tolerable critic — nay, a 
 good critic — nay, let me say to your face, the best critic, the 
 clearest, the soundest, the gayest, the most eloquent, the most 
 pathetic, and, above all, the most honest critic, in matters of art 
 that is to be found in her majesty’s dominions. And, therefore, 
 Mr. Titmarsh, for we must give the deuce his due, you have been 
 brought from your cottage near John O’Groat’s or Land’s End, — 
 I forget which, — therefore you have been summoned to London 
 at the present season. 
 
 ‘ Sir, there are at this moment no less than five public 
 exhibitions of pictures in the metropolis ; and it will be your 
 duty carefully to examine every one of them during your residence 
 here, and bring us a full and accurate report upon all the pieces 
 exhibited which are remarkable for goodness, badness, or mediocrity.’ 
 
 I here got up ; and, laying my hand on my satin waistcoat, 
 looked up to heaven, and said, ‘ Sir, I ’ 
 
 ‘ Sit down, sir, and keep your eternal wagging jaws quiet ! 
 Waiter ! whenever that person attempts to speak, have the good- 
 ness to fill his mouth with olives or a damson cheese. — To pro- 
 ceed. Sir, and you, gentlemen, and you, 0 intelligent public of 
 Great Britain ! (for I know that every word I say is in some way 
 carried to you) you must all be aware, I say, how wickedly, — 
 how foully, basely, meanly — how, in a word, with-every-deteriorat- 
 ing-adverb that ends in ly—\\\ ly^ gentlemen (here Mr. Yorke 
 looked round, and myself and Mr. Fraser, rather alarmed lest we 
 should have let slip a pun, began to raise a low, faint laugh) — 
 you have all of you seen how the world has been imposed upon 
 by persons calling themselves critics, who, in daily, weekly, 
 monthly prints, protrude their nonsense upon the town. What 
 are these men ? Are they educated to be painters ? — No ! Have 
 they a taste for painting? — No ! I know of newspapers in this 
 town, gentlemen, which send their reporters indifferently to a 
 police-office or a picture-gallery, and expect them to describe 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 107 
 
 Correggio or a fire in Fleet Street with equal fidelity. And, alas ! 
 it must be confessed that our matter-of-fact public of England is 
 itself but a dull appreciator of the arts, and. is too easily persuaded 
 by the dull critics who lay down their stupid laws. 
 
 ‘ But we cannot expect, Mr. Titmarsh, to do any good to our 
 beloved public by telling them merely that their instructors are 
 impostors. Abuse is no argument, foul words admit of no 
 pretence (you may have remarked that I never use them myself, 
 but always employ the arts of gentlemanly persuasion), and we 
 must endeavour to create a reform amongst the nations by simply 
 preaching a purer and higher doctrine. Go you among the 
 picture-galleries, as you have done in former years, and prattle on 
 at your best rate ; donT philosophise, or define, or talk big, for I 
 will cut out every line of such stuff, but speak in a simple, 
 natural way, — without fear, and without favour. 
 
 ‘ Mark that latter word “ favour well ; for you are a great 
 deal too tender in your nature, and too profuse of compliments. 
 Favour, sir, is the curse of the critical trade ; and you will 
 observe how a spirit of camaraderie and partizanship prevails in 
 matters of art especially. The picture-critics, as I have remarked, 
 are eminently dull — dull and loud ; perfectly ignorant upon all 
 subjects connected with art, never able to guess at the name of 
 an artist without a catalogue and a number, quite unknowing 
 whether a picture be well or ill drawn, well or ill painted ; they 
 must prate, nevertheless, about light and shade, warm and cool 
 colour, keeping, chiaroscuro, and such other terms, from the 
 Painters’ Cant Dictionary, as they hear bandied about among the 
 brethren of the brush. 
 
 ‘ You will observe that such a critic has ordinarily his one or two 
 idols that he worships ; the one or two painters, namely, into 
 whose studios he has free access, and from whose opinions he forms 
 his own. There is Dash, for instance, of the Star newspaper ; now 
 and anon you hear him discourse of the fine arts, and you may take 
 your afiidavit that he has just issued from Blank’s atelier: all 
 Blank’s opinions he utters — utters and garbles, of course ; all his 
 likings are founded on Blank’s dicta, and all his dislikings : ’tis 
 probable that Blank has a rival, one Asterisk, living over the way. 
 In Dash’s eye Asterisk is the lowest of creatures. At every fresh 
 exhibition you read how ‘‘ Mr. Blank has transcended his already 
 transcendent reputation ; ” “ Myriads are thronging round his 
 glorious canvases ; ” “ Billions have been trampled to death while 
 rushing to examine his grand portrait of Lady Smigsmag ; ” “ His 
 picture of Sir Claude Calipash is a gorgeous representation of 
 aldermanic dignity, and high chivalric grace ! ” As for Asterisk, 
 
108 • 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 you are told, Mr. Asterisk has two or three pictures — pretty, 
 but weak, repetitions of his old faces and subjects in his old namby- 
 pamby style. The committee, we hear, rejected most of his 
 pictures : the committee are very compassionate. How dared they 
 reject Mr. Blank’s stupendous historical picture of So-and-so?”’ 
 (Here, my dear sir, I am sorry to say that there was a general 
 snore heard from the guests round the table, which rather dis- 
 turbed the flow of your rhetoric. You swallowed down two or 
 three pints of burgundy, however, and continued.) 
 
 ‘ But I must conclude. Michael Angelo Titmarsh, you know 
 your duty. You are an honest man (loud cheers, the people had 
 awakened during the pause). You must go forth determined to 
 tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ; as 
 far as you, a fallible creature (cries of “ Ko, no ! ”) know it. If 
 you see a good picture, were it the work of your bitterest enemy 
 — and you have hundreds — praise it.’ 
 
 ‘ I will,’ gasped I. 
 
 ‘ Hold your tongue, sir, and don’t be interrupting me with 
 your perpetual orations ! If you see a bad picture, were it the 
 work of your dearest associate, your brother, the friend of your 
 bosom, your benefactor — cut, slash, slaughter him without mercy. 
 Strip off humbug, sir, though it cover your best boon-companion. 
 Praise merit, though it belong to your fiercest foe, your rival in 
 the affections of your mistress, the man from whom you have 
 borrowed money, or taken a beating in private ! ’ 
 
 ‘ Mr. Yorke,’ said I, clenching my fists and starting up, ‘ this 
 passes endurance, were you not intox — ; ’ but two waiters here 
 seized and held me down, luckily for you. 
 
 ‘ Peace, Titmarsh (said you) ; ’twas but raillery. Be honest, 
 my friend, is all that I would say ; and if you write a decent 
 article on the Exhibitions, Mr. Fraser will pay you handsomely 
 for your trouble ; and, in order that you may have every facility 
 for visiting the picture-galleries, I myself will give you a small 
 sum in hand. Here are ten shillings. Five Exhibitions, five 
 shillings ; catalogues, four. You will have twelve pence for 
 yourself, to take refreshments in the intervals.’ 
 
 I held out my hand, for my anger had quite disappeared. 
 
 ‘ Mr. Fraser,’ said you, give the fellow half a sovereign ; and, 
 for Heaven’s sake, teach him to be silent when a gentleman is 
 speaking ! ’ 
 
 What passed subsequently need not be stated here, but the 
 above account of your speech is a pretty correct one ; and, in 
 pursuance of your orders, I busied myself with the Exhibitions 
 on the following day. The result of my labours will be found in 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 109 
 
 the accompanying report. I have the honour, sir, of laying it 
 at your feet, and of subscribing myself. 
 
 With the profoundest respect and devotion. Sir, 
 
 Your very faithful and obedient Servant, 
 
 Michael Angelo Titmarsh. 
 
 Moreland's Coffee-House, 
 
 Dean Street, Soho. 
 
 PA^QAIA rPAMMA A'. 
 
 The Royal Academy. 
 
 Had the author of the following paragraphs the pen of a Sir 
 Walter Scott or a Lady Morgan, he would write something 
 excessively brilliant and witty about the first day of the Exhibition, 
 and of the company which crowd the rooms upon that occasion. 
 On Friday the queen comes (Heaven bless her majesty !) attended 
 by her courtiers and train ; and deigns, with royal eyes, to 
 examine the works of her Royal Academicians. Her, as we are 
 given to understand, the President receives, bowing profoundly, 
 awe-stricken ; his gold chain dangles from his presidential bosom, 
 and sweet smiles of respectful courtesy light up his venerable face. 
 Walking by her majesty’s side, he explains to her the wonders of 
 the show. ^ That, may it please your majesty, is a picture 
 representing yourself, painted by the good knight, Sir Francis 
 Wilkie : deign to remark how the robes seem as if they were cut 
 out of British oak, and the figure is as wooden as the figure-head 
 of one of your majesty’s men-of-war. Opposite is your majesty’s 
 royal consort, by Mr. Patten. We have the honour to possess 
 two more pairs of Pattens in this Academy — ha, ha ! Round 
 about you will see some of my own poor works of art. Yonder 
 is Mr. Landseer’s portrait of your majesty’s own cockatoo, with a 
 brace of Havadavats. Please your royal highness to look at the 
 bit of biscuit ; no baker could have done it more natural. Fair 
 maid of honour, look at that lump of sugar ; couldn’t one take 
 an affidavit, now, that it cost elevenpence a pound ? Isn’t it 
 sweet ? I know only one thing sweeter, and that’s your ladyship’s 
 lovely face ! ’ 
 
 In such lively conversation might we fancy a bland president 
 discoursing. The queen should make august replies ; the lovely, 
 smiling maids of honour should utter remarks becoming their 
 innocence and station (turning away very red from that corner of 
 the apartment where hung certain Venuses and Andromedas, 
 
110 
 
 CMTICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 painted by William Etty, Esquire) ; the gallant prince, a lordly, 
 handsome, gallant gentleman, with a slight foreign accent, should 
 curl the dark mustache that adorns his comely lip, and say, 
 
 ‘ Potztausend / but dat bigure of First loaf by Herr von Mulready 
 ist luunderschdn I ^ and courtly chamberlains, prim gold-sticks, and 
 sly polonaises of the court, should take their due share in the gay 
 scene, and deliver their portions of the dialogue of the little drama. 
 
 All this, I say, might be done in a very sprightly, neat way, 
 were poor Titmarsh an Ainsworth or a Lady Morgan ; and the 
 scene might be ended smartly with the knighting of one of the 
 Academicians by her majesty on the spot. As thus : — ‘ The royal 
 party had stood for three-and-twenty minutes in mute admiration 
 before that tremendous picture by Mr. Maclise, representing the 
 banquet in the hall of Dunsinane. “ Gory shadow of Banquo,^’ 
 said Lady Almeria to Lady Wilhelmina, “ how hideous thou art ! ’’ 
 “ Hideous 1 hideous yourself, marry 1 replied the arch and lovely 
 Wilhelmina. ‘‘ By my halidome ! whispered the seneschal to the 
 venerable prime minister. Lord Melborough — “ by cock and pie, 
 sir count, but it seems me that yon Scottish kerne, Macbeth, 
 hath a shrewd look of terror ! “ And a marvellous unkempt 
 
 beard, answered the earl ; and a huge mouth gaping wide for 
 very terror, and a hand palsied with fear.’^ Hoot awa, mon ! 
 cried an old Scots general, “but the chield Macbeth (I’m 
 descanded from him leeneally in the saxty-ninth generation) knew 
 hoo to wield a gude claymore ! ” “ His hand looks as if it had 
 
 dropped a hot potato ! ” whispered a roguish page, and the little 
 knave’s remark caused a titter to run through the courtly circle, 
 and brought a smile upon the cheek of the President of the 
 Academy ; who, sooth to say, had been twiddling his chain of 
 office between his finger and thumb, somewhat jealous of the 
 praise bestowed upon his young rival. 
 
 ‘“My lord of Wellington,” said her majesty, “lend me your 
 sword.” The veteran, smiling, drew forth that trenchant sabre, — 
 that spotless blade of battle that had fiashed victorious on the 
 plains of far Assay e, in the breach of storm-girt Badajoz, in the 
 mighty and supreme combat of Waterloo ! A tear stood in the 
 hero’s eye as he fell on his gartered knee ; and, holding the blade 
 between his finger and thumb, he presented the hilt to his liege 
 lady. “ Take it, madam,” said he ; “ sheathe it in this old breast, 
 if you will, for my heart and sword are my sovereign’s. Take it, 
 madam, and be not angry if there is blood upon the steel — ’tis the 
 blood of the enemies of my country ! ” The queen took it ; and, 
 as the young and delicate creature waved that tremendous war- 
 sword, a gentleman near her remarked, that surely never lighted 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 111 
 
 on the earth a more delightful vision. “ Where is Mr. Maclise ? 
 said her majesty. The blushing painter stepped forward. “Kneel ! 
 kneel ! whispered fifty voices ; and frightened, he did as they 
 ordered him. “Sure she’s not going to cut my head off?” he 
 cried to the good knights Sir Augustus Callcott and Sir Isaac 
 Kewton, who were standing. “Your name, sir?” said the Ladye 
 of England. “ Sure you know it’s Maclise ! ” cried the son of Erin. 
 “ Your Christian name ? ” shrieked Sir Martin Shee, in agony. 
 “ Christian name, is it ? Oh, then it’s Daniel Malcolm, your 
 majesty, and much at your service ! ” She waved the sword 
 maiestically over his head, and said, “Rise up. Sir Malcolm 
 Maclise ! ” 
 
 ‘ The ceremony was concluded, the brilliant cortege moved away, 
 the royal caroches received the illustrious party, the heralds cried, 
 “ Largesse, Largesse ! ” and flung silver pennies among the shouting 
 crowds in Trafalgar Square ; and when the last man-at-arms that 
 accompanied the royal train had disappeared, the loud vivas of the 
 crowd were heard no more, the shrill song of the silver clarions 
 had died away, his brother painters congratulated the newly-dubbed 
 chevalier, and retired to partake of a slight collation of bread and 
 cheese and porter in the keeper’s apartments.’ 
 
 Were we, I say, inclined to be romantic, did we dare to be 
 imaginative, such a scene might be depicted with considerable 
 effect ; but, as it is, we must not allow poor fancy to get the 
 better of reason, and declare that to write anything of the sort 
 would be perfectly uncalled for and absurd. Let it simply be 
 stated that, on the Friday, her majesty comes and goes. On the 
 Saturday the Academicians have a private view for the great 
 personages ; the lords of the empire and their ladies, the editors 
 of the newspapers and their friends ; and, after they have seen as 
 much as possible, about seven o’clock the Academicians give a 
 grand feed to their friends and patrons. 
 
 In the arrangement of this banquet let us say roundly that 
 Messieurs de V Academie are vastly too aristocratic. Why were 
 ive not asked ? The dinner is said to be done by Gunter ; and, 
 though the soup and fish are notoriously cold and uncomfortable, 
 we are by no means squeamish, and would pass over this gross 
 piece of neglect. We long, too, to hear a bishop say grace, and to 
 sit cheek by jowl with a duke or two. Besides, we could make 
 some return ; a good joke is worth a plate full of turtle ; a smart, 
 brisk pun is quite as valuable as a bottle of champagne ; a neat 
 anecdote deserves a slive of venison, with plenty of fat and curranty 
 jelly, and so on. On such principles of barter we might be disposed 
 
112 
 
 CEITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 to treat. But a plague on this ribaldry and beating about the 
 bush ! let us leave the plates, and come at once to the pictures. 
 
 Once or twice before, in the columns of this Magazine, we have 
 imparted to the public our notions about Greek art, and its 
 manifold deadly errors. The contemplation of such specimens of it 
 as we possess hath always, to tell the truth, left us in a state 
 of unpleasant wonderment and perplexity. It carries corporeal 
 beauty to a pitch of painful perfection, and deifies the body and 
 bones truly ; but, by dint of sheer beauty, it leaves humanity 
 altogether inhuman — quite heartless and passionless. Look at 
 Apollo the divine : there is no blood in his marble veins, no 
 warmth in his bosom, no fire or speculation in his dull, awful eyes. 
 Laocoon writhes and twists in an anguish that never can, in the 
 breast of any spectator, create the smallest degree of pity. Diana, 
 
 ^ La chasseresse 
 Blanche j au sein mrginal, 
 
 Qui presse 
 
 Quelque cerf matinal ’ ^ — 
 
 may run from this till doomsday ; and we feel no desire to join the 
 cold, passionless huntress in her ghostly chase. Such monsters of 
 beauty are quite out of the reach of human sympathy ; they were 
 purposely (by the poor benighted heathens who followed this error, 
 and strove to make their error as grand as possible) placed beyond 
 it. They seemed to think that human joy and sorrow, passion and 
 love, were mean and contemptible in themselves. Their gods were 
 to be calm, and share in no such feelings. How much grander is 
 the character of the Christian school, which teaches that love is 
 the most beautiful of all things, and the first and highest element 
 of beauty in art ! 
 
 I don't know, madam, whether I make myself clearly understood 
 in saying so much ; but if you will have the kindness to look at a 
 certain little picture by Mr. Eastlake in this gallery, you will see 
 to what the observation applies, and that out of a homely subject, 
 and a few simple figures not at all wonderful for excessive beauty 
 or grandeur, the artist can make something infinitely more beautiful 
 than Medicean Venuses, and sublimer than Pythian Apollos. 
 Happy are you, Charles Lock Eastlake, Esquire, R.A. ! I think 
 you have in your breast some of that sacred fire that lighted the 
 bosom of Raphael Sanctius, Esquire, of Urbino, he being a young 
 man, — a holy kind of Sabbath repose — a calm that comes not of 
 feeling, but of the overflowing of it — a tender, yearning sympathy 
 ^ Alfred de Masset. 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 113 
 
 and love for God’s beautiful world and creatures. Impelled by 
 such a delightful sentiment, the gentle spirit of him in whom it 
 dwells (like the angels of old, who first taught us to receive the 
 doctrine that love was the key to the world) breathes always peace 
 on earth and good-will towards men. And though the privilege of 
 enjoying this happy frame of mind is accorded to the humblest as 
 well as the most gifted genius, yet the latter must remember that 
 the intellect can exercise itself in no higher way than in the 
 practice of this kind of adoration and gratitude. The great artist 
 who is the priest of nature is consecrated especially to this service 
 of praise ; and though it may have no direct relation to religious 
 subjects, the view of a picture of the highest order does always, 
 like the view of stars in a calm night, or a fair quiet landscape in 
 sunshine, fill the mind with an inexpressible content and gratitude 
 towards the Maker who has created such beautiful things for 
 our use. 
 
 And as the poet has told us how, not out of a wide landscape 
 merely, or a sublime expanse of glittering stars, but of any very 
 humble thing, we may gather the same delightful reflections (as 
 out of a small flower, that brings us ‘ thoughts that do often lie 
 too deep for tears’) — in like manner we do not want grand 
 pictures and elaborate yards of canvas so to affect us, as the 
 lover of drawing must have felt in looking at the Raphael designs 
 lately exhibited in London. These were little faint scraps, mostly 
 from the artist’s pencil — small groups, unfinished single figures, 
 just indicated ; but the divine elements of beauty were as strong 
 in them as in the grandest pieces ; and there were many little 
 sketches, not half an inch high, which charmed and affected one 
 like the violet did Wordsworth ; and left one in that unspeakable, 
 complacent, grateful condition which, as I have been endeavouring 
 to state, is the highest aim of the art. 
 
 And if I might be allowed to give a hint to amateurs concerning 
 pictures and their merit, I would say look to have your heart 
 touched by them. The best paintings address themselves to the 
 best feelings of it ; and a great many very clever pictures do not 
 touch it at all. Skill and handling are great parts of a painter’s 
 trade, but heart is the first ; this is God’s direct gift to him, and 
 cannot be got in any academy, or under any master. Look about, 
 therefore, for pictures, be they large or small, finished well or ill, 
 landscapes, portraits, figure-pieces, pen-and-ink sketches, or what 
 not, that contain sentiment and great ideas. He who possesses 
 these will be sure to express them more or less well. Never 
 mind about the manner. He who possesses them not may draw 
 and colour to perfection, and yet do no artist. As for telling you 
 
 I 
 
114 
 
 CEITICAL PAPEES m AET 
 
 what sentiment is, and what it is not, wherein lies the secret of 
 the sublime, there, madam, we must stop altogether ; only if, 
 after reading Burke On the Sublime^ you will find yourself exactly 
 as wise as you were before. I cannot tell why a landscape by 
 Claude or Constable should be more beautiful — it is certainly not 
 
 more dexterous— than a landscape by Mr. or Mr. . I 
 
 cannot tell why Eaphael should be superior to Mr. Benjamin 
 Haydon (a fact which one person in the world may be perhaps 
 inclined to doubt) ; or why Yedrai Carino, in Don Juan, should 
 be more charming to me than ^ Suoni la tromha,' before mentioned. 
 The latter has twice as much drumming, trumpeting, and thunder- 
 ing in it. All these points are quite undefinable and inexplicable 
 (I never read a metaphysical account of them that did not seem 
 sheer dulness and nonsense) ; but we can have no doubt about 
 them. And thus we come to Charles Lock Eastlake, Esquire, 
 from whom we started about a page since ; during which we have 
 laid down, first, that sentiment is the first quality of a picture ; 
 second, that to say whether this sentiment exists or no rests with 
 the individual entirely, the sentiment not being capable of any sort 
 of definition. Charles Lock Eastlake, Esquire, possesses, to my 
 thinking, this undefinable arch-quality of sentiment to a very high 
 degree. And, besides him, let us mention William Mulready, 
 Esquire, Cope, Boxall, Eedgrave, Herbert (the two latter don’t 
 show so much of it this year as formerly), and Eichmond. 
 
 Mr. Eastlake’s picture is as pure as a Sabbath-hymn sung by 
 the voices of children. He has taken a very simple subject — 
 hardly any subject at all ; but such suggestive points are the 
 best, perhaps, that a painter can take ; for with the illustration 
 of a given subject out of a history or romance, when one has seen 
 it, one has commonly seen all, whereas such a piece as this, which 
 Mr. Eastlake calls ‘ The Salutation of the Aged Friar,’ brings the 
 spectator to a delightful peaceful state of mind, and gives him 
 matter to ponder upon long after. The story of this piece is 
 simply this : — A group of innocent, happy-looking Italian peasants 
 are approaching a couple of friars ; a boy has stepped forward 
 with a little flower, which he presents to the elder of these, and 
 the old monk is giving him his blessing. 
 
 Now, it would be very easy to find fault with this picture, and 
 complain of excessive redness in the shadows, excessive whiteness 
 in the linen, of rejDetition in the faces — the smallest child is the 
 very counterpart of one in the ‘ Christ and the Little Children ’ 
 by the same artist last year — the women are not only copies of 
 women before painted by Mr. Eastlake, but absolutely copies of 
 one another; the drawing lacks vigour, the flesh -tints variety. 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 115 
 
 (they seem to be produced, by the most careful stippling, with a 
 brilliant composition of lake and burnt sienna, cooled off as they 
 come to the edges with a little blue.) But though, in the writer's 
 judgment, there are in the picture every one of these faults, the 
 merits of the performance incomparably exceed them, and these 
 are of the purely sentimental and intellectual kind. What a 
 tender grace and purity in the female heads ! If Mr. Eastlake 
 repeats his model often, at least he has been very lucky in finding 
 or making her : indeed, I don't know in any painter, ancient or 
 modern, such a charming character of female beauty. The 
 countenances of the monks are full of unction ; the children, with 
 their mild-beaming eyes, are fresh with recollections of heaven. 
 There is no affectation of middle-age mannerism, such as silly 
 German and silly Frenchmen are wont to call Catholic art ; and 
 the picture is truly Catholic in consequence, having about it what 
 the hymn calls ‘ solemn mirth,' and giving the spectator the utmost 
 possible pleasure in viewing it. JYow, if we might suggest to 
 Mr. Lane, the lithographer, how he might confer a vast benefit 
 upon the public, we would entreat him to make several large 
 copies of pictures of this class, executing them with that admirable 
 grace and fidelity which are the characteristics of all his copies. 
 Let these be coloured accurately, as they might be, at a small 
 charge, and poor people for a few guineas might speedily make for 
 themselves delightful picture-galleries. The colour adds amazingly 
 to the charm of these pictures, and attracts the eye to them. 
 And they are such placid, pious companions for a man's study, 
 that the continual presence of them could not fail to purify his 
 taste and his heart. 
 
 I am not here arguing, let it be remembered, that Mr. Eastlake 
 is absolute perfection ; and will concede to those who find fault 
 with him that his works are deficient in power, however remark- 
 able for grace. Be it so. But, then, let us admire his skill in 
 choosing such subjects as are best suited to his style of thinking, 
 and least likely to shew his faults. In the pieces ordinarily 
 painted by him, grace and tender feeling are the chief requisites ; 
 and I don't recollect a work of his in w^hich he has aimed at 
 other qualities. One more picture besides the old Friar has Mr. 
 Eastlake, a portrait of that beautiful Miss Bury, whom our readers 
 must recollect in the old house, in a black mantle, a red gown, 
 with long golden hair waving over her shoulders, and a lily in her 
 hand. The picture was engraved afterwards in one of the Annuals ; 
 and was one of the most delightful works that ever came from 
 Mr. Eastlake's pencil. I can't say as much for the present 
 portrait ; the picture wants relief, and is very odd and heavy in 
 
116 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IK ART 
 
 colour. The handsome lady looks as if she wanted her stays. 
 
 0 beautiful lily-bearer of six years since ! you should not have 
 appeared like a mortal after having once shone upon us as an 
 angel. 
 
 And now we are come to the man whom we delight to honour, 
 Mr. Mulready, who has three pictures in the Exhibition that are 
 all charming in their way. The first (‘Fair Time,^ 116) was 
 painted, it is said, more than a score of years since ; and the 
 observer may look into it with some payment for his curiosity, 
 for it contahis specimens of the artist’s old and new manner. 
 The picture in its first state is somewhat in the Wilkie style of 
 that day (0 for the Wilkie style of that day !), having many 
 greys, and imitating closely the Dutchmen. Since then the 
 painter has been touching up the figures in the foreground with 
 his new and favourite lurid orange-colour ; and you may see how 
 this is stippled in upon the faces and hands, and borrow, perhaps, 
 a hint or two regarding the Mulreadian secret. 
 
 What is the meaning of this strange colour ? — these glowing, 
 burning crimsons, and intense blues, and greens more green than 
 the first budding leaves of spring, or the mignonette-pots in a 
 Cockney’s window at Brixton. But don’t fancy that we are joking 
 or about to joke at Mr. Mulready. These gaudy prismatic colours 
 are wonderfully captivating to the eye ; and, amidst a host of 
 pictures, it cannot fail to settle on a Mulready in preference to 
 all. But, for consistency’s sake, a protest must be put in against 
 the colour ; it is pleasant, but wrong ; we never saw it in nature 
 — not even when looking through an orange-coloured glass. This 
 point being settled, then, and our minds eased, let us look at the 
 design and conception of ‘ First Love ’ ; and pray, sir, where in 
 the whole works of modern artists will you find anything more 
 exquisitely beautiful ? I don’t know what that young fellow, so 
 solemn, so tender, is whispering into the ear of that dear girl (she 
 is only fifteen now, but, saprist% how beautiful she will be about 
 three years hence !), who is folding a pair of slim arms round a 
 little baby, and making believe to nurse it, as they three are 
 standing one glowing summer day under some trees by a stile. 
 
 1 don’t know, I say, what they are saying ; nor, if I could hear, 
 would I tell — ’tis a secret, madam. Recollect the words that 
 the captain whispered in your ear that afternoon in the shrubbery. 
 Your heart throbs, your cheek flushes ; the sweet sound of those 
 words tells clear upon your ear, and you say, ‘ Oh, Mr. Titmarsh, 
 how can you ? ' Be not afraid, madam — never, never will I peach ; 
 but sing, in the words of a poet who is occasionally quoted in the 
 House of Commons — 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 117 
 
 Est et fidcli tuta silentio 
 
 Merces. Vetabo qui Cereris sacrum 
 Vvjlgarit arcance, sub iisdein 
 Sit trabibus^ fragilemm mecum 
 
 Solvat phaselumd 
 
 Which may be interpreted (with the slight alteration of the name 
 of Ceres for that of a much more agreeable goddess) — 
 
 Be happy, and thy counsel keep, 
 
 ’Tis thus the bard adviseth thee ; 
 
 Remember that the silent lip 
 In silence shall rewarded be. 
 
 And fly the wretch who dares to strip 
 Love of its sacred mystery. 
 
 My loyal legs I would not stretch 
 Beneath the same mahogany ; 
 
 ISTor trust myself in Chelsea Reach, 
 
 In punt or skiff, with such as he. 
 
 The villain who would kiss and peach, 
 
 I hold him for mine enemy ! 
 
 But, to return to our muttons, I would not give a fig for the taste 
 of the individual who does not see the exquisite beauty of this 
 little group. Our artist has more passion than the before-lauded 
 Mr. Eastlake, but quite as much delicacy and tenderness ; and 
 they seem to me to possess the poetry of picture-making more 
 than any other of their brethren. 
 
 By the way, what is this insane yell that has been raised 
 throughout the public press about Mr. Mulready’s other perform- 
 ance, the postage cover, and why are the sages so bitter against 
 it ? The Times says it is disgraceful and ludicrous ; the elegant 
 writers of The W eehly Dispatch vow it is ludicrous and disgrace- 
 ful ; the same sweet song is echoed by papers. Radical and 
 Conservative, in London and the provinces, all the literary gentle- 
 men being alive and smarting under the insult to the arts of the 
 country. Honest gentlemen of the press, be not so thin-skinned ! 
 Take my word for it, there is no cause for such vehement anger 
 — no good opportunity here for you to shew off that exquisite 
 knowledge of the fine arts for which you are so celebrated through- 
 out the world. Gentlemen, the drawing of which you complain 
 is not bad. The commonest engravers, who would be ashamed to 
 produce such a design, will tell you, if they know anythiiig of 
 their business, that they could not make a better in a hurry. 
 Every man who knows what drawing is will acknowledge that 
 some of these little groups are charmingly drawn ; and I will 
 
118 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 trouble your commonest engravers to design the Chinese group, 
 the American, or the West Indian, in a manner more graceful and 
 more characteristic than that of the much - bespattered post 
 envelope. 
 
 I am not holding up the whole affair as a masterpiece — si 
 hete. The ‘ triumphant hallegory of Britannia ruling the waves,’ 
 as Mathews used to call it, is a little stale, certainly, nowadays ; 
 but what would you have ? How is the sublime to be elicited 
 from such a subject ? Let some of the common engravers, in their 
 leisure moments, since the thing is so easy, make a better design, 
 or the literary men who are so indignant invent one. The govern- 
 ment, no doubt, is not bound heart and soul to Mr. Mulready, 
 and is willing to hear reason. Fiat jtistitia, mat coelum : though 
 all the world shall turn on thee, 0 government, in this instance 
 Titmarsh shall stand by thee — ay, and without any hope of 
 reward. To be sure, if my Lord Normanby absolutely insists — 
 but that is neither here nor there. I repeat, the Post Office 
 envelope is not bad, quoad design. That very lion, which some 
 of the men of the press (the Daniels !) have been crying out about, 
 is finely, carefully, and characteristically sketched ; those elephants 
 I am sure were closely studied, before the artist in a few lines 
 laid them down on his wood-block ; and as for the persons who 
 are to imitate the engraving so exactly, let them try. It has 
 been done by the best wood-engraver in Europe. Ask any man 
 in the profession if Mr. Thompson is not at the head of it ? He 
 has bestowed on it a vast deal of time, and skill, and labour; 
 and all who know the difficulties of wood-engraving — of outline 
 wood-engraving — and of rendering faithfully a design so very 
 minute as this, will smile at the sages who declare that all the 
 world could forge it. There was one provincial paper which 
 declared, in a style peculiarly elegant, that a man ‘with a block 
 of wood and a hread-and.-clieese knife could easily imitate the 
 envelope ; ’ which remark, for its profound truth and sagacity, 
 the London journals copied. For shame, gentlemen ! Do you 
 think you show your knowledge by adopting such opinions as 
 these, or prove your taste by clothing yourselves in the second- 
 hand garments of the rustic who talks about bread and cheese ? 
 Try, Tyrotomos, upon whatever block thou choosest to practise ; 
 or be wise, and with appropriate bread-and-cheese knife cut only 
 bread and cheese. Of bread, white and brown, of cheese, old, 
 new, mouldy, toasted, the writer of The Douhle-Gloster Journal^ 
 The Stilton Examiner, The Cheddar Champion, and North Wilt- 
 shire Intelligencer, may possibly be a competent critic, and (with 
 mouth replete with the delicious condiment) may no doubt 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 119 
 
 eloquently speak. But let us be cautious before we agree to and 
 admiringly adopt his opinions upon matters of art. Mr. Thompson 
 is the first wood-engraver in our country — Mr. Mulready one of 
 the best painters in our or any school : it is hard that such men 
 are to be assailed in such language, and by such a critic ! 
 
 This artistes picture of an interior is remarkable for the same 
 exaggerated colour, and for the same excellences. The landscape 
 seen from the window is beautifully solemn, and very finely 
 painted, in the clear bright manner of Van Dyck and Cranach, 
 and the early German school. 
 
 Mr. Richmond's picture of ‘ Our Lord after the Resurrection ’ 
 deserves a much better place than it has in the little, dingy, 
 newly-discovered octagon closet ; and leaves us to regret that he 
 should occupy himself so much with water-colour portraits, and so 
 little with compositions in oil. This picture is beautifully con- 
 ceived, and very finely and carefully drawn and painted. One of 
 the apostles is copied from Raphael, and the more is the pity : a 
 man who could execute two such grand figures as the other two in 
 the picture need surely borrow from no one. A water-colour 
 group, by the same artist (547. ‘ The Children of Colonel Lindsay ’), 
 contains two charming figures of a young lady and a little boy, 
 painted with great care and precision of design and colour, 
 with great purity of sentiment, and without the least aftecta- 
 tion. Let our aristocracy send their wives and children 
 (the handsomest wives and children in the world) to be painted by 
 this gentleman, and those who are like him. Miss Lindsay, with 
 her plain red dress and modest looks, is surely a thousand times 
 more captivating than those dangerous smiling Delilahs in her 
 neighbourhood, whom Mr. Chalon has painted. We must not be 
 understood to undervalue this latter gentleman, however ; his 
 drawings are miracles of dexterity ; every year they seem to be 
 more skilful and more brilliant. Such satins and lace, such 
 diamond rings and charming little lap-dogs, were never painted 
 before, — not by Watteau, the first master of the genre ^ — and 
 Lancret, who was scarcely his inferior. A miniature on ivory by 
 Mr. Chalon, among the thousand prim, pretty little pictures of the 
 same class which all the ladies crowd about, is remarkable for its 
 brilliancy of colour and charming freedom of handling ; as is an oil 
 sketch of masquerading figures, by the same painter, for the 
 curious coarseness of the painting. 
 
 Before we leave the high-class pictures, we must mention Mr. 
 BoxalTs beautiful ‘ Hope,^ which is exquisitely refined and delicate 
 in sentiment, colour, and execution. Placed close beneath one of 
 Turner’s magnificent tornadoes of colour, it loses none of its own 
 
120 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 beauty. As Uhland writes of a certain king and queen who are 
 seated in state side by side — 
 
 Der TwYYiQv furchthar prdchtig wie Hunger Nordlichtschein 
 
 Der Boxall silss und milde^ als hlickte Vollmond drein. 
 
 Which signifies in English, that 
 
 As beams the moon so gentle near the sun, that blood-red burner, 
 
 So shineth William Boxall by Joseph Mallord Turner. 
 
 In another part of the room, and contrasting their quiet grace 
 in the same way with Mr. Turner’s glaring colours, are a couple of 
 delightful pictures by Mr. Cope, with mottoes that will explain 
 their subjects. ‘ Help thy father in his age, and despise him not 
 when thou art in thy full strength ; ’ and ‘ Reject not the affliction 
 of the afflicted, neither turn away thy face from a poor man.’ The 
 latter of these pictures is especially beautiful, and the figure of the 
 female charity as graceful and delicate as may be. I wish I could 
 say a great deal in praise of Mr. Cope’s large altar-piece : it is a 
 very meritorious performance ; but here praise stops, and such 
 praise is worth exactly nothing. A large picture must either be 
 splendid, or else naught. This ‘ Crucifixion ’ has a great deal of 
 vigour, feeling, grace ; but, — the but is fatal ; all minor praises 
 are drowned in it. Recollect, however, Mr. Cope, that Titmarsh, 
 who writes this, is only giving his private opinion ; that he is 
 mortal ; that it is barely possible that he should be in the wrong ; 
 and with this confession, which I am compelled (for fear you might 
 overlook the circumstance) to make, you will, I dare say, console 
 yourself, and do well. But men must gird themselves, and go 
 through long trainings, before they can execute such gigantic works 
 as altar-pieces. Handel, doubtless, wrote many little pleasing 
 melodies before he pealed out the ‘ Hallelujah ’ chorus ; and so 
 painters will do well to try their powers, and, if possible, measure 
 and understand them, before they use them. There is Mr. Hart, 
 for instance, who took in an evil hour to the making of great 
 pictures ; in the present Exhibition is a decently small one ; but 
 the artist has over-stretched himself in the former attempts ; as 
 one hears of gentlemen on the rack, the limbs are stretched one or 
 two inches by the process, and the patient comes away by so 
 much the taller ; but he can’t ivalk near so well as before, and all 
 his strength is stretched out of him. 
 
 Let this be a solemn hint to a clever young painter, Mr 
 Elmore, who has painted a clever picture of ‘ The Murder of 
 Saint Thomas k Becket,’ for Mr. Daniel O’Connell. Come off your 
 rack, Mr. Elmore, or you will hurt yourself. Much better is it to 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 121 
 
 paint small subjects, for some time at least, ‘ Non cuivis contingit 
 adire Corintlmm^^ as the proverb says ; but there is a number of 
 pleasant villages in this world besides, where we may snugly take 
 up our quarters. By the way, what is the meaning of Tom 
 k BeckeCs black cassock under his canonicals? Would John 
 Tuam celebrate mass in such a dress ? A painter should be as 
 careful about his costumes as an historian about his dates, or he 
 plays the deuce with his composition. 
 
 Now, in this matter of costume, nobody can be more scrupulous 
 than Mr. Charles Landseer, whose picture of Nell Cwynn is 
 painted with admirable effect, and honest scrupulousness. It is 
 very good in colour, very gay in spirits (perhaps too refined, — for 
 Nelly never was such a hypocrite as to look as modest as that) ; 
 but the gentlemen and ladies do not look as if they were accus- 
 tomed to their dresses, for all their correctness, and had put them 
 on for the first time. Indeed, this is a very small fault, and the 
 merits of the picture are very great ; every one of the accessories 
 is curiously well painted, — some of the figures very spirited (the 
 drawer is excellent) ; and the picture one of the most agreeable in 
 the whole gallery. Mr. Redgrave has another costume picture, of 
 a rather old subject, from The Rambler, A poor girl comes to be 
 companion to Mr. and Mrs. Courtly, who are at piquet ; their 
 servants are bringing in tea, and the master and mistress are 
 looking at the new-comer with a great deal of easy scorn. The 
 poor girl is charming ; Mrs. Courtly not quite genteel, but with a 
 wonderful quilted petticoat ; Courtly looks as if he were not 
 accustomed to his clothes ; the servants are very good ; and as for 
 the properties, as they would be called on the stage, these are 
 almost too good-painted, with a daguerreotypical minuteness, that 
 gives this and Mr. Redgrave’s . other picture of ^ Paracelsus ’ a 
 finnikin air, if we may use such a disrespectful term. Both per- 
 formances, however, contain very high merit of expression and 
 sentiment ; and are of such a character as we seldom saw in our 
 schools twenty years ago. 
 
 There is a large picture by a Scotch artist, Mr. Duncan, repre- 
 senting ‘The Entry of Charles Edward into Edinburgh,’ which 
 runs a little into caricature, but contains a vast deal of character 
 and merit ; and which, above all, in the article of costume, shews 
 much study and taste. Mr. Duncan seems to have formed his 
 style upon Mr. Allan and Mr. Wilkie — I beg his pardon — Sir 
 David. The former has a pleasing brown picture likewise on the 
 subject of the Pretender. The latter’s maid of Saragossa and 
 Spaniard at the gun, any one may see habited as Irish peasants 
 superintending ‘A Vvhisky Still,’ in the middle room. No. 252. 
 
122 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 This picture, I say, any one may see and admire who pleases ; 
 to me it seems all rags, and duds, and a strange, straggling, misty 
 composition. There are fine things, of course ; for how can Sir 
 David help to paint fine things ? In the ‘ Benvenuto ’ there is 
 superb colour, with a rich management of lakes especially, which 
 has been borrowed from no master that we know of The queen 
 is as bad a likeness and picture as we have seen for many a day. 
 
 ‘ Mrs. Ferguson of Raith,^ a magnificent picture indeed, as grand 
 in effect as a Rubens or Titian, and having a style of its own. 
 The little sketch from Allan Ramsay is delightful ; and the noble- 
 man and hounds (with the exception of his own clumsy vermilion 
 robe), as fine as the fellow-sized portrait mentioned before. Allan 
 Ramsay has given a pretty subject, and brought us a pretty 
 picture from another painter, Mr. A. Johnston, Avho has illustrated 
 those pleasant quaint lines, — 
 
 Last morning I was gay, and early out ; 
 
 Upon a dyke I leaned, glow’ring about. 
 
 I saw my Meg come linken o’er the lea ; 
 
 I saw my Meg, but Meggy saw na me. 
 
 And here let us mention with praise two small pictures in a 
 style somewhat similar, — ‘ Tlie Recruit,’ and ‘ Herman and 
 Dorothea,’ by Mr. Poole. The former of these little pieces is very 
 touching and beautiful. There is among the present exhibitioners 
 no lack of this kind of talent ; and we could point out many 
 pictures that are equally remarkable for grace and agreeable feeling. 
 Mr. Stone’s ‘ Annot Lyle ’ should not be passed over, — a pretty 
 picture, very well painted ; the female head of great beauty and 
 expression. 
 
 Now, if we want to praise performances showing a great deal of 
 power and vigour, rather than grace and delicacy, there are Mr. 
 Etty’s ^Andromeda’ and ^ Venus.’ In the former, the dim figure 
 of advancing Perseus galloping on his airy charger is very fine and 
 ghostly ; in the latter, the body of the Venus, and indeed the 
 whole picture, is a perfect miracle of colour. Titian may have 
 painted Italian flesh equally well : but he never, I think, could 
 surpass the skill of Mr. Etty. The trunk of this voluptuous Venus 
 is the most astonishing representation of beautiful English flesh and 
 blood, painted in the grandest and broadest style. It is said that the 
 Academy at Edinburgh has a room full of Etty’s pictures : they 
 could not do better in England than follow the example ; but 
 perhaps the paintings had better be kept /or the Academy only^ 
 — for the profanum vulgus are scarcely fitted to comprehend their 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 123 
 
 peculiar beauties. A prettily drawn, graceful, nude figure, is 
 ‘Bathsheba,’ by Mr. Fisher, of the street and city of Cork. 
 
 The other great man of Cork is Daniel Maclise by name ; and 
 if in the riot of fancy he hath by playful Titmarsh been raised to 
 the honour of knighthood, it is certain that here Titmarsh is a true 
 prophet, and that the sovereign will so elevate him, one day or 
 other, to sit with other cavaliers at the Academic round table. 
 As for his pictures, — why, as for his pictures, madam, these are to 
 be carefully reviewed in the next number of this Magazine ; for 
 the present notice has noticed scarcely anybody, and yet stretched 
 to an inordinate length. ‘ Macbeth ^ is not to be hurried off under 
 six pages ; and, for this June number, Mr. Fraser vows that he 
 has no such room to spare. 
 
 We have said how Mr. Turner^s pictures blaze about the 
 rooms : it is not a little curious to hear how artists and the 
 public differ in their judgments concerning them ; the enthusiastic 
 wonder of the first-named, the blank surprise and incredulity of 
 the latter. ‘ The new moon ; or, IVe lost my boat ; you shaiiT 
 have your hoop,^ is the ingenious title of one, — a very beautiful 
 picture, too, of a long shining sea-sand, lighted from the upper 
 part of the canvas by the above-named luminary of night, and 
 from the left-hand corner by a wonderful wary boy in a red jacket 
 — the best painted figure that we ever knew painted by Joseph 
 Mallord Turner, Esquire. 
 
 He and Mr. Ward vie with each other in mottoes for their 
 
 pictures. Ward’s epigraph to the S ’s nest is wondrous 
 
 poetic. 
 
 277. The S ’s Nest. S. Ward, E.A. 
 
 Say they that happiness lives with the great, 
 
 On gorgeous trappings mixt with pomp and state ? 
 
 More frequent found upon the simple plain, 
 
 In poorest garb, with Julia, Jess, or Jane ; 
 
 In sport or slumber, as it likes her best, 
 
 Where’er she lays she finds it a S ’s nest. 
 
 Ay, and a S ’s eggs, too, as one would fancy, were great 
 
 geniuses not above grammar. Mark the line, too, 
 
 On gorgeous trappings mixt with pomp and state, 
 
 and construe the whole of this sensible passage. 
 
 Not less sublime is Mr. Ward’s fellow academician. 
 
 230. ‘ Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying : 
 Typhon coming on.’ J. M. W. Turner, R.A. 
 
124 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Aloft all hands, strike the topmasts and belay ! 
 
 Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds 
 Declare the Typhon’s coming. 
 
 Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard 
 The dead and dying, — ne’er heed their chains. 
 
 Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope 
 Where is thy market now ? 
 
 MS. Fallacies of Hope. 
 
 Fallacies of Hope, indeed : to a pretty mart has she brought 
 her pigs ! How should Hope be hooked on tc the slaver ? By 
 the anchor, to be sure, which accounts for it. As for the picture, 
 the R.A.’s rays are indeed terrific ; and the slaver throwing its 
 cargo overboard is the most tremendous jDiece of colour that ever 
 was seen ; it sets the corner of the room in which it hangs into 
 a flame. Is the picture sublime or ridiculous ? Indeed I donT 
 know which. Rocks of gamboge are marked down upon the 
 canvas ; flakes of white laid on with a trowel ; bladders of 
 vermilion madly spirted here and there. Yonder is the slaver 
 rocking in the midst of a flashing foam of white-lead. The sun 
 glares down upon a horrible sea of emerald and purple, into 
 which chocolate-coloured slaves are plunged, and chains that will 
 not sink ; and round these are floundering such a race of fishes as 
 never was seen since the selenium Pyrrhee ; gasping dolphins 
 redder than the reddest herrings ; horrid spreading polypi, like 
 huge, slimy, poached eggs, in which hapless niggers j^lunge and 
 disappear. Ye gods, what a ‘middle passage!^ How Mr. 
 Fowell Buxton must shudder ! What would they say to this in 
 Exeter Hall ? If Wilberforce’s statue downstairs were to be con- 
 fronted with this picture, the stony old gentleman would spring off 
 his chair, and fly away in terror f 
 
 And here, as we are speaking of the slave-trade, let us say a 
 word in welcome to a French artist. Monsieur Biard, and his 
 admirable picture. Let the friends of the negro forthwith buy 
 this canvas, and cause a plate to be taken from it. It is the 
 best, most striking, most pathetic lecture against the trade that 
 ever was delivered. The picture is as fine as Hogarth ; and the 
 artist, who, as we have heard, right or wrong, has only of late 
 years adopted the profession of painting, and was formerly in the 
 French navy, has evidently drawn a great deal of his materials 
 from life and personal observation. The scene is laid upon the 
 African coast. King Tom or King Boy has come with troops of 
 slaves down the Quorra, and sits in the midst of his chiefs and 
 mistresses (one a fair creature, not much darker than a copper 
 tea-kettle), bargaining with a French dealer. What a horrible 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 125 
 
 callous brutality there is in the scoundrePs face, as he lolls over 
 his greasy ledger, and makes his calculations. A number of his 
 crew are about him ; their boats close at hand, in which they are 
 stowing their cargo. See the poor wretches, men and women, 
 collared together, drooping down. There is one poor thing, just 
 parted from her child. On the ground in front lies a stalwart 
 negro ; one connoisseur is handling his chest, to try his wind ; 
 another has opened his mouth, and examines his teeth, to know 
 his age and soundness. Yonder is a poor woman kneeling before 
 one of the Frenchmen. Her shoulder is fizzing under the hot iron 
 with which he brands her ; she is looking up, shuddering and 
 wild, yet quite mild and patient ; it breaks your heart to look at 
 her. I never saw anything so exquisitely pathetic as that face. 
 God bless you. Monsieur Biard, for painting it ! It stirs the heart 
 more than a hundred thousand tracts, reports, or sermons : it 
 must convert every man who has seen it. You British govern- 
 ment, who have given twenty millions towards the good end of 
 freeing this hapless people, give yet a couple of thousand more to 
 the French painter, and don’t let his work go out of the country, 
 now that it is here. Let it hang along with the Hogarths in the 
 National Gallery ; it is as good as the best of them. Or, there 
 is Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay, who has a family interest in 
 the matter, and does not know how to spend all the money he 
 brought home from India ; let the right honourable gentleman 
 look to it. Down with your dust, right honourable sir ; give 
 Monsieur Biard a couple of thousand for his picture of the negroes, 
 and it will be the best black act you ever did in your life ; and 
 don’t go for to be angry at the suggestion, or fancy we are taking 
 liberties. What is said is said from one public man to another, 
 in a Pickwickian sense, de 'puissance en puissance ^ — from Titmarsh, 
 in his critical cathedra^ to your father’s eminent son, rich with 
 the spoils of Ind, and wielding the bolts of war. 
 
 What a marvellous power is this of the painter’s ! how each 
 great man can excite us at his will ! what a weapon he has, if he 
 knows how to wield it ! Look for a while at Mr. Etty’s pictures, 
 and away you rush, your ‘ eyes on fire,’ drunken with the luscious 
 colours that are poured out for you on the liberal canvas, and 
 warm with the sight of the beautiful syrens that appear on it. 
 You fly from this (and full time too,) and plunge into a green, 
 shady landscape of Lee or Creswick, and follow a quiet stream 
 babbling beneath whispering trees, and chequered with cool shade 
 and golden sunshine ; or you set the world — nay, the Thames and 
 the ocean — on fire with that incendiary Turner ; or you laugh 
 with honest, kind-hearted Webster, and his troops of merry 
 
126 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 children ; or you fall a-weeping with Monsieur Biard for his poor 
 blacks ; or you go and consult the priests of the place, Eastlake, 
 Mulready, Boxall, Cope, and the like, and straightway your mind 
 is carried off in an ecstasy, — happy, thrilling hymns sound in your 
 ears melodious, — sweet thankfulness fills your bosom. How 
 much instruction and happiness have we gained from these men, 
 and how grateful should we be to them ! 
 
 It is well that Mr. Titmarsh stopped here, and I shall take 
 special care to examine any further remarks which he may think 
 fit to send. Four-fifths of this would have been cancelled, had 
 the printed sheets fallen sooner into our hands. The story about 
 the Clarendon is an absurd fiction ; no dinner ever took place 
 there. I never fell asleep in a plate of raspberry ice ; and though 
 I certainly did recommend this person to do justice by the painters, 
 making him a speech to that effect, my opinions were infinitely 
 better expressed, and I would repeat them, were it not so late in 
 the month. — 0. Yo 
 
A PICTOEIAL EHAPSODY: CONCLUDED.^ 
 
 AND FOLLOWED BY A EEMAEKABLE STATEMENT OF FACTS BY 
 MES. BAEBAEA. 
 
 And now, in pursuance of t\ie promise recorded in the last number 
 of this Magazine, and for the performance of which the public 
 has ever since been in breathless expectation, it hath become 
 Titmarsh’s duty to note down his opinions of the remaining 
 j^ictures in the Academy exhibition ; and to criticise such other 
 pieces as the other galleries may show. 
 
 In the first place, then, with regard to Mr. Maclise, it becomes 
 us to say our say ; and as The Observer newspaper, which, 
 though under the express patronage of the royal family, devotes 
 by far the noblest part of its eloquence to the consideration of 
 dramatic subjects, and to the discussion of the gains, losses, and 
 theatrical conduct of managers, — as, I say. The Observer news- 
 paper, whenever Madame Yestris or Mr. Yates adopts any plan 
 that concurs with the notions of the paper in question, does not 
 fail to say that Madame Yestris or Mr. Yates have been induced 
 so to reform in consequence of The Observers particular suggestion ; 
 in like manner, Titmarsh is fully convinced, that all the painters 
 in this town have their eyes incessantly fixed upon his criticisms, 
 and that all the wise ones regulate their opinions by his. 
 
 In the language of The Observer^ then, Mr. Maclise has done 
 wisely to adopt our suggestions with regard to the moral treat- 
 ment of his pictures, and has made a great advance in his art. 
 Of his four pictures, let us dismiss the scene from Gil Bias at 
 once. Coming from a second-rate man, it would be well enough : 
 it is well drawn, grouped, lighted, shadowed, and the people all 
 grin very comically, as people do in pictures called comic ; but 
 the soul of fun is wanting, as I take it, — the merry, brisk, good- 
 humoured spirit which in Le Sage’s text so charms the reader. 
 
 ^ Olivia and Malvolio ’ is, on the contrary, one of the best and 
 most spiritual performances of the artist. Nothing can be more 
 ^ [Fraser's Magazine^ 1840 .] 
 
 127 
 
128 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 elegant than the tender, languid melancholy of Olivia, nor more 
 poetical than the general treatment of the picture. The long 
 clipped alleys and quaint gardens, the peacocks trailing through 
 the walks, and vases basking in the sun, are finely painted and 
 conceived. Examine the picture at a little distance, and the 
 ensemble of the composition and colour is extraordinarily pleasing. 
 The details, too, are, as usual, wonderful for their accuracy. 
 Here are flower-beds, and a tree above Olivia’s head of which 
 every leaf is painted, and painted with such skill, as not in the 
 least to injure the general effect of the picture. Mr. Maclise has 
 a daguerreotypic eye, and a feeling of form stronger, I do believe, 
 than has ever been possessed by any painter before him. 
 
 Look at the portrait of Mr. Dickens, — well arranged as a 
 pict\jre, good in colour, and light, and shadow, and as a likeness 
 perfectly amazing ; a looking-glass could not render a better fac- 
 simile. Here we have the real identical man Dickens : the artist 
 must have understood the inward Boz as well as the outward 
 before he made this admirable representation of him. What 
 cheerful intelligence there is about the man’s eyes and large fore- 
 head ! The mouth is too large and full, too eager and active, 
 perhaps ; the smile is very sweet and generous. If Monsieur de 
 Balzac, that voluminous physiognomist, could examine this head, 
 he would, no doubt, interpret every tone and wrinkle in it : the 
 nose firm, and well placed ; the nostrils wide and full, as are the 
 nostrils of all men of genius (this is Monsieur Balzac’s maxim). 
 The past and the future, says Jean Paul, are written in every 
 countenance. I think we may promise ourselves a brilliant future 
 from this one. There seems no flagging as yet in it, no sense of 
 fatigue, or consciousness of decaying power. Long mayest thou, 
 0 Boz ! reign over thy comic kingdom ; long may we pay tribute, 
 whether of threepence weekly or of a shilling monthly, it matters 
 not. Mighty prince ! at thy imperial feet, Titmarsh, humblest 
 of thy servants, ofiers his vows of loyalty and his humble tribute 
 of praise. 
 
 And now (as soon as we are off our knees, and have done pay- 
 ing court to sovereign Boz) it behoves us to say a word or two 
 concerning the picture of ‘ Macbeth,’ which occupies such a con- 
 spicuous place in the Academy gallery. Well, then, this picture 
 of ‘ Macbeth ’ has been, to our notion, a great deal too much 
 praised and abused : only Titmarsh understands the golden mean, 
 as is acknowledged by all who read his criticisms. Here is a 
 very fine masterly picture, no doubt, full of beauties, and showing 
 extraordinary power ; but not a masterpiece, as I humbly take it, 
 — not a picture to move the beholder as much as many perform- 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 129 
 
 ances that do not display half the power that is here exhibited. 
 I don’t pretend to lay down any absolute laws on the sublime 
 (the reader will remember how the ancient satirist hath accused 
 John Dennis of madness, for his vehement preaching of such rules). 
 No, no ; Michael Angelo T. is not quite so impertinent as that ; 
 but the public and the artist will not mind being told, without 
 any previous definitions, that this picture is not of the highest 
 order : the ‘ Malvolio ’ is far more spiritual and suggestive, if we 
 may so speak ; it tells not only its own tale very charmingly, but 
 creates for the beholder a very pleasant, melancholy train of 
 thought, as every good picture does in its kind, from a six-inch 
 canvas by Hobbema or Ruysdael up to a thousand-foot wall of 
 Michael Angelo. If you read over the banquet-scene in words, it 
 leaves an impression far more dreadful and lively. On the stage, 
 it has always seemed to us to fail ; and though out of a trap-door 
 in the middle of it Mr. Cooper is seen to rise very solemnly, — his 
 face covered with white, and a dreadful gash of vermilion across 
 his neck ; though he nods and waggles his head about in a very 
 quiet, ghostlike manner ; yet, strange to say, neither this scene, 
 nor this great actor, has ever frightened us, as they both should, 
 as the former does when we read it at home. The fact is, that it 
 is quite out of Mr. Cooper’s power to look ghostly enough, or, 
 perhaps, to soar along with us to that sublime height to which 
 our imagination is continually carrying us. 
 
 Len. May it please your highness, sit ? 
 
 S^The Ghost o/Banquo rises^ and sits in Macbeth’s 
 
 Macb. Here had we now our country’s honour roof d, 
 
 Were the grac’d person of our Banquo present ; 
 
 Who may I rather challenge for unkindness 
 Than pity for mischance. 
 
 Ilosse. His absence, sir. 
 
 Lays blame upon his promise. Please it your highness 
 To grace us with your royal company ? 
 
 Macb. The table’s full. 
 
 Len. Here’s a place reserv’d, sir. 
 
 Macb. Where ? 
 
 Len. Here, my lord. What is’t that moves your highness ? 
 
 Macb. Which of you have done this ? 
 
 Lords. What, my good lord ? 
 
 Macb. Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake 
 Thy gory locks at me. 
 
 Uosse. Gentlemen, arise ; his highness is not well. 
 
 Lady M. Sit, worthy friends ; my lord is often thus, 
 
 And hath been from his youth. Pray you, keep seat ; 
 
 K 
 
130 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 The fit is momentary ; upon a thought 
 He will again be well. If much you note him, 
 
 You shall offend him, and extend his passion. 
 
 Feed, and regard him not. — Are you a man? 
 
 Mad). Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that 
 Which might appal the devil. 
 
 Lady M. 0 proper stuff ! 
 
 This is the very painting of your fear ; 
 
 This is the air-drawn dagger which you said 
 Led you to Duncan. Oh, these flaws and starts 
 (Impostors to true fear) would well become 
 A woman’s story, at a winter’s fire. 
 
 Authoris’d by her grandam. Shame itself ! 
 
 Why do you make such faces ? When all’s done. 
 
 You look but on a stool. 
 
 Mad). Pr’ythee, see there ! — Behold ! — Look ! — Lo ! How say you ? 
 Why, what care I ? If thou canst nod, speak too. 
 
 If charnel-houses and our graves must send 
 Those that we bury back, our monuments 
 Shall be the maws of kites. 
 
 [Ghost disappea.rs. 
 
 Lady M. What ! Quite unmanii’d in folly ? 
 
 Mad). If I stand here, I saw him. 
 
 Lady M. Fie, for shame ! 
 
 Mad). Blood hath been shed ere noAV, i’ the olden time, 
 
 Ere human statute purg’d the gentle Aveal ; 
 
 Ay, and since too, murders have been perform’d 
 Too terrible for the ear. The times have been 
 That, when the brains Avere out, the man would die, 
 
 And there an end ; but noAv they rise again. 
 
 With twenty mortal murders on their croAvns, 
 
 And push us from our stools. This is more strange 
 Than such a murder is. 
 
 Lady M. My Avorthy lord. 
 
 Your noble friends do lack you. 
 
 Mad). I do forget. 
 
 Do not muse at me, my most Avorthy friends : 
 
 I have a strange infirmity, Avhich is nothing 
 
 To those that know me. Come, love and health to all ; 
 
 Then I’ll sit down. Give me some wine — fill full : 
 
 I drink to the general joy of the whole table, 
 
 Ghost rises. 
 
 And to our dear friend Banquo, AA^hom we miss : 
 
 Would he were here ! To all, and him, we thirst, 
 
 And all to all. 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 131 
 
 Lords. Our duties, and the pledge. 
 
 Mach. Avaunt ! and quit my sight ! Let the earth hide thee ! 
 
 Thy bones are marrowless — thy blood is cold ; 
 
 Thou hast no speculation in those eyes 
 Which thou dost glare with ! 
 
 Lady M. Think of this, good peers, 
 
 But as a thing of custom : ’tis no other ; 
 
 Only it spoils the pleasure of the time. 
 
 Mach. What man dare, I dare : 
 
 Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, 
 
 The arm’d rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger, — 
 
 Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves 
 Shall never tremble : or be alive again. 
 
 And dare me to the desert with thy sword ; 
 
 If trembling I inhibit thee, protest me 
 The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow ! 
 
 [^Ghost disappears. 
 
 Unreal mockery, hence ! Why, so ; being gone, 
 
 I am a man again. Pray you, sit still. 
 
 Lady M. You have displac’d the mirth, broke the good meeting. 
 With most admir’d disorder. 
 
 A large part of this vast picture Mr. Maclise has painted very 
 finely. The lords are all there in gloomy state, fierce stalwart 
 men in steel ; the variety of attitude and light in which the 
 difterent groups are placed, the wonderful knowledge and firm- 
 ness with which each individual figure and feature are placed 
 down upon the canvas will be understood and admired by the 
 public, but by the artist still more, who knows the difficulty of 
 these things, which seem so easy, which are so easy, no doubt, to 
 a man with Mr. Maclise’s extraordinary gifts. How fine is yonder 
 group at the farthest table, lighted up by the reflected light from 
 the armour of one of them ! The effect, as far as we know, is 
 entirely new ; the figures drawn with exquisite minuteness and 
 clearness, not in the least interrupting the general harmony of the 
 picture. Look at the two women standing near Lady Macbeth^s 
 throne, and those beautiful little hands of one of them placed over 
 the state-chair : the science, workmanship, feeling, in these figures 
 are alike wonderful. The face, bust, and attitude of Lady Mac-' 
 beth are grandly designed ; the figures to her right, with looks of 
 stern doubt and wonder, are nobly designed and arranged. The 
 main figure of Macbeth, I confess, does not please ; nor the object 
 which has occasioned the frightful convulsive attitude in which he 
 stands. He sees not the ghost of Banquo, but a huge, indistinct, 
 gory shadow, which seems to shake its bloody locks, and frown 
 
132 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 upon him. Through this shade, intercepted only by its lurid 
 transparency, you see the figures of the guests ; they are looking 
 towards it, and through it. The skill with which this point is 
 made is unquestionable ; there is something there, and nothing. 
 The spectators feel this as well as the painted actors of the scene : 
 there are times when, in looking at the picture, one loses sight of 
 the shade altogether, and begins to wonder with Rosse, Lenox, 
 and the rest. 
 
 The idea, then, so far as it goes, is as excellently worked out 
 as it is daringly conceived. But is it a just one ? I think not. 
 I should say it was a grim piece of comedy rather than tragedy. 
 One is puzzled by this piece of diablerie ^ — not deeply affected 
 and awe-stricken, as in the midst of such heroical characters and 
 circumstances one should be. 
 
 Avaunt ! and quit my sight ! Let the earth hide thee ! 
 
 Thy bones are marrowless — thy blood is cold ; 
 
 Thou hast no speculation in tliose eyes 
 Which thou dost glare with. 
 
 Before the poet’s eyes, at least, the figure of the ghost stood 
 complete — an actual visible body, with the life gone out of it ; an 
 image far more grand and dreadful than the painter’s fantastical 
 shadow, because more simple. The shadow is an awful object, — 
 granted ; but the most sublime, beautiful, fearful sight in all 
 nature is, surely, the face of a man ; wonderful in all its expres- 
 sions of grief or joy, daring or endurance, thought, hope, love, or 
 pain. How Shakespeare painted all these ; with what careful 
 thought and brooding were all his imaginary creatures made ! 
 
 I believe we have mentioned the best figure -pieces in the 
 exhibition ; for, alas ! the ‘ Milton and his Daughters ’ of Sir 
 Augustus Calcott, although one of the biggest canvases in the 
 gallery, is by no means one of the best ; and one may regret that 
 this most spirituel of landscape-painters should have forsaken his 
 old style to follow figure-drawing. Mr. Hollins has a picture of 
 ‘ Benvenuto Cellini showing a Trinket to a Lady.’ A subject of 
 absorbing interest and passionate excitement, painted in a corre- 
 sponding manner. A prim lady sits smiling in a chair, by a 
 table, on which is a very neat, regular table-cloth, drawn at right 
 angles with the picture-frame ; parallel with the table is a chest 
 of drawers, secretaire, cabinet, or hahuL Near this stands a 
 waiting- maid, smiling archly; and in front you behold young 
 Benvenuto, spick and span in his very best clothes and silk 
 stockings, looking — as Benvenuto never did in his life. Of some 
 parts of this picture, the colour and workmanship is very pretty ; 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 133 
 
 but was there ever such a niminypiminy subject treated in such a 
 niminypiminy way ? We can remember this gentleman’s picture 
 of ‘Margaret at the Spinning-wheel,’ last year, and should be 
 glad to see and laud others that were equally pretty. Mr. 
 Lauder has, in the same room, a pleasing picture from Walter 
 Scott, ‘The Glee-Maiden’; and a large sketch, likewise from 
 Scott, by a French artist (who has been celebrated in this 
 Magazine as the author of the picture ‘The Sinking of the 
 Yengeur’), is fine in effect and composition. 
 
 If Mr. Herbert’s picture of ‘ Travellers taking Refreshment at 
 a Convent Gate ’ has not produced much sensation, it is because 
 it is feeble in tone, not very striking in subject, and placed some- 
 what too high. There is a great deal of beauty and delicacy in 
 all the figures ; and though lost here, amidst the glare and bustle 
 of the Academy, will be an excellent picture for the cabinet, 
 where its quiet graces and merits will be better seen. 
 
 Mr. Webster’s ‘Punch,’ before alluded to, deserves a great 
 deal of praise. The landscape is beautiful, the group of little 
 figures assembled to view the show are delightfully gay and 
 pretty. Mr. Webster has the bump of philoprogenitiveness (as 
 some ninny says of George Cruikshank in The Westminster 
 Review ; and all mothers of large families, young ladies who 
 hope to be so one day or the other, and honest papas, are observed 
 to examine this picture with much smiling interest. It is full of 
 sunshine and innocent playful good-humour : all Punch’s audience 
 are on the grin. John, the squire’s footman, is looking on with 
 a protecting air ; the old village folk are looking on, grinning with 
 the very youngest; boys are scampering over the common, in 
 order to be in time for the show ; Punchman is tootooing on the 
 pipes, and banging away on the drum ; potboy has consigned to 
 the earth his precious cargo, and the head of every tankard of 
 liquor is wasting its frothy fragrance in the air ; in like manner, 
 the pieman permits his wares to get cold ; nursery-maids, school- 
 boys, happy children in go-carts, are employed in a similar way : 
 indeed, a delightful little rustic comedy. 
 
 In respect of portraits, the prettiest, as I fancy, after Wilkie’s 
 splendid picture of Mrs. Ferguson, is one by Mr. Grant, of a lady 
 with a scarf of a greenish colour. The whole picture is of the 
 same tone, and beautifully harmonious ; nor is the lady’s face and 
 air the least elegant and charming part of it. The Duke has 
 been painted a vast number of times, such are the penalties of 
 glory ; nor is it possible to conceive anything much worse than 
 that portrait of him in which Col. Gurwood is represented by his 
 ^ [Thackeray here refers to the article written by himself.] 
 
134 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 side, in a red velvet waistcoat, offering to his grace certain 
 despatches. It is in the style of the famous picture in the Regent 
 Circus, representing Mr. Coleby the cigarist, an orange, a pine- 
 apple, a champagne -cork, a little dog, some decanters, and a 
 yellow bandanna, — all which personages appear to be so exces- 
 sively important, that the puzzled eyes scarcely know upon which 
 to settle. In like manner, in the Wellington-Gurwood testimonial, 
 the accessories are so numerous, and so brilliantly coloured, that 
 it is long before one can look up to the countenances of the 
 colonel and his grace ; which, it is to be presumed, are the main 
 objects of interest in the piece. And this plan has been not 
 unartfully contrived, — for the heads are by no means painted up to 
 the point of brilliancy which is visible in boots, clocks, bell-pulls, 
 Turkey carpets, arm-chairs, and other properties here painted. 
 
 Now, if the artist of the above picture wishes to know how 
 properties may be painted with all due minuteness, and yet 
 conduce to the general eftect of the picture, let him examine the 
 noble little portrait of Lord Cottenham, by Leslie, — the only con- 
 tribution of this great man to the exhibition. Here are a number 
 of accessories introduced, but with that forethought and sense of 
 propriety which, as I fancy, distinguish all the works of Mr. 
 Leslie. They are not here for mere picturesque effect or orna- 
 mental huddle ; but are made to tell the story of the piece, and 
 indicate the character of the dignified personage who fills the 
 centre of it. The black brocade drapery of the chancellor’s gown 
 is accurately painted, and falls in that majestic grave way in 
 which a chancellor’s robe should fall. Are not the learned lord’s 
 arms somewhat short and fin-like ? This is a query which we 
 put humbly, having never had occasion to remark that part of 
 his person. 
 
 Mr. Briggs has his usual pleasant, well-painted portraits ; and 
 Mr. Patten a long full-length of Prince Albert that is not admired 
 by artists, it is said, but a good downright honest bourgeois 
 picture, as we fancy ; or, as a facetious friend remarked, good 
 plain roast-and-hoiled. painting. As for the portrait opposite — 
 that of her majesty, it is a sheer libel upon that pretty gracious 
 countenance, an act of rebellion for which Sir David should be 
 put into York gaol. Parts of the picture are, however, splendidly 
 painted. And here, being upon the subject, let us say a word 
 in praise of those two delightful lithographic heads, after Ross, 
 which appear in the printshop windows. Our gracious queen’s 
 head is here most charming ; and that of the prince full of such 
 manly frankness and benevolence as must make all men cry, ‘ God 
 bless him.’ I would much sooner possess a copy of the Ross 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 135 
 
 miniature of the queen^ than a cast from her majesty’s bust by 
 Sir Francis Chantrey, which has the place of honour in the 
 sculpture vault. 
 
 All Macdonald’s busts deserve honourable notice. This lucky 
 sculptor has some beautiful subjects to model, and beautiful and 
 graceful all his marbles are. As much may be said of Mr. 
 McDowell’s girl, — the only piece of imaginative sculpture in the 
 Academy that has struck us as pleasing. Mr. Behnes, too, should 
 receive many commendations ; an old man’s head particularly, 
 that is full of character and goodness ; and ‘ The Bust of a Lady,’ 
 which may be called ‘ A Lady with a Bust,’^ — a beautiful bust, 
 indeed, of which the original and the artist have both good reason 
 to be proud. Mr. Bell’s virgin is not so pleasing in the full size 
 as in the miniature copy of it. 
 
 For the matter of landscapes, we confess ourselves to be no 
 very ardent admirers of these performances, clever and dexterous 
 as most of them are. The works of Mr. Stanfield and Mr. 
 Roberts cannot fail to be skilful ; and both of these famous 
 artists show their wonderful power of drawing, as usual. But 
 these skilful pictures have always appeared to us more pleasing 
 in little on the sketching -board than when expanded upon the 
 canvas. A couple of Martin’s must be mentioned, — huge, queer, 
 and tawdry to our eyes, but very much admired by the public, 
 who is no bad connoisseur, after all ; and also a fine Castle 
 of Chillon, or Chalon, rudely painted, but very poetical and 
 impressive. 
 
 [Here Titmarsh exchanges his check at the door for a valuable 
 gingham umbrella, with a yellow horn-head, representing 
 Lord Brougham or Dr. Syntax, and is soon seen, with his 
 hat very much on one side, swaggering down Pall Mall 
 East, to the Water-Colour Gallery. He flings down 
 eighteenpence in the easiest way, and goes upstairs.] 
 
 Accident, or, what is worse, ill-health, has deprived us of the 
 two most skilful professors of the noble art of water-colour 
 painting ; and, without the works of Messrs. Lewis and Catter- 
 mole, the gallery looks empty indeed. Those gentlemen are 
 accustomed to supply the picture-lover with the pieces de resistance 
 of the feast, with which, being decently satisfied, we can trifle 
 with an old market-place by Prout, or six cows and four pigs by 
 Hill, or a misty Downs by Copley Fielding, with some degree of 
 pleasure. Discontented, then, with the absence of the substantials, 
 it must be confessed that we have been examining the rest of the 
 pictures in no very good-humour. And so, to tell you a secret, I 
 do not care a fig for all the old town-halls in the world, though 
 
136 
 
 CKITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 they be drawn ever so skilfully. How long are we to go on with 
 Venice, Verona, Lago di Soandso, and Ponte di What-d'ye-call-’em ? 
 I am weary of gondolas, striped awnings, sailors with red night 
 (or rather day) caps, cobalt distances, and posts in the water. I 
 have seen so many white palaces standing before dark purple 
 skies, so many black towers with gamboge atmospheres behind 
 them, so many masses of rifle-green trees plunged into the deepest 
 shadow, in the midst of sunshiny plains, for no other reason but 
 because dark and light contrast together, that a slight expression 
 of satiety may be permitted to me, and a longing for more simple 
 nature. On a great staring theatre such pictures may do very 
 well — you are obliged there to seek for these startling contrasts ; 
 and by the aid of blue lights, red lights, transparencies, and plenty 
 of drums and appropriate music, the scene thus presented to one 
 captivates the eye, and calls down thunder from the galleries. 
 
 But in little quiet rooms, on sheets of paper of a yard square, 
 such monstrous theatrical effects are sadly painful. You don’t 
 mistake patches of brickdust for maidens’ blushes, or fancy that 
 tinfoil is diamonds, or require to be spoken to with the utmost 
 roar of the lungs. Why, in painting, are we to have monstrous, 
 flaring, Drury Lane tricks and claptraps put in practice, when a 
 quieter style is, as I fancy, so infinitely more charming ? 
 
 There is no use in mentioning the names of persons who are 
 guilty of the above crimes ; but let us say who is not guilty, and 
 that is D. Cox, upon whose quiet landscapes, moist grass, cool 
 trees, the refreshed eye rests with the utmost pleasure, after it 
 has been perplexed and dazzled elsewhere. May we add an 
 humble wish that this excellent painter will remain out of doors, 
 amidst such quiet scenes as he loves, and not busy himself with 
 Gothicism, middleageism, and the painting of quaint interiors ? 
 There are a dozen artists, of not a tithe of his genius, who can 
 excel him at the architectural work. There is, for instance, Mr. 
 Nash, who is improving yearly, and whose pictures are not only 
 most dexterously sketched, but contain numberless little episodes, 
 hi the shape of groups of figures, that are full of grace and feeling. 
 There is Mr. Haghe, too, of the lower house ; but of him anon. 
 
 To show how ill and how well a man may paint at the same 
 time, the public may look at a couple of drawings by J. Nash, — 
 one, the interior of a church ; the other, a plain landscape : both 
 of which are executed with excessive, almost childish rudeness, 
 and are yet excellent, as being close copies of the best of all 
 drawing-masters. Nature : and Mr. Barrett, who has lately written 
 a book for students, tells them very sagaciously not to copy the 
 manner of any master, however much he may be in the mode. 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 137 
 
 Some there are, fashionable instructors in the art of water- 
 colouring, of whom, indeed, a man had better not learn at any 
 price ; nay, were they to offer a guinea per lesson, instead of 
 modestly demanding the same, the reader should be counselled 
 not to accept of their instructions. 
 
 See in what a different school Mr. Hunt works, and what 
 marvellous effects he produces ! There is a small picture of an 
 interior by him (to which the blue ticket, having the pretty word 
 SOLD written on it, is not fixed) that, as a copy of nature, is a 
 perfect miracle. No De Hooghe was ever better, more airy and 
 sunshiny. And the most extraordinary part of this extraordinary 
 picture is, that the artist has not produced his effect of excessive 
 brilliancy by any violent contrasting darkness ; but the whole 
 picture is light ; the sunshine is in every corner of the room : and 
 this drawing remains unsold, while Dash, and Blank, and Asterisk, 
 have got off all theirs. The large head of the black girl is painted 
 with wonderful power ; in water-colours, we have scarcely seen 
 anything so vigorous. The boys and virgins are, as usual, admir- 
 able ; the lad with the bottle, he reading ballads in the barn, 
 and the red, ragged, brickdust- coloured, brigand -looking fellow, 
 especially good. In a corner is a most astonishing young gentle- 
 man, with a pan of milk : he is stepping forward full into your 
 face ; and has seen something in it which has caused him to spill 
 his milk and look dreadfully frightened. Every man who is 
 worth a fig, as he comes up to this picture bursts out a-laughing 
 — he can’t help himself ; you hear a dozen such laughs in the 
 course of your visit. Why does this little drawing so seize hold 
 of the beholder, and cause him to roar 1 There is the secret : the 
 painter has got the soul of comedy in him — the undefinable 
 humorous genius. Happy is the man who possesses that drawing : 
 a man must laugh if he were taking his last look at it before 
 being hanged. 
 
 Mr. Taylor’s flowing pencil has produced several pieces of 
 delightful colour ; but we are led bitterly to deplore the use of that 
 fatal white-lead pot, that is clogging and blackening the pictures 
 of so many of the water-colour painters nowadays. His large 
 picture contains a great deal of this white mud, and has lost, as 
 we fancy, in consequence, much of that liquid, mellow tone for 
 which his works are remarkable. The retreating figures in this 
 picture are beautiful ; the horses are excellently painted, with as 
 much dexterous brilliancy of colour as one sees in the oil pictures 
 of Landseer. If the amateur wants to see how far transparent 
 colour will go, what rich effect may be produced by it, how little 
 necessary it is to plaster drawings with flakes of white, let him 
 
138 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 examine the background of the design, representing a page asleep 
 on a chair, than which nothing can be more melodious in colour, 
 or more skilfully and naturally painted. 
 
 In the beauty gallery which this exhibition usually furnished, 
 there is Mr. Richter, who contributes his usual specimens ; the 
 fair Miss Sharpe, with those languishing-eyed charmers whom the 
 world admires so much ; and still more to our taste, a sweet 
 pretty lady, by Mr. Stone, in a hideous dress, with upper-Benjamiii 
 buttons ; a couple of very graceful and delicate heads by Wright ; 
 and one beautiful head, a portrait evidently, by Cristall, that is 
 placed very modestly in a corner near the ground — where such 
 a drawing should be placed, of course, being vigorous, honest, 
 natural, and beautiful. This artist’s other drawing — a mysterious 
 subject, representing primaeval Scotchmen, rocks, waterfalls, a 
 cataract of bulls, and other strange things, looks like a picture 
 painted in a dream. Near it hangs Mr. Mackenzie’s view of St. 
 Denis’s Cathedral, that is painted with great carefulness, and is 
 very true to nature. And having examined this, and Mr. 
 Varley’s fine gloomy sketches, you shall be no longer detained 
 at this place, but walk on to see what more remains to be seen. 
 
 Of the New Water-Colour Society, I think it may be asserted 
 that their gallery contains neither such good nor such bad drawings 
 as may be seen in the senior exhibition ; unless, indeed, we except 
 Mr. Haghe, a gentleman who in architectural subjects has a 
 marvellous skill, and whose work deserves to be studied by all 
 persons who follow the trade of water-colouring. This gentleman 
 appears to have a profound knowledge (or an extraordinary 
 instinct) of his profession as an architectural draughtsman. 
 There are no tricks, no clumsy plastering of white, no painful 
 niggling, nor swaggering affectation of boldness. He seems to 
 understand every single tone and line which he lays down ; and 
 his picture, in my humble judgment, contains some of the very 
 best qualities of which this branch of painting is capable. You 
 cannot produce by any combination of water-colours such effects 
 as may be had from oil, such richness and depth of tone, such 
 pleasing variety of texture, as gums and varnishes will give ; but, 
 on the other hand, there are many beauties peculiar to the art, 
 which the oil-painter cannot arrive at, — such as air, brightness, 
 coolness, and flatness of surface ; points which painters understand 
 and can speak of a great deal better than amateur writers and 
 readers. Why will the practitioners, then, be so ambitious? 
 Why strive after effects that are only to be got imperfectly at best, 
 and at the expense of qualities far more valuable and pleasing ? 
 There are some aspiring individuals who will strive to play a 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 139 
 
 whole band of music off a guitar, or to perform the broadsword 
 exercise with a rapier, — monstrous attempts, that the moral critic 
 must lift up his voice to reprehend. Valuable instruments are 
 guitars and smallswords in themselves, the one for making pleasant 
 small music, the other for drilling small holes in the human 
 person ; but let the professor of each art do his agreeable duty in 
 his own line, nor strive with his unequal weapons to compete with 
 persons who have greater advantages. Indeed, I have seldom 
 seen the works of a skilful water-colour painter of figures, 
 without regretting that he had not taken to oil, which would 
 allow him to put forth all the vigour of which he was capable. 
 For works, however, like that of Mr. Haghe, which are not 
 finished pictures, but admirable finished sketches, water is best ; 
 and we wish that his brethren followed his manner of using it. 
 Take warning by these remarks, 0 Mr. Absolon ! Your interiors 
 have been regarded by Titmarsh with much pleasure, and deserve 
 at his hands a great deal of commendation. Mr. Absolon, we 
 take it, has been brought up in a French school — there are many 
 traces of foreign manner in him ; his figures, for instance, are 
 better costumed than those of our common English artists. Look 
 at the little sketch which goes by the laconic title of ‘ Jump.’ 
 Let Mrs. Seyffarth come and look at it before she paints Sir 
 Roger de Coverley’s figures again, and she will see what an air of 
 life and authenticity the designer has thrown into his work. 
 Several larger pieces by Mr. Absolon, in which are a face — is it 
 the artist’s own, by any chance? — (We fancy that we have a 
 knack at guessing a portrait of an artist by himself, having 
 designed about five thousand such in our own experience, — 
 ‘Portrait of a Painter,’ ‘A Gentleman in a Vandyke Dress,’ ‘A 
 Brigand,’ ‘ A Turkish Costume,’ and so on : they are somehow 
 always rejected by those cursed Academicians,) — but to return to 
 Absolon, whom we have left hanging up all this time on the 
 branch of a sentence, he has taken hugely to the body-colour 
 system within the last twelve months, and small good has it done 
 him. The accessories of his pictures are painted with much 
 vigour and feeling of colour, are a great deal stronger than hereto- 
 fore — a great deal too strong for the figures themselves ; and the 
 figures being painted chiefly in transparent colour, will not bear 
 the atmosphere of distemper by which they are surrounded. The 
 picture of ‘ The Batchelor ’ is excellent in point of effect and 
 justness of colour. 
 
 Mr. Corbould is a gentleman who must be mentioned with a 
 great deal of praise. His large drawing of the ‘ Canterbury 
 Pilgrims at the Tabard ’ is very gay and sparkling ; and the artist 
 
140 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 shows that he possesses a genuine antiquarian or Walter-Scottish 
 spirit. It is a pity that his people are all so uncommon hand- 
 some. It is a pity that his ladies wear such uncommonly low 
 dresses — they did not wear such (according to the best authorities) 
 in Chaucer’s time ; and even if they did, Mr. Corbould had much 
 better give them a little more cloth, which costs nothing, and 
 would spare much painful blushing to modest men like — never 
 mind whom. But this is a moral truth : nothing is so easy to 
 see in a painter as a certain inclination towards naughtiness, which 
 we press- Josephs are bound to cry fie at. Cover them up, Mr. 
 Corbould — muslin is the word ; but of this no more. Where the 
 painter departs from his line of beauty, his faces have considerable 
 humour and character. The whole of the pilgrim group, as he 
 has dej^icted it, is exceedingly picturesque. It might be painted 
 with a little more strength, and a good deal less finical trifling 
 with the pencil ; but of these manual errors the painter will no 
 doubt get the better as his practice and experience increase. 
 
 Here is a large and interesting picture by Mr. Warren, of the 
 Pasha of Egypt in the middle of the Nubian desert, surrounded 
 by pipe-bearers and camels, and taking his cup of cofiee. There 
 is much character both in the figures and scenery. A slight 
 sketch by the same artist, ‘ The King in Thule,’ is very pretty, and 
 would make a very good picture. 
 
 Mr. Bright is an artist of whom we do not before remember to 
 have heard. His pictures are chiefly eftects of sunset and moon- 
 light ; of too criarde a colour as regards sun and moon, but pretty 
 and skilful in other points, and of a style that strikes us as almost 
 new. The manner of a French artist, M. Collignon, somewhat 
 resembles that of Mr. Bright. The cool parts of his pictures are 
 excellent ; but he has dangerous dealings with gamboge and 
 orange, pigments with the use of which a painter is bound to be 
 uncommonly cautious. Look at Mr. Turner, who has taken to 
 them until they have driven him quite wild. If there be any 
 Emperor of the Painters, he should issue ‘ a special edict ’ against 
 the gamboge-dealers : — ’tis a deleterious drug. ^ Hasten, hasten,’ 
 Mr. Bright ; ‘ obey with trembling,’ and have a care of gamboge 
 henceforth. 
 
 For the rest of the artists at this place, it may be said that Mr. 
 Hicks has not been quite so active this year as formerly ; Mr. 
 Boys has some delightful drawings in his style of art ; and for the 
 curious there is, moreover, a second-hand Cattermole, a sham 
 Prout, a pseudo Bently, and a small double of Cox, whose works 
 are to be seen in various parts of the room. Miss Corbould has a 
 pretty picture. Mr. Duncan’s drawings exhibit considerable skill 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 141 
 
 and fidelity to nature. And here we must close our list of the 
 juniors, whose exhibition is very well worth the shilling which all 
 must pay who would enter their pretty gallery. 
 
 We have been through a number of picture galleries, and 
 cannot do better than go and visit a gentleman who has a gallery 
 of his own, containing only one picture. We mean Mr. Danby, 
 with his ‘Deluge,^ now visible in Piccadilly. Every person in 
 London will no doubt go and see this ; artists, because the treat- 
 ment and eftect of the picture are extraordinarily skilful and 
 broad ; and the rest of the world, who cannot fail of being deeply 
 moved by the awful tragedy which is here laid before them. The 
 work is full of the strongest dramatic interest ; a vast perform- 
 ance, grandly treated, and telling in a wonderful way its solemn 
 awful tale. Mr. Danby has given a curious description of it to 
 our hand ; and from this the reader will be able to understand 
 what is the design and treatment of the piece. 
 
 The general idea of the picture is founded on a supposition that a 
 comet, which appears in the centre at the top, is the immediate cause of 
 the deluge, and that it illuminates the scene with a bright phosphoric 
 light, which overpowers the setting sun, already obscured by falling 
 rain. On the left of the spectator, in the distance, are a few domes of a 
 city still appearing above the waters, from which the inhabitants have 
 flown to the highest rocks within their reach in the vicinity, but where 
 they are soon overtaken by the rising flood. On the right the moun- 
 tains are deluged with water, which falls from the heavens condensed 
 into solid masses in the form of tremendous water-spouts ; and, as they 
 descend over precipices, they carry with them immense fragments of the 
 mountains. 
 
 The situation of the spectator is supposed to be on a height, beneath 
 a higher range of mountains, a part of which is seen on the right of the 
 picture, declining in shelving precipices towards the plain, to which in 
 perspective it runs. Immediately before him, in the nearest part of the 
 scene, is a small ravine, which separates him from a towering mass of 
 splinter-broken rocks (which form a rude and barren middle distance), 
 beyond whose summits the country declines less wildly to the plain, 
 where is situated, near the horizon on the left, a grand antediluvian city. 
 
 Composition and Effect of the Picture. 
 
 Through turgid clouds and whirling columns of falling rain, the 
 struggling sun, as though in tears, throws his last fond look upon the 
 dying world ; setting never to rise more to the teeming inhabitants of 
 the city. AYrapped in his crimson mantle, and shrouded in the black 
 
142 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 and mystic curtains of the mourning skies, he sinks behind the once- 
 proud dome, whose golden sculptured front so long had glittered in his 
 noontide blaze. 
 
 The blooming plain around, rich without cultivation, where once 
 sweet-scented groves of blossoms and fruit luxuriantly twined, now lies 
 deep sunk beneath the raging and swelling ocean, — the great deep ! 
 ‘whose fountains are broken up.’ Wildly the loosened waters rush 
 upon the plain : they spread — they rise — they mount above the city 
 walls, bursting the grand yet little barriers of man ; while fiercely now 
 they rush, in eddying currents, through the depeopled streets. This, 
 the moment, the picture represents. 
 
 The Almighty’s vengeance is at hand ; who can escape his wrath ? 
 Man is against man ; friendship is no more ; the loveliness of woman, 
 the innocence of childhood, or the low moan of suffering age, no longer 
 gain the sigh of pity or of love ; — fear or rage alone possess the human 
 breast. 
 
 The towering rock, which forms the centre middle distance of the 
 picture, is the nearest refuge to the maddening crowd. Blindly, and 
 with giant strength, they scale its splintered sides ; in masses, like the 
 gaining waters, wildly they urge their course upon the side the most ac- 
 cessible. Exhausted at the moment they reach the object of their hope, 
 they sink, while others mount over piles of fellow-men, yet mount they 
 to their death. The top is full, even more than full, while yet they 
 climb and grapple with those above in deadly struggle for a moment’s 
 resting-place. Alas ! they see not, that on the narrow surface of the 
 cliff above is piled a horrid rocking mass of human forms, of life and 
 death, where the smothering groan, deep buried, is unheard, and the 
 wild cry of those above is more unheeded. 
 
 The ponderous giant, amid the crowd above, presents his matchless 
 shoulders against the increasing mass, his foot and arms against the 
 rock. In vain are women, young and delicate of frame, with their more 
 tender infants, crushed to silence against his broad unyielding muscles. 
 The solid rock gives way, and all the clinging, trembling mass of human 
 life upon it falls precipitately to the whirling flood below. 
 
 The waters gain, — resistlessly they rush, bursting each rocky barrier, 
 that for a moment may resist their course, rolling huge fragments of the 
 mountain’s side, with forest trees, that crash and snap as twigs in the 
 mighty torrent’s force, sinking or rising to the boiling surface of the 
 flood ; the broken trees are swept along, their tops and roots alternately 
 uppermost, — still offering to the drowning man a false and fatal aid. 
 
 In the middle of the composition is a group of lately-fallen rocks, 
 which the painter has attempted to express by the trees they have 
 entangled and broken in their fall, occasioned by earthquake, which he 
 supposes to have accompanied the Deluge. These rocks have fallen in 
 such a position as to serve as a species of flight of steps to the crowd 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 143 
 
 who have gained the height, and are now occupied by a few feeble 
 stragglers, that still urge on their weary and useless flight. Here a few 
 incidents of the heart-rending distress of mothers for their darling off- 
 spring, or children for their parents, may appear, as these were with 
 the first, and must remain the last of ties upon the human heart. 
 
 In the fore part of the picture, on the left, is a portion of a large tree, 
 which still remains rooted in the earth, but trembles to its fall in the 
 rush of waters ; it is supposed to have been a momentary refuge to 
 hundreds of beings, before the waters had gained their present height ; 
 but, from the weight above, the stem has broken midway, and with its 
 struggling, writhing charge, the upper half is swept along the roaring 
 flood. 
 
 In the middle of the fore part of the picture, men, w^omen, and 
 children, with a strangling lion, are entangled in the broken trees that 
 are precipitated down the current ; and on the right, floating on a 
 hastily constructed raft, are the lifeless bodies of a giant and a female 
 (crushed by a fallen tree), over whose pallid forms weeps an Angel of 
 Light, who, though not involved in the ruin, may, with a heart of 
 heavenly mould, drop a tear of more than diamond purity and bright- 
 ness over that once divine and glorious human race, once bright as he, 
 and who were still so beautiful, though fallen, that the ‘ Sons of God 
 saw that the Daughters of Men were fair, and chose from amongst them 
 such as they loved.’ 
 
 This episode of the angel is the sole part of the picture with 
 which we should be disposed to quarrel ; but the rest, which has 
 been excellently described in the queer, wild words of the artist, 
 is really as grand and magnificent a conception as ever we saw. 
 Why Poussin^s famous picture of an inundation has been called 
 ‘ The Deluge,’ I never could understand : it is only a very small 
 and partial deluge. The artist has genius enough, if any artist 
 ever had, to have executed a w^ork far more vast and tremendous ; 
 nor does his picture at the Louvre, nor Turner’s deluge, nor Martin’s, 
 nor any that we have ever seen, at all stand a competition with 
 this extraordinary performance of Mr. Danby. He has painted 
 the picture of ‘ The Deluge ’ ; we have before our eyes still the 
 ark in the midst of the ruin floating calm and lonely, the great 
 black cataracts of water pouring down, the mad rush of the 
 miserable people clambering up the rocks ; — nothing can be finer 
 than the way in which the artist has painted the picture in all its 
 innumerable details, and we hope to hear that his room will be 
 hourly crowded, and his great labour and genius rewarded in some 
 degree. 
 
 Let us take some rest after beholding this picture, and what 
 
144 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 place is cooler and more quiet than the Suffolk Street Gallery? 
 If not remarkable for any pictures of extraordinary merit, it is at 
 least to be praised as a place singularly favourable to meditation. 
 It is a sweet, calm solitude, lighted from the top with convenient 
 blinds to keep out the sun. If you have an assignation, bid your 
 mistress to come hither, there is only a dumb secretary in the 
 room ; and sitting, like the man in The Arabian Nights^ perpetu- 
 ally before a great book, in which he pores. This would be a 
 grand place to hatch a conspiracy, to avoid a dun, to write an epic 
 poem. Something ails the place ! What is it ? — what keeps the 
 people away, and gives the money-taker in his box a gloomy, lonely 
 sinecure ? Alas, and alas ! not even Mr. Haydon’s ‘ Samson 
 Agonistes ^ is strong enough to pull the people in. 
 
 And yet this picture is worth going to see. You may here 
 take occasion to remark the truth of Mr. Yorke’s astute remark 
 about another celebrated artist, and see how bad a painter is this 
 great writer of historical paintings, Mr. Haydon. There is an 
 account in some of the late papers — from America, of course — of 
 a remarkably fat boy, three years old, five feet six high, with a 
 fine bass voice, and a handsome beard and whiskers. Much such 
 a hero is this Samson, — a great red chubby-cheeked monster, 
 looking at you with the most earnest, mild, dull eyes in the world, 
 and twisting about a brace of ropes, as he comes sprawling forwards. 
 Sprawling backwards is a Delilah — such a Delilah, with such an arm, 
 with such a dress, on such a sofa, with such a set of ruffians 
 behind her ! The picture is perfectly amazing ? Is this the 
 author of the ‘ Judgment of Solomon?’ — the restorer or setter up 
 of the great style of painting in this country ? The drawing of the 
 figures is not only faulty, but bad and careless as can be. It 
 never was or could be in nature ; and, such as it is, the drawing is 
 executed in a mannner so loose and slovenly, that one wonders to 
 behold it. Is this the way in which a chef Tecole condescends to 
 send forth a picture to the public ? Would he have his scholars 
 finish no more and draw no better ? Look at a picture of ‘ Milton 
 and his Daughters,’ the same subject which Sir A. Callcott has 
 treated in the Academy, which painters will insist upon treating, 
 so profoundly interesting does it seem to be. Mr. Haydon’s 
 ‘ Milton ’ is playing on the organ, and turning his blind eyes to- 
 wards the public with an expression that is absolutely laughable. 
 A buxom wench in huge gigot sleeves stands behind the chair, 
 another is at a table writing. The draperies of the ladies are 
 mere smears of colour ; in the foreground lies a black cat or dog, 
 a smudge of lamp-black, in which the painter has not condescended 
 to draw a figure. The chair of the poetical organ-player is a 
 
A riCTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 145 
 
 similar lump of red and brown ; nor is the conception of the 
 picture, to our thinking, one whit better than the execution. If 
 this be the true style of art, there is another great work of the 
 kind at the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill, which had better be 
 purchased for the National Gallery. 
 
 Mr. Hurlstone has, as usual, chosen this retired spot to exhibit 
 a very great number of pictures. There is much good in almost 
 all of these. The children especially are painted with great truth 
 and sweetness of expression, but we never shall be able to reconcile 
 ourselves to the extraordinary dirtiness of the colour. Here are 
 ladies’ dresses which look as if they had served for May-day, and 
 arms and shoulders such as might have belonged to Cinderella. 
 Once in a way the artist shows he can paint a clean face, such 
 an one is that of a child in the little room ; it is charming, if the 
 artist did but know it, how much more charming for being clean! 
 A very good picture of a subject somewhat similar to those which 
 Mr. Hurlstone loves to paint, is Mr. Buckner’s ‘ Peasants of Sora 
 in the Regno di Napoli.’ The artist has seen the works of 
 Leopold Robert, and profited evidently by the study of them. 
 
 Not far from this is a performance embellished with a brace 
 of poetical quotations, by Mr. Stewart : 
 
 Lo ! on the strand the Indian mother kneels, 
 
 And to the fervid skies her prayers prefers, 
 
 That her gone cherub may inhabit there. 
 
 — Anon. 
 
 Lo ! yon Brahmin mother kneeling 
 By the sacred river’s verge ; 
 
 Mark her deep impassioned feeling 
 Wailing forth her infant’s dirge ! 
 
 She has watched it, when the dawning 
 Found her by the Ganges’ side ; 
 
 Until now, advancing morning. 
 
 Rolls along its swelling tide. 
 
 Onward rolls, but quick returning. 
 
 Sweeps her cherished charge away ; 
 
 And that scene her bosom burning. 
 
 She hath knelt her down to pray. 
 
 And the picture, it must honestly be confessed, is worthy of the 
 poetry. Some portraits by the same artist are executed in a much 
 more satisfactory manner. 
 
 L 
 
146 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Concerning other artists whose works appear in this gallery, 
 we should speak favourably of Mr. O’Neill, who has two pretty 
 pictures, of a couple of animal pieces, ‘ A Pony and Cows,’ by 
 Mr. Sosi, and of a pretty picture by Mr. Elmore, a vast deal 
 better than his great Becket performance before alluded to. Mr. 
 Tomkins has some skilful street-scenes ; and Mr. Holland, a large, 
 raw, clever picture, of Milan Cathedral. And so farewell to this 
 quiet spot, and let us take a peep at the British Gallery, where a 
 whole room is devoted to the exhibition of Mr. Hilton, the late 
 Academician. 
 
 A man’s sketches and his pictures should never be exhibited 
 together ; the sketches invariably kill the pictures ; are far more 
 vigorous, masterly, and effective. Some of those hanging here, 
 chieffy subjects from Spencer, are excellent, indeed ; and fine in 
 drawing, colour, and composition. The decision and spirit of the 
 sketch disappear continually in the finished piece, as any one may 
 see in examining the design for ‘ Comus,’ and the large picture 
 afterwards, the ‘ Two Amphitrites,’ and many others. Were the 
 sketches, however, removed, the beholder would be glad to admit 
 the great feeling and grace of the pictures, and the kindly poetical 
 spirit which distinguishes the works of the master. Besides the 
 Hiltons, the picture-lover has here an opportunity of seeing a fine 
 Virgin by Julio Roman o, and a most noble one by Sebastian del 
 Piombo, than which I never saw anything more majestically 
 beautiful. The simpering beauties of some of the Virgins of the 
 Raphael school, many painters are successful in imitating. See, 
 0 ye painters ! how in Michael Angelo strength and beauty are 
 here combined, wonderful chastity and grace, humility, and a 
 grandeur almost divine. The critic must have a care as he talks 
 of these pictures, however, for his words straightway begin to grow 
 turgid and pompous ; and, lo ! at the end of his lines, the picture 
 is not a whit better described than before. 
 
 And now having devoted space enough to the discussion of the 
 merits of these different galleries and painters, I am come to the 
 important part of this paper — viz. to my Essay on the State of 
 the Fine Arts in this Kingdom, my Proposals for the General 
 Improvement of Public Taste, and my Plan for the Education of 
 Young Artists. 
 
 In the first place, I propose that government should endow a 
 college for painters, Avhere they may receive the benefits of a good 
 literary education, without which artists will never prosper. I 
 propose that lectures should be read, examinations held, and prizes 
 and exhibitions given to students ; that professorships should be 
 instituted, and — and a president or lord rector appointed, with a 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 147 
 
 baronetcy, a house, and a couple of thousand a year. This place, 
 of course, will be offered to Michael Angelo Tit 
 
 Mr. Titmarsh’s paper came to us exactly as the reader here 
 sees it. His contribution had been paid for in advance, and we 
 regret exceedingly that the public should be deprived of what 
 seemed to be the most valuable part of it. He has never been 
 heard of since the first day of June. He was seen on that day 
 pacing Waterloo Bridge for two hours ; but whether he plunged 
 into the river, or took advantage of the steam-boat and went down 
 it only, we cannot state. 
 
 Why this article was incomplete, the following document will, 
 perhaps, show. It is the work of the waiter at Morland’s Hotel, 
 where the eccentric and unhappy gentleman resided. 
 
 STATEMENT BY MES. BAEBAEA. 
 
 ‘ On the evening of the 30th of May, Anay Domino 1840, Mr. 
 Mike Titmash came into our house in a wonderful state of delarium, 
 drest in a new coat, a new bloo satting hankysher, a new wite at, 
 and polisht jipannd boots, all of which he’d bot sins he went out 
 after dinner ; nor did he bring any of his old cloves back with 
 him, though he’d often said, “Barbara,” says he to me, “when 
 Mr. Frasier pays me my money, and I git new ones, you shall 
 have these as your requisites : ” that was his very words, thof I 
 must confess I don’t understand the same. 
 
 ‘ He’d had dinner and coughy before he went ; and we all 
 cumjectured that he’d been somewhere particklar, for I heer’d 
 him barging with a cabman from Hollywell Street, of which he 
 said the fair was only hatepence ; but being ableeged to pay a 
 shilling, he cust and swoar horrybill. 
 
 ‘ He came in, ordered some supper, laft and joakt with the 
 gents in the parlor, and showed them a deal of money, which 
 some of the gentlemen was so good as to purpose to borry of him. 
 
 ‘ They talked about literaryture and the fine harts (which is 
 both much used by our gentlemen) ; and Mr. Mike was very 
 merry. Specially he sung them a song, which he ancored hisself 
 for twenty minutes ; and ordered a bole of our punch, which is 
 chocked against his skor to this very day. 
 
 ‘ About twelve o’clock he went to bed, very comfortable and 
 quiet, only he cooldnt stand on his legs very well, and cooldnt 
 speak much, excep, “ Frasier for ever ! ” “ All of a York ! ” ^ and 
 
 ^ [The pseudonym of Dr. Maginn, the editor of Fraser s Ma,gazine^ was 
 Oliver Yorke.] 
 
148 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 some such nonsense, which neither me nor George nor Mrs. Stoaks 
 could understand. 
 
 ‘ “ WhaCs the matter says Mrs. Stokes, ‘‘Barbara,’^ says 
 she to me, “has he taken anythin says she. 
 
 ‘ “ Law bless you, mum ! says I (I always says. Law bless 
 you), “as I am a Christen woman, and hope to be married, he’s 
 had nothin out of common.” 
 
 ‘ “ What had he for dinner ? ” says she, as if she didn’t know. 
 
 ‘ “ There was biled salmon,” says I, “ and a half-crown lobster 
 in soss (bless us if he left so much as a dor or tisspunful !), boil 
 pork and peace puddn, and a secknd course of beef steak and onions, 
 cole plumpuddn, maccarony, and afterwards cheese and sallat.” 
 
 ^ “ I don’t mean that,” says she. “ What was his liquors, or 
 bavyrage ? ” 
 
 ‘ “ Two Guineas’s stouts ; old madeira, one pint ; port, half a 
 ditto ; four tumlers of niggus ; and three cole brandy and water, 
 and sigars.” 
 
 ‘“He is a good fellow,” says Mrs. Stokes, “and spends his 
 money freely, that I declare.” 
 
 ‘“I wish he’d ony pay it,” says I to Mrs. Stokes, says I. 
 “ He’s lived in our house any time these fourteen years and 
 never ” 
 
 ‘ “ Hush your imperence ! ” says Mrs. Stokes ; “ he’s a gentle- 
 man, and pays when he pleases. He’s not one of your common 
 sort. Did he have any tea ? ” 
 
 ‘ “ No,” says I, “ not a drop ; ony coughy and muffns. I 
 told you so — three on ’em ; and growled preciously, too, because 
 there was no more. But I wasn’t a-going to fetch him any more, 
 he whose money we’d never ” 
 
 ‘ “ Barbara,” says Mrs. Stokes, “ leave the room — do. You’re 
 always a-suspecting every gentleman. M^ell, what did he have 
 at supper ? ” 
 
 ‘ “ You know,” says I, “ pickled salmon — that chap’s a reglar 
 devil at salmon (those were my very words) — cold pork, and cold 
 peace puddn agin ; toasted chease this time ; and such a lot of 
 hale and rum-punch as I never saw — nine glasses of heach, I do 
 believe, as I am an honest woman.” 
 
 ‘ “ Barbara,” says mistress, “ that’s not the question. Bid he 
 mix his liquors^ Barbara ? That’s the pint.” 
 
 ‘ “ No,” says I, “Mrs. Stokes; that indeed he didn’t.” And 
 so we agread that he couldnt posbly be affected by drink, and 
 that something wunderfie must have hapned to him, to send him 
 to bad so quear like. 
 
 ‘Nex morning I took him his tea in bed (on the 4th flore 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 149 
 
 back, No. 104 was his number) ; and says he to me, ‘‘Barbara,’’ 
 says he, “ you find me in sperrits.” 
 
 ‘ “ Find you in sperrits ! I believe we do,” says I ; “ we’ve 
 found you in ’em these fifteen year. I wish you’d find us in 
 money says I ; and laft, too, for I thought it was a good un. 
 
 ‘ “ Pooh ! ” says he, “ my dear, that’s not what I mean. You 
 find me in spirits bycause my exlent publisher, Mr. Frasier, of 
 Regent Street, paid me handsum for a remarkable harticle I wrote 
 in his Magazine. He gives twice as much as the other publishers,” 
 says he ; “ though, if he didn’t, I’d write for him just the same — 
 rayther more, I’m so fond of him.” 
 
 ‘“How much has he gave you?” says I; “because I hope 
 you’ll pay us.” 
 
 ‘ “ Oh,” says he, after a bit, “a lot of money. Here, you, you 
 darling,” says he (he did ; upon my word, he did), “go and git me 
 change for a five-pound note.” 
 
 ‘ And when he got up and had his brekfast, and been out, he 
 changed another five-pound note ; and after lunch, another five- 
 pound note; and when he came in to dine, another five-pound 
 note, to pay the cabman. Well, thought we, he’s made of money, 
 and so he seemed ; but you shall hear soon how it was that he had 
 all them notes to change. 
 
 ‘ After dinner he was a sitten over his punch, when some of 
 our gents came in ; and he began to talk and brag to them about 
 his harticle, and what he had for it ; and that he was the best 
 cricket ^ in Europe ; and how Mr. Murray had begged to be 
 introjuiced to him, and was so pleased with him, and he with 
 Murray ; and how he’d been asked to write in The Quartly 
 Review^ and in bless us knows what ; and how, in fact, he was 
 going to carry all London by storm. 
 
 ‘ “ Have you seen what The Morning Roast says of you ? ” 
 says Frank Flint, one of them hartist chaps as comes to our 
 house. 
 
 ‘“No,” says he, “I aint. Barbara, bring some more punch, 
 do you hear? No, I aint; but that’s a fashnable paper,” says 
 he, “ and always takes notice of a fashnable chap like me. What 
 does it say ? ” says he. 
 
 ‘ Mr. Flint opened his mouth and grinned very wide ; and 
 taking The Morning Roast out of his pocket (he was a great 
 friend of Mr. Titmarsh’s, and, like a good-naterd friend as he 
 was, had always a kind thing to ,say or do) — Frank pulls out a 
 Morning Roast^ I say (which had cost Frank Phippens ‘^) : “ Here 
 
 ^ Critic, Mrs. Barbara means, an absurd monomania of Mr. Titmarsh, 
 
 ^ Fivepence, Mrs. Barbara means. 
 
150 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 it says he ; read for yourself ; it will make you quite happy.’’ 
 And so he began to grin to all the gents like winkin. 
 
 ‘ When he red it, Titmarsh’s jor dropt all of a sudn : he turned 
 pupple, and bloo, and violate ; and then, with a mighty effut, he 
 swigg off his rum and water, and staggered out of the room. 
 
 ‘ He looked so ill when he went up stairs to bed, that Mrs. 
 Stokes insisted upon making him some grool for him to have 
 warm in bed ; but. Lor bless you ! he threw it in my face when 
 I went up, and rord and swor so dredfle, that I rann down stairs 
 quite frightened. 
 
 ‘Nex morning I knockt at his dor at nine — no anser. 
 
 ‘ At ten, tried agin — never a word. 
 
 ‘ At yeven, twelve, one, two, up we went, with a fresh cup of 
 hot tea every time. His dor was lockt, and not one sillibaly 
 could we get. 
 
 ‘ At for we began to think he’d suasided hisself ; and having 
 called in the policemen, bust open the dor. 
 
 ‘ And then we beheld a pretty spactycle ! Fancy him in his 
 gor, his throat cut from hear to hear, his white night-gownd all 
 over blood, his beautiful face all pale with hagny ! — well, no such 
 thing. Fancy him hanging from the bedpost by one of his pore 
 dear garters ! — well, no such thing. Agin, fancy him flung out of 
 the window, and dasht into ten billium peaces on the minionet- 
 potts in the fust floar ; or else a naked, melumcolly corpse, laying 
 on the hairy spikes ! — not in the least. He wasn’t dead, nor he 
 wasn’t the least unwell, nor he wasn’t asleep neither — he only 
 wasn’t there ; and from that day we have heard nothen about 
 him. He left on his table the following note as follows : — 
 
 ‘ 15^5 June, 1840. Midnight. 
 
 ‘Mrs. Stokes, — I am attached to you by the most disinterested 
 friendship. I have patronised your house for fourteen years, and it was 
 my intention to have paid you a part of your bill, but The Morning Tost 
 newspaper has destroyed that blessed hope for ever. 
 
 ‘ Before you receive this I shall be — ash not where ; my mind shudders 
 to think where ! You will carry the papers directed to Regent Street 
 to that address, and perhaps you will receive in return a handsome sum 
 of money ; but if the bud of my youth is blighted, the promise of a long 
 and happy career suddenly and cruelly cut short, an affectionate family 
 deprived of its support and ornament, say that The Morning Post has 
 done this by its savage criticism upon me the last this day. 
 
 ‘ Farewell.’ 
 
 ‘ This is hall lie said. From that day to this we have never 
 seen the poor fellow — we have never heerd of him — we have never 
 
A PICTORIAL RHAPSODY 
 
 151 
 
 known anythink about him. Being halarmed, Mrs. Stoks had- 
 vertized him , in the papers ; but not wishing to vex his family, 
 we called him by another name, and put hour address diffrent too. 
 Hall was of no use ; and I canT tell you what a pang I felt in my 
 busum when, on going to get change for the five-pound notes he’d 
 given me at the public-house in Hoxford Street, the lan’lord laft 
 when he saw them ; and said, says he, “ Do you know, Mrs. 
 Barbara, that a queer gent came in here with five sovrings one 
 day, has a glass of hale, and hashes me to change his sovrings for 
 a note ? which I did. Then in about two hours he came back 
 with five more sovrings, gets another note and another glass of 
 hale, and so goes on four times in one blessed day ! It’s my 
 beleaf that he had only five pound, and wanted you to suppose 
 that he was worth twenty, for you’ve got all his notes, I see ! ” 
 
 ‘ And so the poor fellow had no money with him after all ! I 
 do pity him, I do, from my hart ; and I do hate that wicked 
 Morning Post for so treating such a kind, sweet, good-nater’d 
 gentleman ! {Signed) Bake aka. 
 
 ^ MorlanPs Hotel, Vo Jewin, 1840.’ 
 
 This is conclusive. Our departed friend had many faults, but 
 he is gone, and we will not discuss them now. It appears that, 
 on the 1st of June, The Morning Post published a criticism upon 
 him, accusing him of ignorance, bad taste, and gross partiality.^ 
 His gentle and susceptible spirit could not brook the rebuke ; he 
 was not angry ; he did not retort ; but his heart broke I 
 
 Peace to his ashes ! A couple of volumes of his works, we see 
 by our advertisements, are about immediately to appear.^ 
 
 ^ [‘Among other papers in the Magazine is what is called A Pictorial 
 Rhapsody upon the Royal Academy, in which great personal favouritism and 
 general bad taste in the criticism is boldly and unscrupulously indulged. The 
 absurdities of this notice are plenty, and parmi les autres the writer defends 
 Mulready and the postage cover.’ — The Morning Post, June 1, 1840.] 
 
 {The Paris Sketch-Book.'] 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES.^ 
 
 A PKOPos OF A Walk in the Louyee. 
 
 Paris, June 1841. 
 
 In the days of my youth I knew a young fellow that I shall here 
 call Tidbody, and who, born in a provincial town of respectable 
 parents, had been considered by the drawing-master of the place, 
 and, indeed, by the principal tea-parties there, as a great genius in 
 the painting line, and one that was sure to make his fortune. 
 
 When he had made portraits of his grandmother, of the house- 
 dog, of the door-knocker, of the church and parson of the place, 
 and had copied, tant hien que mal, the most of the prints that 
 were to be found in the various houses of the village, Harry Tidbody 
 was voted to be very nearly perfect ; and his honest parents laid 
 out their little savings in sending the lad to Rome and Paris. 
 
 I saw him in the latter town in the year ’32, before an immense 
 easel, perched upon a high stool, and copying with perfect com- 
 placency a Correggio in the gallery, which he thought he had 
 imitated to a nicety. No misgivings ever entered into the man’s 
 mind that he was making an ass of himself ; he never once paused 
 to consider that his copy was as much like the Correggio as my nose 
 is like the Apollo’s. But he rose early of mornings, and scrubbed 
 away all day with his macgilps and varnishes ; he worked away 
 through cold and through sunshine; wRen other men were warming 
 their fingers at the stoves, or wisely lounging on the Boulevard, he 
 worked away, and thought he was cultivating art in the purest 
 fashion, and smiled with easy scorn upon those who took the world 
 more easily than he. Tidbody drunk water with his meals — if 
 meals those miserable scraps of bread and cheese, or bread and 
 sausage, could be called, which he lined his lean stomach with ; 
 and voted those persons godless gluttons who recreated themselves 
 with brandy and beef. He rose up at daybreak, and worked 
 away with bladder and brush ; he passed all night at life-academies, 
 designing life-guardsmen with chalk and stump ; he never was 
 ^ i^Frasers Magazine, July, 1841.] 
 
 152 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 153 
 
 known to take any other recreation ; and in ten years he had spent 
 as much time over his drawing as another man spends in thirty. 
 At the end of his second year of academical studies, Harry Tidbody 
 could draw exactly as well as he could eight years after. He had 
 visited Florence, and Rome, and Venice, in the interval ; but there 
 he was as he had begun, without one single farther idea, and not 
 an inch nearer the goal at which he aimed. 
 
 One day, at the Life-Academy in St. Martin’s Lane, I saw 
 before me the back of a shock head of hair and a pair of ragged 
 elbows, belonging to a man in a certain pompous attitude which I 
 thought I recognised ; and when the model retired behind his 
 curtain to take his ten minutes’ repose, the man belonging to the 
 back in question turned round a little, and took out an old snuffy 
 cotton handkerchief and wiped his forehead and lank cheekbones, 
 that were moist with the vast mental and bodily exertions of the 
 night. Harry Tidbody was the man in question. In ten years 
 he had spent at least three thousand nights in copying the model. 
 When abroad perhaps, he had passed the Sunday evenings too in 
 the same rigorous and dismal pastime. He had piles upon piles 
 of grey paper at his lodgings, covered with worthless nudities in 
 black and white chalk. 
 
 At the end of the evening we shook hands, and I asked him 
 how the arts flourished. The poor fellow, with a kind of dismal 
 humour that formed a part of his character, twirled round upon 
 the iron heels of his old patched Blucher boots, and showed me his 
 figure for answer. Such a lean, long, ragged, fantastical-looking 
 personage, it would be hard to match out of the drawing schools. 
 
 ‘ Tit, my boy,’ said he, when he had finished his pirouette, ‘you 
 may see that the arts have not fattened me as yet ; and between 
 ourselves I make by my profession something considerably less 
 than a thousand a year. But, mind you I am not discouraged ; 
 my whole soul is in my calling; T can’t do anything else if I 
 would : and I will be a painter, or die in the attempt.’ 
 
 Tidbody is not dead, I am happy to say, but has a snug place 
 in the Excise of eighty pounds a year, and now only exercises the 
 pencil as an amateur. If his story has been told here at some 
 length, the ingenious reader may fancy that there is some reason 
 for it. In the first place, there is so little to say about the present 
 exhibition at Paris, that your humble servant does not know how 
 to fill his pages without some digressions ; and, secondly, the Tid- 
 bodian episode has a certain moral in it, without which it never 
 would have been related, and which is good for all artists to read. 
 
 It came to my mind upon examining a picture of sixty feet by 
 forty (indeed, it cannot be much smaller) which takes up a good 
 
154 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 deal of room in the large room of the Louvre. But of this picture 
 anon. Let us come to the general considerations. 
 
 Why the deuce will men make light of that golden gift of 
 mediocrity which for the most part they possess, and strive so 
 absurdly at the sublime ? What is it that makes a fortune in this 
 world but energetic mediocrity ? What is it that is so respected 
 and prosperous as good, honest, emphatic, blundering dulness, 
 bellowing commonplaces with its great healthy lungs, kicking and 
 struggling with its big feet and fists, and bringing an awe-stricken 
 public down on its knees before it ? Think, my good sir, of the 
 people who occupy your attention and the world's. Who are they? 
 Upon your honour and conscience now, are they not persons with 
 thews and sinews like your own, only they use them with some- 
 what more activity — with a voice like yours, only they shout a 
 little louder — with the average portion of brains, in fact, but 
 working them more ? But this kind of disbelief in heroes is very 
 offensive to the world, it must be confessed. There, now, is The 
 Times newspaper, which the other day rated your humble servant 
 for publishing an account of one of the great humbugs of modern 
 days, viz. the late funeral of Napoleon ^ — which rated me, I say, and 
 talked in its own grave, roaring way, about the flippancy and 
 conceit of Titmarsh. 
 
 0, you thundering old Times! Napoleon's funeral was a 
 humbug, and your constant reader said so. The people engaged in 
 it WTve humbugs, and this your Michael Angelo hinted at. There 
 may be irreverence in this, and the process of humbug-hunting may 
 end rather awkwardly for some people. But, surely there is no 
 conceit. The shamming of modesty is the most pert conceit of all, 
 the precieuse affectation of deference where you don't feel it, the 
 sneaking acquiescence in lies. It is very hard that a man may 
 not tell the truth as he fancies it, without being accused of conceit : 
 but so the world wags. As has already been prettily shown in 
 that before-mentioned little book about Napoleon, that is still to 
 be had of the publisher's, there is a ballad in the volume, which, 
 if properly studied, will be alone worth two-and-sixpence to any 
 man. 
 
 Well, the funeral of Napoleon was a humbug ; and being so, 
 what was a man to call it ? What do we call a rose ? Is it 
 disrespectful to the pretty flower to call it by its own innocent 
 name? And, in like manner, are we bound, out of respect for 
 society, to speak of humbug only in a circumlocutory way — to call 
 it something else, as they say some Indian people do their devil — 
 
 ^ The Second Funeral of Napoleon : in three Letters to Miss Smith of 
 London; and The Qhroniele of the Drum. By Mr. M. A. Titmomsh. 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 155 
 
 to wrap it up in riddles and charades ? Nothing is easier. Take, 
 for instance, the following couple of sonnets on the subject : — 
 
 The glad spring sun shone yesterday, as Mr. 
 
 M. Titmarsli wandered with his favourite lassie 
 By silver Seine, among the meadows grassy 
 Meadows, like mail-coach guards new clad at Easter. 
 Fair was the sight ’twixt Neuilly and Passy : 
 
 And green the field and bright the river’s glister. 
 
 The birds sang salutations to the spring ; 
 
 Already buds and leaves from branches burst : 
 
 ‘ The surly winter time hath done its worst, ’ 
 
 Said Michael : ‘ lo, the bees are on the wing ! ’ 
 
 Then on the ground his lazy limbs did fling. 
 Meanwhile the bees pass’d by him with my first. 
 
 My second dare I to your notice bring. 
 
 Or name to delicate ears that animal accurst ? 
 
 To all our earthly family of fools 
 My whole, resistless despot, gives the law — 
 
 Humble and great, we kneel to it with awe ; 
 
 O’er camp and court, the senate and the schools. 
 
 Our grand invisible Lama sits and rules, 
 
 By ministers that are its men of straw. 
 
 Sir Robert utters it in place of wit. 
 
 And straight the Opposition shouts ‘ Hear, hear ! ’ 
 And oh ! but all the Whiggish benches cheer 
 When great Lord John retorts it as is fit. 
 
 In you, my Press'^ each day throughout the year. 
 
 On vast broad sheets we find its praises writ. 
 
 0 wondrous are the columns that you rear. 
 
 And ,sweet the morning hymns you roar in praise of it ! 
 
 Sacred word ! it is kept out of the dictionaries, as if the great 
 compilers of those publications were afraid to utter it. Well, then, 
 
 ^ The reader can easily accommodate this line to the name of his favourite 
 paper. Thus : — 
 
 In you, my ^ j each day throughout the year. 
 
 Jn you, my Galignanis Messengere ; 
 
 a capital paper, because you have there the very cream of all the others. In 
 the last line, for ‘morning’ you can read ‘evening,’ or ‘weekly,’ as circum- 
 stances prompt. 
 
 Times 
 
 Or: 
 
 In you, my 
 
 ^Tiser j through the year. 
 
 Or, in France : — 
 
156 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 the funeral of Napoleon was a humbug,* as Titmarsh wrote ; and a 
 still better proof that it was a humbug was this, that nobody 
 bought Titmarsh’s book, and of the 10,000 copies made ready by 
 the publisher not above 3000 went off. It was a humbug, and an 
 exploded humbug. Peace be to it ! Parlous Pautres choses ; 
 and let us begin to discourse about the pictures without further 
 shilly-shally, 
 
 I must confess, with a great deal of shame, that I love to go 
 to the picture gallery of a Sunday after church, on purpose to see 
 the thousand happy people of the working sort amusing them- 
 selves — not very wickedly, as I fancy — in the only day in the 
 week on which they have their freedom. Genteel people, who 
 can amuse themselves every day throughout the year, do not 
 frequent the Louvre on a Sunday. You can’t see the pictures 
 well, and are pushed and elbowed by all sorts of low-bred 
 creatures. Yesterday, there were at the very least two hundred 
 common soldiers in the place — little vulgar ruffians, with red 
 breeches and three halfpence a-day, examining the pictures in 
 company with fifteen hundred grisettes, two thousand liberated 
 shop -boys, eighteen hundred and forty -one artist -apprentices, 
 half a dozen of livery servants, and many scores of fellows with 
 caps, and jackets, and copper-coloured countenances, and gold ear- 
 rings, and large ugly hands, that are hammering, or weaving, or 
 filing, all the week. done ! what a thing it is to have a taste 
 for low company ! Every man of decent breeding ought to have 
 been in the Bois de Boulogne, in white kid gloves and on horse- 
 back, or on hack-back at least. How the dandies just now went 
 prancing and curvetting down the Champs Elysees making their 
 horses jump as they passed the carriages, with their japanned 
 boots glittering in the sunshine ! 
 
 The fountains were flashing and foaming, as if they too were in 
 their best for Sunday ; the trees are covered all over with little, 
 twinkling, bright green sprouts ; numberless exhibitions of Punch 
 and the Fantoccini are going on beneath them ; and jugglers and 
 balancers are entertaining the people with their pranks. I met 
 two fellows the other day, one with a barrel organ, and the other 
 with a beard, a turban, a red jacket, and a pair of dirty, short, 
 spangled, white trousers, who were cursing each other in the 
 purest St. Giles’s English ; and if I had had impudence or 
 generosity enough, I should have liked to make up their quarrel 
 over a chopine of Strasbourg beer, and hear the histories of either. 
 Think of these fellows quitting our beloved country, and their 
 homes in some calm nook of Field Lane or Seven Dials, and toiling 
 over to France with their music and their jiggling-traps, to balance 
 
ON' MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 167 
 
 cart-wheels and swallow knives for the amusement of our natural 
 enemies. They are very likely at work at this minute, with 
 grinning bonnes and conscripts staring at their skill. It is pleasant 
 to walk by and see the nurses and the children so uproariously 
 happy. Yonder is one who has got a halfpenny to give to the 
 beggar at the crossing ; several are riding gravely in little carriages 
 drawn by goats. Ah, truly, the sunshine is a fine thing ; and 
 one loves to see the little people and the poor basking in it, as 
 well as the great in their fine carriages, or their prancing cock- 
 tailed horses. 
 
 In the midst of sights of this kind, you pass on a fine Sunday 
 afternoon down the Elysian Fields and the Tuileries until you 
 reach the before-mentioned low-bred crowd rushing into the Louvre. 
 
 Well, then, the pictures of this exhibition are to be numbered 
 by thousands, and these thousands contain the ordinary number of 
 chefs oeuvre; that is to say, there may be a couple of works of 
 genius, half a dozen very clever performances, a hundred or so of 
 good ones, fifteen hundred very decent good or bad pictures, and the 
 remainder atrocious. What a comfort it is, as I have often 
 thought, that they are not all masterpieces, and that there is a good 
 stock of mediocrity in this world, and that we only light upon 
 genius now and then, at rare angel intervals, handed round like 
 tokay at dessert, in a few houses, and in very small quantities only ! 
 Fancy how sick one would grow of it, if one had no other drink ! 
 
 Now, in this exhibition there are, of course, a certain number of 
 persons who make believe that they are handing you round tokay 
 — giving you the real imperial stuff, with the seal of genius 
 stamped on the cork. There are numbers of ambitious pictures, 
 in other words, chiefly upon sacred subjects, and in what is called 
 a severe style of art. 
 
 The severe style of art consists in drawing your figures in the 
 first place very big and very neat, in which there is no harm ; and 
 in dressing them chiefly in stiff, crisp, old-fashioned draperies, 
 such as one sees in the illuminated missals and the old masters. 
 The old masters, no doubt, copied the habits of the people about 
 them ; and it has always appeared as absurd to me to imitate 
 these antique costumes, and to dress up saints and virgins after the 
 fashion of the fifteenth century, as it would be to adorn them with 
 hoops and red-heels such as our grandmothers wore : and to make 
 a Magdalen, for instance, taking off her patches, or an angel in 
 powder and a hoop. 
 
 It is, or used to be, the custom at the theatres for the grave- 
 digger in Hamlet always to wear fifteen or sixteen waistcoats of 
 which he leisurely divested himself, the audience roaring at each 
 
158 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 change of raiment. Do the Denmark gravediggers always wear 
 fifteen waistcoats ? Let any body answer who has visited the 
 country. But the probability is that the custom on the stage is a 
 very ancient one, and that the public would not be satisfied at a 
 departure from the legend. As in the matter of gravediggers, so 
 it is with angels : they have — and Heaven knows why — a regular 
 costume, which every ‘ serious ’ painter follows ; and which has a 
 great deal more to do with serious art than people at first may 
 imagine. They have large white wings, that fill up a quarter of 
 the picture in which they have the good fortune to be ; they have 
 white gowns that fall round their feet in pretty fantastical 
 draperies ; they have fillets round their brows, and their hair 
 combed and neatly pomatumed down the middle ; and if they have 
 not a sword, have an elegant portable harp of a certain angelic 
 shape. Large rims of gold leaf they have round their heads always ; 
 a pretty business it would be if such adjuncts were to be left out. 
 
 Now, suppose the legend ordered that every gravedigger should 
 be represented with a gold leaf halo round his head, and every 
 angel with fifteen waistcoats, artists would have followed serious 
 art just as they do now most probably, and looked with scorn at 
 the miserable creature who ventured to scoff at the waist- 
 coats. Ten to one but a certain newspaper would have called 
 a man flippant who did not respect the waistcoats — would have 
 said that he was irreverent for not worshipping the waist- 
 coats.^ But why talk of it ? The fact is I have rather a desire 
 to set up for a martyr, like my neighbours in the literary trade ; 
 it is not a little comforting to undergo such persecutions courage- 
 ously. ‘ 0 Socrate / je hoirai la cigue avec toi ! ’ as David said 
 to Robespierre. You too were accused of blasphemy in your 
 time ; and the world has been treating us j30or literary gents in 
 the same way ever since. There, now, is Bulw 
 
 But to return to the painters. In the matter of canvas cover- 
 ing, the French artists are a great deal more audacious than ours ; 
 and I have known a man starve all the winter through, without 
 fire and without beef, in order that he might have the honour of 
 filling five-and-twenty feet square of canvas with some favourite 
 subject of his. 
 
 It is curious to look through the collection, and see how for 
 the most part the men draw their ideas. There are caricatures 
 of the late and early style of Raphael ; there are caricatures of 
 
 ^ Last year, when oiir friend published some article in Uiis Magazine, he 
 seemed to be agitated almost to madness by a criticism, and a very just one 
 too, which appeared in The Morning Post. At present he is similarly affected 
 by some strictures on a defunct work of his, 
 
Q-N MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 159 
 
 Masaccio ; there is a picture painted in the very pyramidical form, 
 and in the manner of Andrea del Sarto ; there is a Holy Family, 
 the exact counterpart of Leonardo da Vinci ; and, finally, there is 
 Achille Deveria — it is no use to give the names and numbers of 
 the other artists who are not known in England — there is 
 Achillp Deveria, who, having nothing else to caricature, has 
 caricatured a painted window, and designed a Charity, of which 
 all the outlines are half an inch thick. 
 
 Then there are numberless caricatures in colour as in form. 
 There is a Violet Entombment — a crimson one, a green one ; a 
 light emerald and gamboge Eve ; all huge pictures, with talent 
 enough in their composition, but remarkable for this strange mad 
 love of extravagance, which belongs to the nation. Titian and 
 the Venetians have loved to paint lurid skies and sunsets of 
 purple and gold : here, in consequence, is a piebald picture of 
 crimson and yellow, laid on in streaks from the top to the 
 bottom. 
 
 Who has not heard a great, comfortable, big-chested man, 
 with bands round a sleek double chin, and fat white cushion- 
 squeezers of hands, and large red whiskers and a soft roaring 
 voice, the delight of a congregation, preaching for an hour with 
 all the appearance and twice the emphasis of piety, and leading 
 audiences captive ? And who has not seen a humble individual, 
 who is quite confused to be conducted down the aisle by the big 
 beadle with his silver stall’ (the stalwart ‘ drum-major ecclesiastic ’) ; 
 and when in his pulpit, saying his say in the simplest manner 
 possible, uttering what are very likely commonplaces, without a 
 single rhetorical grace or emphasis 
 
 The great, comfortable, red-whiskered, roaring cushion-thumper, 
 is most probably the favourite with the public. But there are 
 some persons who, nevertheless, prefer to listen to the man of 
 timid, mild commonplaces, because the simple words he speaks 
 come from his heart, and so find a way directly to yours ; where, 
 if perhaps you canT find belief for them, you still are sure to 
 receive them with respect and sympathy. 
 
 There are many such professors at the easel as well as the 
 pulpit ; and you see many painters with a great vigour and 
 dexterity, and no sincerity of heart ; some with little dexterity, but 
 plenty of sincerity ; some one or two in a million who have both 
 these qualities, and thus become the great men of their art. I 
 think there are instances of the two former kinds in this present 
 exhibition of the Louvre. There are fellows who have covered 
 great swaggering canvases with all the attitudes and externals of 
 piety ; and some few whose humble pictures cause no stir, and 
 
160 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 remain in quiet nooks, where one finds them, and straightway 
 acknowledges the simple, kindly appeal, which they make. 
 
 Of such an order is the picture entitled ‘ La Frier by M. 
 Trimolet. A man and his wife are kneeling at an old-fashioned 
 praying desk, and the woman clasps a little sickly-looking child 
 in her arms, and all three are praying as earnestly as^ their 
 simple hearts will let them. The man is a limner or painter of 
 missals, by trade, as we fancy. One of his works lies upon the 
 praying desk, and it is evident that he can paint no more that 
 day, for the sun is just set behind the old-fashioned roofs of the 
 houses in the narrow street of the old city where he lives. 
 Indeed, I have had a great deal of pleasure in looking at this 
 little quiet painting, and in the course of half a dozen visits that 
 I have paid to it, have become perfectly acquainted with all the 
 circumstances of the life of the honest missal illuminator and his 
 wife, here praying at the end of their day’s work in the calm 
 summer evening. 
 
 Very likely M. Trimolet has quite a different history for his 
 little personages, and so has everybody else who examines the 
 picture. But what of that ? There is the privilege of pictures. 
 A man does not know all that lies in his picture, any more than 
 he understands all the character of his children. Directly one 
 or the other makes its appearance in the world, it has its own 
 private existence, independent of the progenitor. And in respect 
 of works of art, if the same piece inspire one man with joy, that 
 fills another with compassion, what are we to say of it, but that 
 it has sundry properties of its own which its author even does not 
 understand ? The fact is, pictures ‘ are as they seem to all,’ as 
 Mr. Alfred Tennyson sings in the first volume of his poems. 
 
 Some of this character of holiness and devotion that I fancy I 
 see in M. Trimolet’s pictures is likewise observable in a piece of 
 Madame Juillerat, representing Saint Elizabeth, of Hungary, 
 leading a little beggar boy into her house, where the holy dame of 
 Hungary will, no doubt, make him comfortable with a good plate 
 of victuals. A couple of young ladies follow behind the princess, 
 with demure looks, and garlands in their hair, that hangs straight 
 on their shoulders, as one sees it in the old illuminations. The 
 whole picture has a pleasant, mystic, innocent look ; and one is 
 all the better for regarding it. What a fine instinct or task it 
 was in the old missal illuminators to be so particular in the 
 painting of the minor parts of their pictures ! the precise manner 
 in which the flowers and leaves, birds and branches, are painted, 
 give an air of truth and simplicity to the whole performance, and 
 make nature, as it were, an accomplice and actor in the scene 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 161 
 
 going on. For instance, you may look at a landscape with 
 certain feelings of ]3leasure ; but if you have pulled a rose, and 
 are smelling it, and if of a sudden a blackbird in a bush hard by 
 begins to sing and chirrup, your feeling of pleasure is very much 
 enhanced most likely ; the senses with which you examine the 
 scene become brightened as it were, and the scene itself becomes 
 more agreeable to you. It is not the same j)lace as it was 
 before you smelt the rose, or before the blackbird began to sing. 
 Now, in Madame JuilleraUs picture of the Saint of Hungary and 
 the hungry boy, if the flowers on the young ladies’ heads had 
 been omitted, or not painted with their pleasing minuteness and 
 circumstantiality, I fancy that the effect of the piece would have 
 been by no means the same. Another artist of the mystical 
 school. Monsieur Servan, has employed the same adjuncts in a 
 similarly successful manner. One of his pictures represents St. 
 Augustin meditating in a garden ; a great cluster of rose-bushes, 
 hollyhocks, and other plants, are in the foreground, most 
 accurately delineated ; and a fine rich landscape and river stretch 
 behind the saint, round whom the flowers seem to keep up a 
 mysterious waving and whispering that All one with a sweet, 
 pleasing, indescribable kind of awe — a great perfection in this 
 style of painting. 
 
 In M. Aguado’s gallery there is an early Raphael (which all 
 the world declares to be a copy, but no matter). This piece only 
 represents two young people walking hand in hand in a garden, 
 and looking at you with a kind of ‘ solemn mirth ’ (the expression 
 of old Sternhold and Hopkins has always struck me as very fine). 
 A meadow is behind them, at the end of which is a cottage, and 
 by which flows a river, environed by certain very prim-looking 
 trees ; and that is all. Well, it is impossible for any person who 
 has a sentiment for the art to look at this picture without feeling 
 indescribably moved and pleased by it. It acts upon you — how ? 
 How does a beautiful, pious, tender air of Mozart act upon you ? 
 What is there in it that should make you happy and gentle, and 
 fill you with all sorts of good thoughts and kindly feelings ? I 
 fear that what Doctor Thumpcushion says at church is correct, 
 and that the indulgences are only carnal, and of the earth earthy ; 
 but the sensual effort in this case carries one quite away from the 
 earth, and up to something that is very like heaven. 
 
 Now the writer of this has already been severely reprehended for 
 saying that Raphael at thirty had lost that delightful innocence 
 and purity which rendered the works of Raphael of twenty so 
 divine ; and perhaps it may be the critic’s fault, and not the 
 painter’s (I’m not proud, and will allow that even a magazine 
 
 M 
 
162 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 critic may be mistaken). Perhaps by the greatest stretch of the 
 perhaps, it may be that Raphael was every whit as divine at 
 thirty as at eighteen ; and that the very quaintnesses and imjDer- 
 fections of manner observable in his early works are the reasons 
 why they appear so singularly pleasing to me. At least among 
 painters of the present day, I feel myself more disposed to recognise 
 spiritual beauties in those whose powers of execution are manifestly 
 incomplete, than in artists whose hands are skilful and manner 
 formed. Thus there are scores of large pictures here, hanging in 
 the Louvre, that represent subjects taken from Holy Writ, or 
 from the lives of the saints — pictures skilfully enough painted 
 and intended to be religious, that have not the slightest effect 
 upon me, no more than Doctor Thumpcushion’s loudest and 
 glibbest sermon. 
 
 Here is No. 1475, for instance — a ‘Holy Family,’ painted in 
 the antique manner, and with all the accessories before spoken of, 
 viz. large flowers, fresh roses, and white stately lilies ; curling 
 tendrils of vines forming fantastical canopies for the heads of the 
 sacred personages, and rings of gold-leaf drawn neatly round the 
 same. Here is the Virgin, with long, stiff, prim draperies of 
 blue, red, and white ; and old Saint Anne in a sober dress, seated 
 gravely at her side ; and Saint Joseph in a becoming attitude ; 
 and all very cleverly treated, and pleasing to the eye. But though 
 this picture is twice as well painted as any of those before 
 mentioned, it does not touch my heart in the least ; nor do any 
 of the rest of the sacred pieces. Opposite the ‘Holy Family’ is 
 a great ‘Martyrdom of Poly carp,’ and the Catalogue tells you 
 how the executioners first tried to burn the saint ; but the fire 
 went out, and the executioners were knocked down ; then a soldier 
 struck the saint with a sword, and so killed him. The legends 
 recount numerous miracles of this sort, which I confess have not 
 any very edifying effect upon me. Saints are clapped into boiling 
 oil, which immediately turns cool ; or their heads are chopped off, 
 and their blood turns to milk ; and so on. One can’t understand 
 why these continual delays and disappointments take place, 
 especially as the martyr is always killed at the end ; so that it 
 would be best at once to put him out of his pain. For this 
 reason, possibly the execution of Saint Polycarp did not properly 
 affect the writer of this notice. 
 
 M. Laemlein has a good picture of the ‘ Waking of Adam,’ so 
 royally described by Milton— a picture full of gladness, vigour, 
 and sunshine. There is a very fine figure of a weeping woman in 
 a picture of the ‘ Death of the Virgin ’ ; and the Virgin falling in 
 M. Steuben’s picture of ‘ Our Saviour going to Execution ’ is very 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 163 
 
 pathetic. The mention of this gentleman brings us to what is 
 called the bourgeois style of art, of which he is one of the chief 
 professors. He excels in depicting a certain kind of sentiment, 
 and in the vulgar, which is often too the true, pathetic. 
 
 Steuben has painted many scores of Napoleons ; and his picture 
 of Napoleon this year brings numbers of admiring people round it. 
 The Emperor is sitted on a sofa, reading dispatches ; and the 
 little King of Rome, in a white muslin frock, with his hair beauti- 
 fully curled, slumbers on his papa^s knee. What a contrast ! the 
 conqueror of the world, the stern warrior, the great giver of laws 
 and ruler of nations, he dare not move because the little baby is 
 asleep ; and he would not disturb him for all the kingdoms he 
 knows so well how to conquer. This is not art, if you please ; 
 but it is pleasant to see fat, good-natured mothers and grand- 
 mothers clustered round this picture, and looking at it with 
 solemn eyes. The same painter has an Esmeralda dancing and 
 frisking in her night-gown, and playing the tambourine to her 
 goat, capering likewise. This picture is so delightfully bad, the 
 little gipsy has such a killing ogle, that all the world admires it. 
 M. Steuben should send it to London, where it would be sure of a 
 gigantic success. 
 
 M. Grrenier'has a piece much looked at, in the bourgeois line. 
 Some rogues of gipsies, or mountebanks, have kidnapped a fine 
 fat child, and are stripping it of its pretty clothes ; and poor 
 baby is cr^dng ; and the gipsy-woman holding up her finger, and 
 threatening ; and the he-mountebank is lying on a bank, smoking 
 his pipe, — the callous monster ! Preciously they will ill-treat 
 that dear little darling, if justice do not overtake them, — if, ay, 
 if. But, thank Heaven : there in the corner come the police and 
 they will have that pipe -smoking scoundrel off to the galleys 
 before five minutes are over. 
 
 1056. A picture of the galleys. Two galley-slaves before you, 
 and the piece is called, ‘ A Crime and a Fault.^ The poor ‘ Fault ^ 
 is sitting on a stone, looking very repentant and unhappy indeed. 
 The great ‘ Crime ^ stands grinning you in the face, smoking his 
 pipe. The ruffian ! That pipe seems to be a great mark of 
 callosity in ruffians. I heard one man whisper to another, as they 
 were looking at these galley-slaves, ‘ They are poi'traits^'’ and very 
 much aftected his companion seemed by the information. 
 
 Of a similar virtuous interest is 7 05, by M. Finart. ‘ A family 
 of African Colonists carried off by Abd-el-Kader.’ There is the 
 poor male colonist without a single thing on but a^ rope round his 
 wrists. His silver skin is dabbled with his golden blood, and he 
 looks up to heaven as the Arabs are poking him on with the tips 
 
164 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 of their horrid spears. Behind him come his flocks and herds, 
 and other members of his family. In front, principal figure, is his 
 angelic wife, in her night-gown, and in the arms of an odious 
 blackamoor on horseback. Poor thing — poor thing ! she is kick- 
 ing, and struggling and resisting as hard as she possibly can. 
 
 485. ^ The Two friends.’ Debay. 
 
 ‘ Deicx jeunes femmes se donnent le gage le ‘plus sacre d'une amitie 
 sincere^ dans un acte de demUment et de reconnaissance. 
 
 ^ L'une d' elles, faihle^ extenuee d' efforts inutilement tentes pour allaiter, 
 decouvre son sein tari, cause du deperissement de son enfant. Sa douleur 
 est comprise par son amie, d qui la sante permet d'ajouter au honheur de 
 nourrir son propre enfant^ celui de rappeler d la vie le fils mourant de sa 
 compagne. ’ 
 
 M. Debay’s pictures are not bad, as most of the others here 
 mentioned as appertaining to the bourgeois class ; but, good or 
 bad, I can’t but own that I like to see these honest, hearty repre- 
 sentations, which work upon good simple feeling in a good down- 
 right way ; and if not works of art, are certainly works that can 
 do a great deal of good, and make honest people happy. Who is 
 the man that despises melodramas ? I swear that T. P. Cooke is 
 a benefactor to mankind. Away with him who has no stomach 
 for such kind of entertainments, where vice is always punished, 
 where virtue always meets its reward ; where Mrs. James Yining 
 is always sure to be made comfortable somewhere at the end of 
 the third act ; and if 0. Smith is lying in agonies of death, in red 
 breeches, on the front of the stage, or has just gone off in a flash 
 of fire down one of the traps, I know it is only make-believe on 
 his part, and believe him to be a good, kind-hearted fellow, that 
 would not do harm to mortal ! So much for pictures of the 
 serious melodramatic sort. 
 
 M. Biard, whose picture of the ‘ Slave Trade ’ made so much 
 noise in London last year — and indeed it is as fine as Hogarth, — 
 has this year many comic pieces, and a series representing the 
 present Majesty of France when Duke of Orleans undergoing 
 various perils by land and by water. There is much good in 
 these pieces ; but I mean no disrespect in saying I like the comic 
 ones best. There is one entitled ‘ Une Distraction.^ A National 
 Guard is amusing himself by catching flies. You can’t fail to 
 laugh when you see it. There is ‘ Le Gros Peche^^ and the biggest 
 of all sins, no less than a drum-major confessing. You can’t see 
 the monster’s face, which the painter has wisely hidden behind the 
 curtain, as beyond the reach of art ; but you see the priest’s, and, 
 murder ! what a sin it must be that the big tambour has just 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 165 
 
 imparted to him ! All the French critics sneer at Biard, as they 
 do at Paul de 'Kock, for not being artistical enough ; but I do not 
 think these gentlemen need mind the sneer ; they have the millions 
 with them, as Feargus 0 ‘Connor says, and they are good judges, 
 after all. 
 
 A great comfort it is to think that there is a reasonable 
 prospect that, for the future, very few more battle-pieces will be 
 painted. They have used up all the victories, and Versailles is 
 almost full. So this year, much to my happiness, only a few 
 yards of warlike canvas are exhibited in place of the furlongs 
 which one was called upon to examine in former exhibitions. One 
 retreat from Moscow is there, and one storming of El Gibbet, or 
 El Arish, or some such place, in Africa. In the latter picture, you 
 see a thousand fellows, in loose red pantaloons, rushing up a hill 
 with base heathen Turks on the top, who are firing off guns, 
 carabines, and other pieces of ordnance, at them. All this is very 
 well painted by Monsieur Bollange, and the rush of red breeches 
 has a queer and pleasing appearance. In the Bussian piece, you 
 have frozen men and cattle ; mothers embracing their offspring ; 
 grenadiers scowling at the enemy, and especially one fellow standing 
 on a back with his bayonet placed in the attitude for receiving the 
 charge, and actually charged by a whole regiment of Cossacks, — * 
 a complete pulk, my dear madam, coming on in three lines, with 
 their lances pointed against this undaunted warrior of France. I 
 believe Monsieur Thiers sat for the portrait, or else the editor of 
 the Courrier Fran<^ais — the two men in this belligerent nation 
 who are the belligerentest. A p?'opos of Thiers ; the Nouvelles a la 
 Main have a good story of this little sham Napoleon. When the 
 second son of the Duke of Orleans was born (I forget his royal 
 I highness’s title) news was brought to Monsieur Thiers. He was 
 
 i told the princess was well, and asked the courier who brought the 
 news, ‘ Comment se portait de Roi de Rome ? ’ It may be said, 
 in confidence, that there is not a single word of truth in the story, 
 j But what of that ? Are not sham stories as good as real ones ? 
 
 I Ask M. Leullier ; who, in spite of all that has been said and 
 
 I written upon a certain sea-fight, has actually this year come 
 
 I forward with his 
 
 1311 — Heroisme de V Equipage du Vaisseau le Vengeur, If Juin, T79J^. 
 ^Apres avoir soutenu longtemps un combat acharne contre trois vaisseaux 
 j Anglais^ le vaisseau le Vengeur avail perdu la moitie de son equipage^ le 
 
 j reste etait blessi pour la plupart : le second capitaine avail ete coupe en deux 
 
 1 par un boulet ; le vaisseau etait rase par le feu de Vennem% sa mature 
 
 } abattue, ses flancs crihles par Ics boulets etaient ouverts de toutes parts : sa 
 
 cale se remplissait d vio d'oeil ; il s’enfongait dans la mer. Les marims 
 
166 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 qui restent sur son bord servent la hatterie basse jusqu'd ce quelle se 
 trouve au niveau de la mcr ; quand elle va disparaUre, ils s’Hancent dans 
 la scconde, ou ils repetent la meme manoeuvre ; celle-ci engloutie, ils mon- 
 tent sur le pont. Un trongon de mat d' artimon restait encore debout; 
 leurs pavilions en lambeaux y sont clones ; puis, reunissant instinctive- 
 ment leurs volentes en une seule pensee, ils veulent perir avec le navire qui 
 leur a ete confie. Tons, combattants, blesses, mourants se raniment : un 
 cri immense s'eleve, repete sur toutes les parties du tillac : Vive la Repub- 
 lique ! Vive la France ! , , , Le Vengeur coule ... les cris continuent ; 
 tons les bras sont dresses au del, et ces braves, preferant la mort d la cap- 
 tivite, emportent triomphalement leur pavilion dans ce glorieux tombeaud 
 — France Maritime. 
 
 I think Mr. Thomas Carlyle is in the occasional habit of calling 
 lies wind-bags. This wind-bag one would have thought exploded 
 last year ; but no such thing. You canH sink it, do what you 
 will : it always comes bouncing up to the surface again, where it 
 swims and bobs about gaily for the admiration of all. This lie 
 the Frenchman will believe ; all the paj^ers talk gravely about 
 the affair of the Vengeur, as if an established fact : and I 
 heard the matter disposed of by some artists the other day in 
 a very satisfactory manner. One has always the gratification, in 
 all French societies where the matter is discussed, of telling the 
 real story (or if the subject be not discussed, of bringing the 
 conversation round to it, and then telling the real story), one has 
 always this gratification, and a great wicked, delightful one it is, — 
 you make the whole company uncomfortable at once ; you narrate 
 the history in a calm, good-humoured, dispassionate tone ; and as 
 you proceed, you see the different personages of the audience looking 
 uneasily at one another, and bursting out occasionally with a ‘ Metis 
 cependeint T but you continue your tale with perfect suavity of 
 manner, and have the satisfaction of knowing that you have stuck 
 a dagger into the heart of every single person using it. 
 
 Telling, I say, this story to some artists who were examining 
 M. Leullier’s picture, and I trust that many scores of persons 
 besides were listening to the conversation, one of them replied to 
 my assertion, that Captain Renaudin\s letters were extant, and 
 that the whole affair was a humbug, in the following way. 
 
 ‘ Sir,’ said he, ‘ the sinking of the Vengeur is an estahlislied fact 
 of history. It is completely proved by the documents of the 
 time ; and as for the letters of Captain Renaudin of which you 
 speak, have we not had an example the other day of some 
 pretended letters of Louis Philippe’s which were published in a 
 newspaper here ? And what, sir, were those letters ? Forgeries I ’ 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 167 
 
 Q.E.D. Everybody said sansculotte was right ; and I have no 
 doubt that if all the Vengeur^s crew could rise from the dead, and 
 that English cox — or boat-swain, who was last on hoard the ship^^ 
 of which he and his comrades had possession, and had to swim for 
 his life, could come forward, and swear to the real story, I make 
 no doubt that the Frenchmen would not believe it. Only one I 
 know, my friend Julius, who, ever since the tale has been told to 
 him, has been crying it into all ears and in all societies, and vows 
 he is perfectly hoarse with telling it. 
 
 As for M. Leullier’s picture, there is really a great deal of good 
 in it. Fellows embracing each other, and holding up hands and 
 eyes to heaven ; and in the distance an English ship, with the 
 crew in red coats, firing away on the doomed vessel. Possibly, 
 they are only marines whom we see ; but as I once beheld several 
 English naval officers in a play habited in top-boots, perhaps the 
 legend in France may be, that the navy, like the army, with us, 
 is caparisoned in scarlet. A good subject for another historical 
 picture would be Oambronne, saying, ‘ La Garde meiirt mais ne 
 se rend loas.^ I have bought a couple of engravings of Vengeur 
 and Oambronne, and shall be glad to make a little historical 
 collection of facts similarly authenticated. 
 
 Accursed, I say, be all uniform coats of blue or of red ; all ye 
 epaulets and sabertaches ; all ye guns, shrapnels, and musketoons ; 
 all ye silken banners embroidered with bloody reminiscences of 
 successful fights : down — down to the bottomless pit with you all, 
 and let honest men live and love each other without you ! What 
 business have I, forsooth, to plume myself because the Duke of 
 Wellington beat the French in Spain and elsewhere ; and kindle 
 as I read the tale, and fancy myself of a heroic stock, because my 
 uncle Tom was at the battle of Waterloo, and because we beat 
 Napoleon there ? Who are ^ve, in the name of Beelzebub ? Did 
 we ever fight in our lives ? Have we the slightest inclination for 
 fighting and murdering one another ? Why are we to go on hating 
 one another from generation to generation, swelling up our little 
 bosoms with absurd national conceit, strutting and crowing over 
 our neighbours, and longing to be at fisticuffs with them again ? 
 As Aristotle remarks, in war there are always two parties ; and 
 though it often happens that both declare themselves to be 
 victorious, it still is generally the case that one party beats and 
 the other is beaten. The conqueror is thus filled with national 
 pride, and the conquered with national hatred and a desire to do 
 better next time. If he has his revenge and beats his opponent as 
 
 ^ The writer heard of this man from an English captain in the navy, who 
 had him on board his ship. 
 
168 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 desired, these agreeable feelings are reversed, and so Pride and 
 Hatred continue in saecula saecidorum, and ribands and orders are 
 given away, and great men rise and flourish. ‘ Remember you are 
 Britons ! ^ cries our general ; ^ there is the enemy, and d — ^em, 
 give ’em the bayonet ! ’ Hurrah ! helter skelter, load and fire, cut 
 and thrust, down they go ! ‘ Soldats I dans ce moment terrible 
 
 la France vous regarde I Vive V Empereur F shouts Jacques 
 Bonhomme, and his sword is through your ribs in a twinkling, 
 ‘ Children ! ’ roars Feldmarechal Sauerkraut, ‘ men of Hohenzollern- 
 sigmaringen ! remember the eyes of Yaterland are upon you ! ’ and 
 murder again is the consequence. Tomahee-tereboo leads on the 
 Ashantees with the very same war-cry, and they eat all their 
 prisoners with true patriotic cannibalism. 
 
 Thus the great truth is handed down from father to son, that 
 A Briton, 
 
 and by this truth the dullards of the respective nations swear, and 
 by it statesmen govern. 
 
 Let the reader say for himself, does he not believe himself to 
 be superior to a man of any other country ? We can’t help it — in 
 spite of ourselves we do. But if, by changing the name, the fable 
 applies to yourself, why do you laugh ? 
 
 as a certain poet says (in a quotation that is pretty well known in 
 England, and therefore put down here in a new fashion). Why do 
 you laugh, forsooth ? Why do you not laugh ? If donkeys’ ears 
 are a matter of laughter, surely we may laugh at them when 
 growing on our own skulls. 
 
 Take a couple of instances from ‘ actual life ’ as the fashionable 
 novel-pufiers say. 
 
 A little, fat, silly woman, who in no country but this would 
 ever have pretensions to beauty, has lately set up a circulating 
 library in our street. She lends the five franc editions of the 
 English novels, as well as the romances of her own country, and I 
 have had several of the former works of fiction from her store : 
 Bulwer’s Night and Morning^ very pleasant, kind-hearted reading ; 
 Peter Priggins^ an astonishing work of slang, that ought to be 
 translated if but to give Europe an idea of what a gay young 
 
 A Frenchman, 
 
 An Ashantee, 
 
 A Hohenzollernsig- 
 
 is superior to all the rest 
 of the world ; 
 
 maringenite, etc. 
 
 Kui5 pL^rji ; fiVTaroj voofuve dr] tt] 
 ^a/3Xa vapparvp, 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 169 
 
 gentleman in England sometimes is ; and other novels never mind 
 what. But to revert to the fat woman. 
 
 She sits all day ogling and simpering behind her little counter ; 
 and from the slow, prim precise way in which she lets her silly 
 sentences slip through her mouth, you see at once that she is quite 
 satisfied with them, and expects that every customer should give 
 her an opportunity of uttering a few of them for his benefit. Going 
 there for a book, I always find myself entangled in a quarter of an 
 hour’s conversation. 
 
 This is carried on in not very bad French on my part; at 
 least I find that when I say something genteel to the library- 
 woman, she is not at a loss to understand me, and we have passed 
 already many minutes in this kind of intercourse. Two days since, 
 returning Night and Morning to the library-lady and demanding 
 the romance of Peter Priggins^ she ofiered me instead Ida^ par M. 
 le Vicomte Darlincourt, which I refused, having already experienced 
 some of his lordship’s works ; next she produced Stella^ Valida, 
 Eloa, by various French ladies of literary celebrity ; but again I 
 declined, declaring respectfully that however agreeable the society 
 of ladies might be, I found their works a little insipid. The fact 
 is, that after being accustomed to such potent mixtures as the 
 French romancers ofter you, the mild compositions of the French 
 romanceresses pall on the palate.^ 
 
 Madame j says I, to cut the matter short, ‘je ne demande 
 gviun roman Anglais, Peter P rig gins ; Vamz-vous2 oui on 
 non ? ’ 
 
 says the library -woman, Monsienr ne comiorend loas 
 
 noire langue, dest dommage.^ 
 
 Now one might, at first sight, fancy the above speech an 
 epigram, and not a bad one, on an Englishman’s blundering French 
 grammar and pronunciation ; but those who know the library-lady 
 must be aware that she never was guilty of such a thing in her life. 
 It was simply a French bull, resulting from the lady’s dulness, and 
 by no means a sarcasm. She uttered the words with a great air 
 of superiorit}^ and a prim toss of the head, as much as to say, 
 ‘ How much cleverer I am than you, you silly foreigner ! and what 
 a fine thing it is in me to know the finest language in the 
 world ! ’ In this way I have heard donkeys of our two countries 
 address foreigners in broken English or French, as if people 
 
 ^ In our own country, of course — Mrs. Trollope, Miss Mitford, Miss Pardoe, 
 Mrs. Charles Gore, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, Miss Stickney, Miss Barrett, 
 Lady Blessington, Miss Smith, Mrs. Austin, Miss Austin, etc. — form excep- 
 tions to this rule ; and glad am I to offer per favour of this note a humble 
 tribute of admiration to those ladies. 
 
170 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 who could not understand a language when properly spoken 
 could comprehend it when spoken ill. Why the deuce do people 
 give themselves these impertinent, stupid airs of superiority, 
 and pique themselves upon the great cleverness of speaking their 
 own language ? 
 
 Take another instance of this same egregious national conceit. 
 At the English pastry-cook’s — (you can’t readily find a prettier 
 or more graceful woman than Madame Colomhin, nor better plum- 
 cake than she sells) — at Madame Colombin’s, yesterday, a huge 
 Briton, with sandy whiskers and a double chin, was swallowing 
 patties and cherry-brandy, and all the while making remarks to a 
 friend similarly employed. They were talking about English and 
 French ships. 
 
 ‘ Hang me, Higgins,’ says Sandy whiskers, ‘ if Fd ever go into 
 one of their cursed French ships ! I should be afraid of sinking 
 at the very first puff of wind ! ’ 
 
 What Higgins replied does not matter. But think what a 
 number of Sandy whiskerses there are in our nation, — fellows who 
 are proud of this stupid mistrust, — who think it a mark of national 
 spirit to despise French skill, bravery, cookery, seamanship, and 
 what not. Swallow your beef and porter, you great, fat-paunched 
 man ; enjoy your language and your country, as you have been bred 
 to do ; but don’t fancy yourself, on account of these inheritances of 
 yours, superior to other people of other ways and language. You 
 have luck, perhaps, if you will, in having such a diet and dwelling 
 place, but no merit. . . . And with this little discursive essay 
 upon national prejudices, let us come back to the pictures, and 
 finish our walk through the gallery. 
 
 In that agreeable branch of the art for which we have I believe 
 no name, but which the French call genre^ there are at Paris 
 several eminent professors ; and as upon the French stage the 
 costume pieces are far better produced than with us, so also are 
 French costume-pictures much more accurately and characteristic- 
 ally handled than are such subjects in our own country. You do 
 not see Oimabue and Giotto in the costume of Francis the First, 
 as they appeared (depicted by Mr. Simpson, I think) in the Royal 
 Academy Exhibition of last year ; but the artists go to some 
 trouble for collecting their antiquarian stuff, and paint it pretty 
 scrupulously. 
 
 M. Jacquard has some pretty small pictures de genre ; a very 
 good one, indeed, of fat ‘ Monks granting Absolution from Fast- 
 ing ’ ; of which the details are finely and accurately painted, a 
 task more easy for a French artist than an English one, for the 
 former’s studio (as may be seen by a picture in this exhibition) is 
 
ON MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 171 
 
 generally a magnificent curiosity shop ; and for old carvings, 
 screens, crockery, armour, draperies, etc., the painter here has but 
 to look to his own walls, and copy away at his ease. Accordingly 
 Jacquard's monks, especially all the properties of the picture, are 
 admirable. M. Baron has ‘ The Youth of Ribera,' a merry 
 Spanish beggar-boy, among a crowd of his like, drawing sketches 
 of them under a garden wall. The figures are very prettily 
 thought and grouped ; there is a fine terrace and palace, and 
 statues in the background, very rich and luxurious ; perhaps too 
 pretty and gay in colours, and too strong in details. 
 
 But the king of the painters of small history subjects, is M. 
 Robert Fleury ; a great artist indeed, and I trust heartily he may 
 be induced to send one or two of his pieces to London, to show 
 our people what he can do. His mind, judging from his w^orks, is 
 rather of a gloomy turn ; and he deals somewhat too much, to my 
 taste, in the horrible. He has this year ‘ A Scene in the Inquisi- 
 tion.' A man is howling and writhing with his feet over a fire ; 
 grim inquisitors are watching over him ; and a dreadful 
 executioner, with fierce eyes peering from under a mysterious 
 capuchin, is doggedly sitting over the coals. The picture is down- 
 right horror, but admirably and honestly drawn; and in effect 
 rich, sombre, and simple. 
 
 ‘ Benvenuto Cellini ' is better still ; and the critics have 
 lauded the piece as giving a good idea of the fierce, fantastic 
 Florentine sculptor ; but I think M. Fleury has taken him in too 
 grim a mood, and made his ferocity too downright. There was 
 always a dash of the ridiculous in the man, even in his most 
 truculent moments ; and I fancy that such simple rage as is here 
 represented scarcely characterises him. The fellow never cut a 
 throat without some sense of humour, and here we have him 
 greatly too majestic, to my taste. 
 
 ‘ Old Michael Angelo watching over the Sick-bed of his servant 
 Urbino,' is a noble painting ; as fine in feeling as in design and 
 colour. One can't but admire in all these the manliness of the artist. 
 The picture is painted in a large, rich, massive, vigorous manner ; 
 and it is gratifying to see that this great man, after resolute seek- 
 ing for many years, has found the full use of his hand at last, and 
 can express himself as he would. The picture is fit to hang in the 
 very best gallery in the world ; and a century hence will no doubt 
 be worth five times as many crowns as the artist asks or has had 
 for it. 
 
 Being on the subject of great pictures, let us here mention — 
 
 712, ^Portrait of a Lady,' by Hippolyte Flandrin. 
 
172 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Of this portrait all I can say is, that if you take the best 
 portraits by the best masters — a head of Sebastian, or Michael 
 Angelo, a head of Raphael, or one of those rarer ones of Andrea 
 del Sarto — not one of them, for lofty character and majestic 
 nobleness and simplicity, can surpass this magnificent work. 
 
 This seems, doubtless, very exaggerated praise, and people 
 reading it may possibly sneer at the critic who ventures to speak 
 in such a way. To all such I say. Come and see it. You who 
 admire Sir Thomas and the Boole s of Becmty will possibly not 
 admire it ; you who give ten thousand guineas for a blowsy Murillo 
 will not possibly relish M. Flandrin’s manner ; but you who love 
 simplicity and greatness come and see how an old lady, with a 
 black mantilla and dark eyes, and grey hair and a few red fiowers 
 in her cap, has been painted by M. Flandrin of Lyons. If I were 
 Louis-Philippe, I would send a legion of honour cross, of the 
 biggest sort, to decorate the bosom of the painter who has executed 
 this noble piece. 
 
 As for portraits (with the exception of this one, which no man 
 in England can equal, not even Mr. Samuel Lawrence, who is 
 trying to get to this point, but has not reached it yet) our English 
 painters keep the lead still, nor is there much remarkable among 
 the hundreds in the gallery. There are vast numbers of English 
 faces staring at you from the canvases ; and among the miniatures 
 especially one canT help laughing at the continual recurrence of 
 the healthy, vacant, simpering, aristocratic English type. There 
 are black velvets and satins, ladies with birds of paradise, 
 deputies on sofas, and generals and marshals in the midst of smoke 
 and cannon-balls. Nothing can be less to my taste than a pot- 
 bellied, swaggering Marshal Soult, who rests his baton on his 
 stomach, and looks at you in the midst of a dim cloud of war. 
 The Duchess de Nemours is done by M. Winterhalter, and has 
 a place of honour, as becomes a good portrait ; and, above all, such 
 a pretty lady. She is a pretty, smiling, buxom blonde, with 
 plenty of hair, and rather too much hands, not to speak disrespect- 
 fully ; and a slice of lace which goes across the middle of her white 
 satin gown seems to cut the picture very disagreeably in two. 
 There is a beautiful head in a large portrait of a lad of eighteen, 
 painted by himself ; and here may be mentioned two single figures 
 in pastel by an architect, remarkable for earnest, siyirituel beauty ; 
 likewise two heads in chalk by De Rudder ; most charming 
 sketches, full of delicacy, grace and truth. 
 
 The only one of the acknowledged great who has exhibited this 
 year is M. Delacroix, who has a large picture relative to the siege of 
 Constantinople, that looks very like a piece of crumpled tapestry. 
 
O'R MEN AND PICTURES 
 
 173 
 
 but that has nevertheless its admirers and its merits, as what work 
 of his has not ? 
 
 His two smaller pieces are charming. ‘A Jewish Wedding at 
 Tangiers,’ is brilliant with light, and merriment ; a particular sort 
 of merriment, that is, that makes you gloomy in the very midst of 
 the hey-day : and his ‘ Boat ^ is awful. A score of shipwrecked 
 men are in this boat, on a great, wide, swollen, interminable sea 
 — no hope, no speck of sail — and they are drawing lots which 
 shall be killed and eaten. A burly seaman, with a red beard, has 
 just put his hand into the hat, and is touching his own to the 
 officer. One fellow sits with his hands clasped, and gazing — 
 gazing into the great void before him. By Jupiter, his eyes are 
 unfathomable ! he is looking at miles and miles of lead-coloured, 
 bitter, pitiless brine ! Indeed one can’t bear to look at him long ; 
 nor at that poor woman, so sickly and so beautiful, whom they 
 may as well kill at once, or she will save them the trouble of 
 drawing straws ; and give up to their maws that poor, white, 
 faded, delicate, shrivelled carcass. Ah, what a thing it is to be 
 hungry ! Oh, Eugenius Delacroix ! how can you manage with a 
 few paint-bladders, and a dirty brush, and a careless hand, to dash 
 down such savage histories as these, and fill people’s minds with 
 thoughts so dreadful ? Ay, there it is ; whenever I go through 
 that part of the gallery where M. Delacroix’s picture is, I always 
 turn away now, and look at a fat woman with a parroquet opposite. 
 For what’s the use of being uncomfortable ? 
 
 Another great picture is one of about four inches square — ‘ The 
 Chess-players ’ by M. Meissonnier — truly an astonishing piece of 
 workmanship. No silly tricks of effect and abrupt startling 
 shadow and light, but a picture painted with the minuteness and 
 accuracy of a daguerreotype, and as near as possible perfect in its 
 kind. Two men are playing at chess, and the chess-men are no 
 bigger than pin-heads ; every one of them an accurate portrait, 
 with all the light, shadow, roundness, character and colour, 
 belonging to it. 
 
 Of the landscapes it is very hard indeed to speak, for professors 
 of landscapes almost all execute their art well ; but few so well as 
 to strike one with especial attention or to produce much remark. 
 Constable has been a great friend to the new landscape-school in 
 France, who have laid aside the slimy weak manner formerly in 
 vogue, and perhaps have adopted in its place a method equally 
 reprehensible — that of plastering their pictures excessively. When 
 you wish to represent a piece of old timber, or a crumbling wall, 
 or the ruts and stones in a road, this impasting method is very 
 successful, but here the skies are trowelled on ; the light vapouring 
 
174 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 distances are as thick as plum-pudding, the cool clear shadows are 
 mashed- down masses of sienna and indigo. But it is un- 
 
 deniable that by these violent means a certain power is had, 
 and noon -day effects of strong sunshine are often dashingly 
 rendered. 
 
 How much pleasanter is it to see a little quiet grey waste of 
 David Cox than the very best and smartest of such works ! Some 
 men from Dusseldorf have sent very fine scientific faithful pictures, 
 that are a little heavy, but still you see that they are portraits 
 drawn respectfully from the great, beautiful, various, divine face 
 of Nature. 
 
 In the statue-gallery there is nothing worth talking about ; and 
 so let us make an end of the Louvre, and politely wish a good 
 morning to everybody. 
 
AN EXHIBITION GOSSIRi 
 
 By Michael Angelo Titmarsh. 
 
 In a Letter to Monsieur Guillaume, Peintre, a son Atelier, 
 Rue de Monsieur, Faubourg St. Germain, Paris. 
 
 Dear Guillaume, 
 
 Some of the dullest chapters that ever were written 
 in this world — viz., those on The History of Modern Enroy>e^ 
 by Russell, begin with an address to some imaginary young 
 friend, to whom the Doctor is supposed to communicate his 
 knowledge. ‘Dear John,^ begins he, quite affectionately, ‘I 
 take up my pen to state that the last of the Carlo vingians,’ — or, 
 ‘Dear John, I am happy to inform you, that the aspect of Europe 
 on the accession of Henry VIII. was so and so.’ In the same 
 manner, and in your famous Lettres d Sophie the history of the 
 heathen gods and goddesses is communicated to some possible 
 young lady ; and this simple plan has, no doubt, been adopted 
 because the authors wished to convey their information with the 
 utmost simplicity possible, and in a free, easy, honest, confidential 
 sort of a way. 
 
 This, (as usual), dear Guillaume, has nothing to do with the 
 subject in hand ; but I have ventured to place a little gossip con- 
 cerning the Exhibition, under an envelope inscribed with your 
 respectable name, because I have no right to adopt the editorial 
 and so implicate a host of illustrious authors, who give their 
 names and aid to Mr. Ainsworth’s magazine, in opinions that are 
 very likely not worth sixpence ; and because that simple upright 
 I, which often seems egotistical and presuming, is, I fancy, less 
 affected and pert than ‘ we ’ often is. ‘ I ’ is merely an individual ; 
 whereas ‘ we ’ is clearly somebody else. ‘ I ’ merely expresses an 
 opinion ; whereas ‘ we ’ at once lays down the law. 
 
 Pardon, then, the continued use of the personal pronoun, as I 
 am sure, my dear friend, you will ; because as you do not under- 
 stand a word of English, how possibly can you quarrel with my style? 
 
 ^ \^ Ainsworth' s Magazine , June, 1842.] 
 
176 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 We Rave often had great battles together on the subject of our 
 respective schools of art ; and having seen the two Exhibitions, I 
 am glad to be able to say that ours is the best this year, at least ; 
 though, perhaps, for many years past you have had the superiority. 
 We have more good pictures in our 1400, than you in your 3000 ; 
 among the good, we have more ver;i/ good, than you have this 
 year, (none nobler and better than the drawings of M. Decamps) ; 
 and though there are no such large canvases and ambitious 
 subjects as cover the walls of your salon, I think our painters 
 have more first-class pictures in their humble way. 
 
 They wisely, I think, avoid those great historical ‘ parades ^ 
 which cover so much space in the Louvre. A young man has 
 sometimes a fit of what is called ^ historical painting ^ ; comes out 
 with a great canvas, disposed in the regular six-feet heroical order ; 
 and having probably half ruined himself in the painting of his 
 piece, which nobody (let us be thankful for it !) buys, curses the 
 decayed state of taste in the country, and falls to portrait-painting, 
 or takes small natural subjects, in which the world can sympathise, 
 and with which he is best able to grapple. We have no govern- 
 ment museums like yours to furnish ; — no galleries in chief towns 
 of departments to adorn ; — no painted chapels, requiring fresh 
 supplies of saints and martyrs, which your artists do to order. 
 Art is a matter of private enterprise here, like everything else : 
 and our painters must suit the small rooms of their customers, 
 and supply them with such subjects as are likely to please them. 
 If you were to make me a present of half a cartoon, or a prophet 
 by Michael Angelo, or a Spanish martyrdom, I would turn the 
 picture against the wall. Such great things are only good for 
 great edifices, and to be seen occasionally ; — we want pleasant 
 pictures, that we can live with — something that shall be lively, 
 pleasing or tender, or sublime, if you will, but only of a moderate- 
 sized sublimity. Confess, if you had to live in a huge room with 
 ‘ The Last Judgment ’ at one end of it, and ‘ The Death of Ananias ’ 
 at the other, would not you be afraid to remain alone — or, at any 
 rate, long for a comfortable bare wall ? The world produces, now 
 and then, one of the great daring geniuses who make those 
 tremendous works of art ; but they come only seldom — and 
 Heaven be thanked for it ! We have had one in our country — ■ 
 John Milton by name. Honestly confess now, was there not a 
 fervour in your youth when you had a plan of an epic, or, at least, 
 of an heroic Michael-Angelesque picture ? The sublime rage fades 
 as one grows older and cooler ; and so the good, sensible, honest 
 English painters, for the most part, content themselves with doing 
 no more than they can. 
 
AK EXHIBITION GOSSIP 
 
 177 
 
 ti 
 
 But though we have no heroical canvases, it is not to be 
 inferred that we do not cultivate a humbler sort of high art ; and 
 you painters of religious subjects know, from the very subjects 
 which you are called upon to draw, that humility may be even 
 more sublime than greatness. For instance, there is in almost 
 everything Mr. Eastlake does (in spite of a little feebleness of 
 hand and primness of mannerism) a purity which is to us quite 
 angelical, so that we canT look at one of his jjictures without 
 being touched and purified by it. Mr. Mulready has an art, too, 
 which is not inferior, and though he commonly takes, like the 
 before-mentioned gentleman, some very simple, homely subject 
 to illustrate, manages to affect and delight one, as much as painter 
 can. Mr. Mulready calls his picture ‘ The Ford ’ ; Mr. Eastlake 
 styles his, ‘ Sisters.^ The ‘ Sisters ’ are two young ladies looking 
 over a balcony ‘ The Ford ’ is a stream, through which some boys 
 are carrying a girl ; and how is a critic to describe the beauty in 
 such subjects as these ? It would be easy to say these pictures 
 are exquisitely drawn, beautifully coloured, and so forth ; but that 
 is not the reason of their beauty : on the contrary, any man who 
 has a mind may find fault with the drawing and colouring of both. 
 Well, there is a charm about them seemingly independent of 
 drawing and colouring ; and what is it ? There’s no foot-rule that 
 I know of to measure it ; and the very wisest lecturer in art 
 might define and define, and be not a whit nearer the truth. I 
 can’t tell you why I like to hear a blackbird sing ; it is certainly 
 not so clever as a piping bullfinch. 
 
 I always begin with the works of these gentlemen, and look at 
 them oftenest and longest ; but that is only a simple expression 
 of individual taste, and by no means an attempt at laying down 
 the law, upon a subject which is quite out of the limits of all 
 legislation. Abetter critic might possibly (I say ‘ possibly,’ not 
 as regards the correctness of my own opinion, but the unquestion- 
 able merit of the two admirable artists above named), another 
 critic will possibly have other objects for admiration, and if such 
 a person were to say. Pause — before you award pre-eminence to 
 this artist or that, pause — for instance, look at these two Leslies, 
 can anything in point of esprit and feeling surpass them ? — indeed 
 the other critic would give very sound advice. Nothing can be 
 finer than the comedy of the Scene from Twelfth Night, more 
 joyous, frank, manly, laughter - moving ; — or more tender, and 
 grave, and nmf^ than the picture of Queen Catherine and her 
 attendant. The great beauty of these pieces is the total absence 
 of aftectation. The figures are in perfectly quiet, simple positions, 
 looking as if they were not the least aware of the spectator’s 
 
178 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 presence, (a rare quality in pictures, as I think, of which little 
 dramas, the actors, like those upon the living stage, have a great 
 love of ‘striking an attitude,^ and are always on the look-out for 
 the applause of the lookers-on,) whereas Mr. Leslie’s excellent 
 little troop of comedians know their art so perfectly, that it 
 becomes the very image of nature, and the best nature, too. 
 Some painters (skilled in the depicting of such knicknacks) over- 
 power their pieces with ‘ properties ’ — guitars, old armours, flower- 
 jugs, curtains and what not. The very chairs and tables in the 
 picture of Queen Catherine have a noble, simple arrangement about 
 them ; they look sad and stately, and cast great dreary shadows 
 — they will lighten up a little, doubtless, when the girl begins 
 to sing. 
 
 You and I have been in the habit of accusing one of the 
 cleverest painters of the country of want of poetry : no other than 
 Mr. Edwin Landseer, who, with his marvellous power of hand, a 
 sort of aristocrat among painters, has seemed to say — I care for 
 my dog and my gun ; I’m an English country gentleman, and 
 poetry is beneath me. He has made us laugh sometimes, when 
 he is in the mood, with his admirable humour, but has held off as 
 it were from poetic subjects, as a man would do who was address- 
 ing himself in a fine ball-room to a party of fine people, who would 
 stare if any such subjects were broached. I don’t care to own that 
 in former years those dogs, those birds, deer, wild-ducks, and so 
 forth, were painted to such a pitch of desperate perfection, as to 
 make me quite angry — elegant, beautiful, well-appointed, perfect 
 models for grace and manner ; they were like some of our English 
 dandies that one sees, and who never can be brought to pass the 
 limits of a certain polite smile, and decorous, sensible insipidity. 
 The more one sees them, the more vexed one grows, for, be 
 hanged to them, there is no earthly fault to find with them. This, 
 to be sure, is begging the question, and you may not be disposed 
 to allow either the correctness of the simile, or that dandies are 
 insipid, or that field-sports, or pictures thereof, can possibly be 
 tedious ; but, at any rate, it is a comfort to see that a man of 
 genius who is a poet iviU be one sometimes, and here are a couple 
 of noble poetical pieces from Mr. Landseer’s pencil. The ‘ Otter 
 and Trout ’ has something awful about it ; the hunted stag, pant- 
 ing through the water and startling up the vrild-fowl, is a beautiful 
 and touching poem. Oh, that these two pictures, and a few more 
 of different English artists, could be carried across the Channel — 
 say when Mr. Partridge’s portrait of the Queen goes, to act as a 
 counteri)oise to that work ! 
 
 A few Etties might likewise be put into the same box, and a 
 
AN EXHIBITION GOSSIP 
 
 179 
 
 few delightful golden landscapes of Callcott. To these I would 
 add Mr. Maclise's ‘ Hamlet/ about whose faults and merits there 
 have been some loud controversies ; but in every Exhibition for 
 the last five years, if you saw a crowd before a picture, it was 
 sure to be before his ; and with all the faults people found, no 
 one could go away without a sort of wonder at the prodigious 
 talent of this gentleman. Sometimes it was mere wonder ; in the 
 present Exhibition it is wonder and pleasure too ; and his picture 
 of Hamlet is by far the best, to my thinking, that the artist has 
 ever produced. If, for the credit of Old England (and I hereby 
 humbly beg Mr. Maclise to listen to the suggestion) it could be 
 transported to the walls of your mlon^ it would show French 
 artists, who are accustomed to sneer at the drawing of the English 
 school, that we have a man whose power of drawing is greater 
 than that of any artist among you, — of any artist that ever 
 lived, I should like to venture to say. An artist, possessing this 
 vast power of hand, often wastes it — as Paganini did, for instance 
 — in capriccios, and extravagances, and brilliant feats of skill, as 
 if defying the world to come and cope with him. The picture of 
 the play in ‘ Hamlet ^ is a great deal more, and is a noble poetic 
 delineation of the awful story. Here I am obliged to repeat, for 
 the tenth time in this letter, how vain it is to attempt to describe 
 such works by means of pen and ink. Fancy Hamlet, ungartered, 
 lying on the ground, looking into the very soul of King Claudius, 
 who writhes under the play of Gonzago. Fancy the Queen, per- 
 plexed and sad, (she does not know of the murder), and poor 
 Ophelia, and Polonius, with his staff, pottering over the tragedy ; 
 and Horatio, and all sorts of knights and ladies, looking wonder- 
 ing on. Fancy, in the little threatre, the King asleep ; a lamp in 
 front casts a huge forked fantastic shadow over the scene — a 
 shadow that looks like a horrible devil in the background that is 
 grinning and aping the murder. Fancy ghastly flickering tapestries 
 of Cain and Abel on the walls, and all this painted with the 
 utmost force, truth and dexterity — fancy all this, and then you 
 will have not the least idea of one of the most startling, wonderful 
 pictures that the English school has ever produced. 
 
 Mr. Maclise may l3e said to be at the head of the young men ; 
 and though you and I, my dear Guillaume, are both old, and 
 while others are perpetually deploring the past, I think it is a 
 consolation to see that the present is better, and to argue that 
 the future will be better still. You did not give up David with- 
 out a pang, and still think Baron Gerard a very wonderful fellow. 
 I can remember once, when Westall seemed really worth looking 
 at, when a huge black exaggeration of Northcote or Opie struck 
 
180 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 me as mighty fine, and Mr. West seemed a most worthy President 
 of our Academy. Confess now that the race who succeeded them 
 did better than they ; and indeed the young men, if I may he 
 permitted to hint such a thing, do better still — not better than 
 individuals — for Eastlake, Mulready, Etty, Leslie, are exhibitors 
 of twenty years^ standing, and the young men may live a thousand 
 years and never surpass them ; but a finer taste is more general 
 among them than existed some thirty years back, and a purer, 
 humbler, truer love of nature. Have you seen ‘ The Deserted 
 Village- of the ‘Etching ClubT What charming feeling and 
 purity is there among most of the designs of these young painters, 
 and what a credit are they to the English school ! 
 
 The designers of the ‘ Etching Club ’ seem to form a little knot 
 or circle among themselves ; and though the names of Cope, 
 Eedgrave, Herbert, Stone, have hardly reached you as yet in 
 France, they will be heard of some day even there, where your 
 clever people, who can appreciate all sorts of art, will not fail to 
 admire the quiet, thoughtful, pious, delicate feeling which 
 characterises the works of this charming little school. All Mr. 
 Cope’s pictures, though somewhat feeble in hand, are beautifully 
 tender and graceful. ‘ The Hawthorn Bush, with seats beneath 
 the shade, for talking age and whispering lovers made,’ is a 
 beautiful picture for colour, sentiment and composition. The old 
 people, properly garrulous, talking of old times, or the crops, or 
 the Doctor’s sermon ; the lovers — a charming pair — loving with 
 all their souls, kind, hearty, and tender. The Schoolmaster of 
 one of his other pictures is an excellent awful portrait of Gold- 
 smith’s pedagogue. Mr. Redgrave’s ‘ Cinderella ’ is very pleasant, 
 his landscape beautiful. Mr. Stone’s ‘ Advice ’ is full of tender 
 sentiment, and contains some frank, excellent painting ; but how 
 vapid all such comments appear, and how can you, on the banks 
 of the Seine, understand from these sort of vague, unsatisfactory 
 praises, what are the merits or demerits of the pieces spoken 
 about ! 
 
 We have here a delightful, artist, Mr. Webster by name, 
 who has taken little boys under his protection, and paints them 
 in the most charming comic way — in that best sort of comedy 
 which makes one doubt whether to laugh or to cry. His largest 
 picture this year represents two boys bound for school. Break- 
 fast is hurried over (a horrid early breakfast) ; the trunk is 
 packed ; papa is pulling on his boots ; there is the coach coming 
 down the hill, and the guard blowing his pitiless horn. All the 
 little girls are gathered round their brothers ; the elder is munch- 
 ing a biscuit, and determined to be a man ; but the younger, 
 
AN EXHIBITION GOSSIP 
 
 181 
 
 whom the little sister of all has got hold of by the hand, can’t 
 bear the parting, and is crying his eyes out. 
 
 I quarrel with Mr. Webster for making one laugh at the boy, 
 and giving him a comic face. I say no man who has experienced 
 it, has a right to laugh at such a sorrow. Did you ever, in 
 France, look out for the diligence that was to take you to school, 
 and hear a fatal conducteur blowing his horn as you waited by 
 the hill side — as you waited with the poor mother, turning her 
 eyes away — and slowly got off the old pony, which you were not 
 to see for six months — for a century — for a thousand miserable 
 years again ? Oh, that first night at school ! those bitter, bitter 
 tears at night, as you lay awake in the silence, poor little lonely 
 boy, yearning after love and home. Life has sorrows enough, 
 God knows, but, I swear, none like that ! I was thinking about 
 all this as I looked at Mr. Webster’s picture, and behold it turned 
 itself into an avenue of lime-trees, and a certain old stile that led 
 to a stubble-field ; and it was evening, about the 1 4th of 
 September, and after dinner (how that last glass of wine used to 
 choke and burn in the throat !) and presently, a mile off, you 
 heard, horribly distinct, the whirring of the well-known Defiance 
 coach wheels. It was up in a moment — the trunk on the roof ; 
 and — bah ! from that day I can’t bear to see mothers and 
 children parting. 
 
 This, to be sure, is beside the subject ; but pray let Mr. 
 Webster change the face of his boy. 
 
 Letters (except from young ladies to one another) are not 
 allowed to go beyond a certain decent length ; hence, though I 
 may have a fancy to speak to you of many score of other good 
 pictures, out of the fourteen hundred here exhibited, there are 
 numbers which w^e must pass over without any notice whatever. 
 It is hard to pass by Mr. Kichmond’s beautiful water-colour 
 figures, without a word concerning them ; or Mr. Charles Land- 
 seer’s capital picture of ‘ Ladies and Cavaliers ’ ; or not to have at 
 least half a page to spare, in order to make an onslaught upon Mr. 
 Chalon and his ogling beauties : he has a portrait of Mdlle. 
 Kachel, quite curious for its cleverness and unlikeness, and one of 
 the most chaste and refined of our actresses, Mrs. Charles Kean, 
 who is represented as a killing coquette ; and so Mr. Kean may 
 be thankful that the portrait does not in the least resemble his 
 lady. 
 
 There is scarce any need to say that the oil portrait-painters 
 maintain their usual reputation and excellence : Mr. Briggs, Mr. 
 Pickersgill, Mr. Grant, show some excellent canvases : the latter’s 
 ladies are beautiful, and his ‘ Lord Cardigan ’ a fine painting and 
 
182 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 portrait ; Mr. Briggs’ ‘ Archbishop ’ is a noble head and picture ; 
 Mr. Pickersgill has, among others, a full-length of a Navy Captain, 
 very fine ; Mr. Linneirs portraits are very fine ; and Mr. S. 
 Lawrence has one (the Attorney-General), excellently drawn, and 
 fine in character. This year’s picture of her Majesty is intended 
 for your Majesty, Louis Philippe — perhaps the French court might 
 have had a more favourable representation of the Queen. There 
 is only one ^Duke of Wellington’ that I have remarked — (indeed 
 it must be a weary task to the good-natured and simple old 
 nobleman to give up to artists the use of his brave face, as he is 
 so often called upon to do) — at present he appears in a group of 
 red-coated brethren in arms, called the ‘ Heroes of Waterloo.’ 
 The picture from the quantity of requisite vermilion, was most 
 difficult to treat, but is cleverly managed, and the likeness very 
 good. All the Avarriors assembled are smiling, to a man ; and in 
 the background is a picture of Napoleon, who is smiling too — 
 and this is surely too great a stretch of good-nature. 
 
 What can I say of the Napoleon of Mr. Turner, called (with 
 frightful satire) the ^ Exile and the Rocldimpet ’ ? He stands in 
 the midst of a scarlet tornado, looking at least forty feet high. 
 
 Ah ! says the mysterious poet, from whom Mr. Turner loves to 
 quote, — 
 
 Ah ! thy tent-formed shell is like 
 The soldier’s nightly bivouac, alone 
 
 Amidst a sea of blood 
 
 hut you can join your comrades. 
 
 Fallacies of Hope. 
 
 These remarkable lines entirely explain the meaning of the 
 picture ; another piece is described by lines from the same poem, 
 in a metre more regular : — 
 
 The midnight-torch gleam’d o’er the steamer’s side 
 And merit’s corse was yielded to the tide. 
 
 When the pictures are re-hung, as sometimes I believe is the 
 case, it might perhaps be as well to turn these upside down, and 
 see how they would look then; the Campo Santo of Venice, when 
 examined closely, is scarcely less mysterious ; at a little distance, 
 however, it is a most brilliant, airy, and beautiful picture. 0 for 
 the old days, before Mr. Turner had lighted on ‘ The Fallacies,’ and 
 could see like other people ! 
 
 Other landscape-painters, not so romantic, are, as usual, ex- 
 cellent. You know Mr. Stanfield and Mr. Roberts, in France, as 
 well as I do : I wish one day you could see the beauty, fresh 
 English landscapes of Lee and Creswick, where you can almost see 
 
AN EXHIBITION GOSSIP 
 
 183 
 
 the dew on the fresh grass, and trace the ripple of the water, and 
 the whispering in the foliage of the cool wholesome wind. 
 
 There is not an inch more room in the paper ; and a great deal 
 that was to be said about the Water-colour Societies and Suffolk 
 Street must remain unsaid for ever and ever. But I wish you 
 could see a drawing by Miss Setchel, in the Junior Water-colour 
 Society, and a dozen by Mr. Absolon, which are delightful in grace 
 and expression, and in tender, pathetic humour. 
 
 M. A. T. 
 
LETTEES ON THE FINE AETS.^ 
 
 No. 1 . — The Aet Unions. 
 
 From M. A. Titmarsh^ Fsq., to Sanders McGilp, Fsq, 
 
 My deae Sandees, 
 
 I have always had the highest confidence in your judgment, 
 and am therefore pretty certain that your picture is one of 
 vast merit. The value, you say, is two hundred guineas, and 
 you have, I hope, with laudable prudence, induced your relatives, 
 your grandmother, your confiding aunts, the tradesmen with 
 whom you have little accounts, and the friends with whom you 
 are occasionally kind enough to go and dine, to subscribe to the 
 Art Union, in hopes that one or other of them may gain the 
 principal prize, when your taste as well as their friendship (and 
 where can friendship be better bestowed ?) will induce them to 
 purchase your work. To your relatives affection alone would 
 dictate the acquisition of your picture ; to your tradesmen you 
 offer, if possible, a still stronger inducement. ‘ I owe you £40,’ 
 you can say to Mr. Snip, your respected tailor : ‘ I cannot pay 
 those £40 ; but gain the first prize, and you have my picture for 
 two hundred guineas, which, in reality, is worth five hundred, 
 plus the payment of your bill, the amount of wdiich you can 
 deduct from the sum due to myself.’ Thus Mr. Snip gets 
 
 A picture (valued at 500 guineas) . 
 
 . £525 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 The payment of his bill 
 
 . 40 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 And costs of Writ 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 0 
 
 
 £567 
 
 2 
 
 0 
 
 in return for a single sovereign subscribed to the Union. 
 
 The advantage of Art Unions has never before, I believe, been 
 considered in this light ; and if every artist would but go round 
 to his tradesmen and represent to them the truth as here laid 
 down, no doubt great numbers of additional patrons would be 
 found for the noble art you practise. 
 
 ^ [The Pictorial Times^ March 18, 1843. 
 
 184 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 185 
 
 How many a man, for instance, has not one, but half-a-dozen 
 tailors in the category in which I have placed Mr. Snip. Well, 
 let them all subscribe ; — the more the merrier. ‘ If one win, 
 gentlemen,’ you say, ^remember I am in a condition to pay all the 
 rest their accounts.’ And thus is an interest for Art brought 
 home to the bosoms and boards of six deserving families. 
 
 Is, or is not, the principle a good one ? Are, or are not, trades- 
 men to be paid? Are, or are not, artists to be well-clothed? 
 And would, or would not, the diffusion of their divine science 
 enlarge the heart and soften the rude manners of the million? 
 What, on this head, does Hesiod observe? The Teian bard 
 nobly remarks, — 
 
 Ivyevvas bibiKLcrcre (pcdrjXLrep apT7]S, 
 
 UpLoWir pL(sJpT]S V€K aLVLT 6(7(76 06/)WS. 
 
 And if the principle he a good one, I say it should be universal. 
 Say (as an encouragement) to the collector who comes for your 
 rate, ‘ I’ll pay you if you take a ticket in the Art Union ! ’ 
 Remark to your butcher, in a pleasant way, ‘ Mr. Brisket, I 
 desire from you, for your own advantage, one stake more.’ 
 
 ‘ From the loin, or where ? ’ says he. 
 
 ‘No,’ say you, laughingly interrupting him, ‘a stake in the 
 Art Union J 
 
 And point out to your washerwoman what an ennobling and 
 glorious thing it would be — a holy effluence, a bright and beam- 
 ing radiance woven into the dark chain of her existence, — (or 
 other words of might and poesy suited to her capacity), point out 
 — I say, what a pleasure it would be to her to be able to exclaim, 
 ‘ I wash Mr. McGilp’s shirts — and look ! one of his five hundred 
 guinea master-pieces hangs yonder, over my mangle.’ 
 
 It is in his power, it is in anybody’s power. The very Malay 
 sweeper who shivers at the corner of your street, and acts as your 
 model, may easily save money enough to take a ticket, and have 
 his portrait, as Othello, to decorate his humble place of abode. 
 
 You may fancy, my friend, that there is some caricature in 
 this, and possibly you are right. You will never stoop to Mr. 
 Snip in the manner pointed out by me ; you are above entreating 
 your washerwoman, cutting jokes with your butcher, or cajoling 
 the respectable gentleman who calls for your contributions once a 
 quarter. Art, say you, is above paltry speculation and mean 
 ideas of gain. An artist never stoops to intrigue, nor chaffers for 
 money. He is the priest of nature, called to worship at her 
 glorious altar, by special vocation ; one chosen out of the million, 
 and called up to the high places; in short, you will make a 
 
186 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 speech, crammed with fine words, proving your disinterestedness, 
 and the awful poetical nature of your calling. 
 
 Psha ! my good friend, let us have no more of this stale talk. 
 You are a tradesman as well as my lord on the woolsack, or Mr. 
 Smith selling figs, or General Sones breathing freely and at his 
 ease in an atmosphere of cannon-balls. You each do your duty 
 in your calling, and according to your genius, but you want to be 
 paid for what you do. You want the best pay, and the greatest 
 share of reputation you can get. You will do nothing dishonest 
 in the pursuit of your trade ; but will you not yield a little ‘ to 
 the exigencies of the public service ’ ? General Sones, though he 
 may have his own opinion of the Chinese war, will attack 
 mandarins without mercy ; my Lord Chancellor has pleaded many 
 a queer cause before he reposed on yonder woolsack ; Smith has 
 had recourse to many little harmless tricks to get a sale for his 
 figs and treacle ; and you (as I take it) are not a whit better than 
 they. Did you ever paint a lady handsomer in her j^ortrait than 
 nature made her? Did you ever, when your immense genius 
 panted to be at work on some vast historical piece, crush your 
 aspirations so far as to sit down and depict a plain gentleman in 
 a buff waistcoat and a watch-chain, for the sake of the twenty 
 guineas which were to be elicited from his ample pepper-and-salt 
 pantaloons? You have done all this, and were quite right in 
 doing it, too. How else are the little McGilps to get their 
 dinners, or your lady the means of discharging her weekly bills ? 
 
 And now you will begin, I trust, to perceive that the ridicule 
 cast upon the Art Union system in the first sentences of this letter 
 is not in reality so very severe ; it is the sort of sneering language 
 which the enemies of those establishments are in the habit of 
 indulging in, though expressed as high, no doubt you will think in 
 a far more satiric and witty manner than most of the anti-TJnionists 
 have at command. 
 
 Hear, for instance. The Athenceum. ‘ So early,’ says that 
 journal, ‘as 1837, we put on record our opinion that the Art 
 Union would and must of necessity tend to the still further 
 degradation of Art. Any man,’ we observed, ‘who purchases 
 pictures may be presumed to have a love for, and this will in the 
 end generate a knowledge of. Art. But there will be many 
 subscribers who desire only a little gambling — to risk a pound for 
 the sake of winning a hundred — and who would quite as soon join 
 in a raffle for a horse, or a snuff-box, or a pipe of port wine, as for 
 a picture. The motive of the subscriber is of no consequence, so 
 long as others have to dispose of the money ; but the Art Union 
 proposes that each subscriber ‘shall select for himself.’ Now, is 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 187 
 
 it not certain that such patronage must tend to degrade Art 
 The scheme may be beneficial to the lowest class of artists, but 
 utterly ruinous to Art itself. When every individual, be he whom 
 he may, is allowed to follow his own judgment in the disposal of 
 his prize-money, the best results can be but an irresponsible 
 indulgence of individual whim and caprice — the worst and certain 
 in the degradation of Art. Men who paint to live, instead of 
 working with all their power, be it more or less, up to the best 
 and highest judgments, must solicit the sweet voices of the unin- 
 formed, the chance prize-holders and therefore purchasers of the 
 Art Unions.’ 
 
 So writes The Athenceum^ and you will at once perceive the 
 truth of my previous assertion : — l.That The Athenceum^s arguments 
 resemble those employed at the commencement of this letter. 2. 
 That the arguments at the beginning of this letter are far more 
 cleverly and wickedly put. 
 
 Let us now proceed to demolish the one and the other, and we 
 will, if you please, take the dicta of The Athenceum in the 
 first place into consideration. 
 
 ‘ Every man (says The Athenceum) who purchases pictures, may 
 be presumed to have a love for, and this will in the end generate 
 a knowledge of. Art.’ 
 
 ‘ But this Art Union is joined by many for the sake of gambling, 
 and who would quite as soon join in a raffle for a horse, or a snufi- 
 box, or a pipe of port wine, as for a picture.’ 
 
 Why quite as soon ? A man who wants a pipe of port wine 
 does not, we presume, raffle for a horse ; or being eagerly desirous 
 of a snuff-mull, he does not raffle for a pipe of port wine. There 
 are certainly in the world many ‘uninformed’ persons, as the 
 insinuating Athenceum remarks ; let us say at once there are fools, 
 but not such tremendous fools as our misanthropic contemporary 
 would discover. No, no. A man raffles for a horse, because the 
 dealers or the knackers will give him a price for it, or because his 
 wife wishes to be driven out in a gig, or because he has a mind to 
 cut a dash in the ring. A man raffles for a gold snuff-box, 
 because he is fond of Macabaw, or because he likes to sport such 
 a box after dinner, or because he wishes to make it a present to 
 Mr. Boys when he brings out any more of his relatives’ lithographs, 
 or for some other simple and equally apparent reason. And so 
 for a pipe of port wine, a man risks his money in order to gain it, 
 because he likes port wine, or because he can sell it, or because he 
 wishes to present a few dozens to a friend. I wish, for my part, 
 I had a friend who desired to dispose of either of the three articles ; 
 but that is a mere personal ejaculation, and nothing to the point. 
 
188 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 The point is that a man bids money for a horse, because he wants 
 it ; for a picture, because he would like to have a picture. 
 Common charity must admit so much good sense in the world. 
 Well, then, it is granted that a man joins in a raffle for a set of 
 pictures because he is interested in pictures ; that is, he may he 
 presumed to have a love for Art, And a love for Art, in the end, 
 says The Athenaeum,^ will generate a knowledge of Art. Amen. 
 In that case the excellence of Art Unions is established at once. 
 
 But no, says the philosopher who argues every week from 
 under the columns of the temple of Minerva ; this love which 
 generates knowledge is only conceded to men who purchase pictures, 
 not to those who raffle for them ! Is not this a little hard ? How 
 much income tax must a man pay in order to have a decent love 
 of Art ; a love that shall be potent enough to become the father of 
 a future knowledge ? 
 
 I may say, without exaggeration, that Sir Eobert Peel is richer 
 than I am ; but does it follow that he loves Art better ? It may 
 be, or not ; but at least the right honourable baronet’s income 
 does not establish the superiority of his taste. Let any gentleman 
 go into a pastry-cook’s, and eat raspberry tarts ; ten to one, pressed 
 against the window of the shop you will see the blue nose of a penni- 
 less urchin, who is looking at the good things with all his might. 
 Would one say that Dives, because he eats the tarts, loved them 
 better than the little Lazarus who yearned after them ? No, even 
 The Athenceum would not say that; the cruel, cruel Athenaeum. 
 
 Now, suppose that round that shop-window, and allured by the 
 same charming prospect which has brought their comrade thither, 
 other little Lazaruses should assemble : they love tarts ; they are 
 penniless ; but still not altogether without coin. Say they have 
 a farthing apiece ; and clubbing together their wealth, or poverty 
 rather, these rascally young gamblers made a lottery in the cap of 
 one of them, and what is the consequence ? the winner of the prize 
 steps in and takes a raspberry tart from the very same tray at 
 which great Dives himself has been gormandising. It is gambling, 
 certainly ; but I suspect the pastry-cook (considering its result) 
 will look upon the crime rather justly — she might never have sold 
 her wares but for that TART UNION. 
 
 I shall resume this subject next week with philosophical con- 
 siderations upon Polytechnic Societies, upon the lunar prospectus 
 (or that of Mr. Moon), and upon the puerile distribution (or that 
 of Mr. Boys). 
 
 Meanwhile, dear McGilp, I remain, 
 
 Your very humble servant, 
 
 Michael Angelo Titmaksh. 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 189 
 
 No. 2. — The Objections against Art Unions.^ 
 
 M, A. Titmarsh^ Usq., to Sanders McGilp^ Esq, 
 
 My dear Sanders, 
 
 The Tart Union alluded to last week has been appreciated ; 
 and I am given to understand that several young gentlemen 
 about Covent Garden and the foundation colleges in the City 
 (where the youthful students wear leather breeches and green 
 coats, and caps famous for their similarity in shape to the muffin) 
 have put the scheme into practice, and are very eager in borrowing 
 or begging farthings for the pastry-cook's interest and their own. 
 
 That the scheme will benefit the former is clear ; and should 
 any of them be inclined, by way of gratitude, to forward to the 
 office of the paper a ^yroof plate of their tarts, there are several 
 juvenile persons about the premises who will gladly give an 
 opinion of their merits. 
 
 One of the union or distribution schemes mentioned in our last 
 has forwarded proofs of its claims to public favour, proofs of its 
 puffs, we would say, but that is a pun, and the truth must be 
 told, let what will come of it, and we are now solemnly met, my 
 brave McGilp, to discuss it. The fact is that the goodness or 
 badness of the prints in question does not, at least for the sake 
 of the argument, matter a fig. Suppose a man (by means of the 
 electrotype, of course) were enabled to produce a series of copies 
 of Mr. Catnach's ballads, and charge a guinea, two guineas — a 
 thousand pounds ; three farthings, for whitey-brown proofs of the 
 same. He is quite free to do so. Nobody need buy unless they 
 like. Or suppose he could (always by means of the electrotype) 
 produce India paper proof plates of all the cartoons, and sell 
 them for a halfpenny ? He is quite as much at liberty to do the 
 one as the other ; and I do believe that the reason of fair dealing 
 and moderate prices in the world has been not so much the 
 honesty as the selfishness of our nature. We sell cheap, because 
 no one will buy else. We are honest because no one ivill trust 
 us unless they can trust us. 
 
 In a doubtful commerce with few concurrents and uncertain 
 gains, men do not unfrequently cheat. But competition hustles 
 roguery pretty quickly out of the market ; the swaggering, 
 swindling, lying imposter has no chance against the burly good 
 sense of the public. 
 
 And I must confess, for my part, that if a man has a thirty- 
 ^ \The Pictorial Times, April 1, 8, 1848.] 
 
190 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 guinea watch to raffle for, and thirty persons are willing to 
 subscribe so much amongst them, and try the chance of winning 
 it, I see no much greater harm in this ‘ union ’ than in many 
 other speculations where (of course) chances exist of losing or 
 winning. But to moralise on the Art Union case because of this 
 harmless peddling with guineas, and to say that it provokes a 
 spirit of gambling, is too hard. Is it altogether sinful to play a 
 rubber of whist at shilling points ? Does it imply an abominable 
 desire of gain and a frightful perversion in the individual who 
 bets half- a -crown on the rubber? Are we basely cast down 
 because we lose, or brutally exultant because we win half-a-score 
 of shillings ? If it be a deadly sin, heaven help our grandfathers 
 and grandmothers, who played cards every night of their lives, 
 and must be anything but comfortable now. But let us hope 
 that with regard to the criminality of the proceeding The 
 Aihenmum is wrong. Many of us have tried a raffle at Margate, 
 and slept no worse for it. Once, at school, I drew lots with two 
 other boys, and the prize was a flogging ; and it does not much 
 matter which of us won ; but the others were not very sorry 
 about it, depend on that. No ; let this harmless little sin pass. 
 As long as it provokes no very evil passions, as long as the 
 pleasure of winning is great, and the pain of losing small, let 
 gentlemen and ladies have their sport, and bet their bet, and our 
 moralists not altogether despair. You cannot say that the Art 
 Union supporters are actuated by a violent or unwholesome love 
 of gambling ; they don’t injure their properties by the subscription 
 of their guinea ; they don’t absent themselves from home, contract 
 dissipated habits, bring their wives and families to ruin. They 
 give a guinea, and are not much the better or the worse for the 
 outlay. This is an encouragement of lotteries. The Athenceum 
 may say, presently ; but indeed the objection is not worth a fig. 
 
 The old lotteries were undisguised robberies. The Art Unions 
 are none. The old lotteries lived upon atrocious lies and puffs, 
 encouraged silly people with exaggerated notions of gain. The 
 Art Union offers but to purchase pictures with the aggregate of 
 your money, and to distribute the pictures so bought. There are 
 no falsehoods told, and no absurd lying baits held out. A country 
 book-club is a lottery, a wicked gambling transaction in which 
 squires and parsons take a part. A house or life assurance 
 is a lottery. You take the odds there to win in a certain 
 event ; and may by very strait-laced moralists be accused 
 of ‘ gambling,’ for so providing against fortune; but the Parlia- 
 ment has sanctioned this gambling, and the state draws a 
 considerable profit from it. An underwriter gambles when he 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 191 
 
 insures a ship ; calculating that he has a profit on the chances. 
 A man gambles when he buys stock to sell afterwards, or a 
 newspaper, or a house, or any other commodity, upon which 
 profit or loss may accrue. In the latter cases, perhaps, he 
 gambles as he does at whist, knowing himself to be a good 
 player, and trusting to skill and chance for his success. But in 
 the former cases, the underwriter of the ship or house has no 
 security ; it is sheer luck ; dependent on a fire or a gale of wind, 
 with the pull of the chances in his favour. 
 
 In a commercial country, then, where there is so much 
 authorised gambling for profit, a little gambling for mere amuse- 
 ment’s and kindness’s sake may be tolerated. Let it be allowed, 
 at any rate, that there is no great criminality in the Art Union 
 species of gambling ; and so quietly pass over the moral objection 
 to the scheme. Then there has been lately mooted in the papers 
 a legal objection ; but that is not a very frightful one. Both of 
 the learned gentlemen who have been consulted and have pro- 
 nounced for and against Art Unions have allowed that there is no 
 danger of prosecution, and that poor bugbear will frighten honest 
 folks no more. 
 
 But the strong objection is that on the part of some artists of 
 the old school, who say that the Art Union system deteriorates 
 Art ; that it sets painters speculating upon fancy pieces, to suit 
 the taste of the prize-holders ; that they think this will be a 
 taking two-hundred guinea subject, or that a neat gaudy piece 
 that will be sure to hook something ; and they paint accordingly. 
 
 Now, let any man who has looked at English picture-galleries 
 for the last ten or twenty years be called upon to say from his 
 heart, whether there has not been a great, a noble, improvement ? 
 — whether there is not infinitely more fancy, feeling, poetry, 
 education, among artists as a body now than then ? Good 
 Heavens ! if they do paint what are called subjects^ what is the 
 harm ? If people do like fancy pieces, where is the great evil ? 
 If I have no fancy to have my own portrait staring me in the 
 face in the dining-room, and would rather have Mr. Stone’s ‘ one 
 particular star,’ for instance (and it is a charming picture), am I 
 such a degraded wretch ? This is but cant on the part of 
 humbugs on the one side, and on the other the ultra-ticklishness 
 of too susceptible minds. 
 
 What does the charge amount to ? That the artist tries by 
 one means or other to consult the taste of the public. The 
 public is ignorant ; therefore its choice is bad ; therefore the 
 artists paint bad pictures ; therefore the taste grows worse and 
 worse ; therefore the public grows worse and worse ; therefore 
 
192 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 the public and the artist are degraded by a desperate, helpless, 
 arithmetical progression, out of which, as one fancies, there is no 
 escape. 
 
 But look what the real state of the case is, as it has been 
 recited by a. weekly paper {The Age) — that, too, moans over the 
 degeneracy of its namesake, and prophesies a most pathetic future 
 for Englishmen, because they have been lately seized with a love 
 for illustrated books. First, says The Age^ came The Observer^ 
 with its picture of ThurtelPs Cottage, then The Hive^ then The 
 Mirror^ then this and that, then The Illustrated London News^ 
 then The Pictorial Times, Well, apres ? as the French say. 
 The Hive was better than ThurtelPs Cottage, The Alirror was 
 better than The Ilive^ The News better than The Mirror,, and The 
 Times better than The Neivs^ and (though The Times readers may 
 fancy the thing impossible) the day will come when something shall 
 surpass even The Times^ and so on to the infinity of optimism. 
 And so with pictures as with prints. The public is not used to 
 having the former yet ; but wait awhile and it will take them ; 
 and take them better and better every day. The commercial 
 energy of our hearty country is such that where there is a small 
 demand dealers well know how to raise it to a great one ; and 
 raise fresh wmnts by fresh supplies ingeniously insinuated and by 
 happy inventions in advance. As to GENIUS, that is not to be 
 spoken of in this way ; but genius is rare ; it conies to us but 
 once in many, many years ; and do you think the genius of 
 painting less likely to flourish in our country because people are 
 buying (by means of these Art Unions) five hundred little fancy 
 pictures per annum, in addition to the ten thousand portraits 
 they bought before ? 
 
 As for aristocratic patronage of Art only, let us ask in what 
 state was Art before Art Unions began ? Did artists complain or 
 not ? Did they say that there was no opportunity to cultivate 
 their poetical feelings, and that they must paint portraits to live ? 
 I am sure the people of England are likely to be better patrons of 
 art than the English aristocracy ever were, and that the aristocracy 
 have been tried and didnH patronise it ; that they neither knew 
 how to value a picture nor an artist ; what artist ever got so good 
 a place as a tenth-rate lawyer, or as a hundredth-rate soldier, or as 
 a lucky physician, or as an alderman who had made a good 
 speculation, or a country squire who had a borough ? The aris- 
 tocracy never acknowledged the existence of Art in this country, 
 for they never acknowledged the artist. They were the hand- 
 somest men and women in the world, and they had their simpering 
 faces j)ainted, but what have they done for Art to honour it ? No, 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 193 
 
 no ; they are not the friends of genius. That day is over ; its 
 friends lie elsewhere ; rude and uncultivated as yet, but hearty, 
 generous, and eager. It may put up with rough fare ; but it can’t 
 live in ante-chambers with lackeys, eating my lord’s broken meat ; 
 equality is its breath, and symjoathy the condition of its existence. 
 What sympathy did my lords ever give it? No; the law, the 
 sword, the alderman’s consols, the doctor’s pill, they can stomach ; 
 they can reconcile these to their lordly nature, and infuse them 
 into their august body. But the poet had best come lower. 
 What have their lordships to do with him ? He has never been 
 one of their intimates. In the old song of Schiller, Love bids the 
 poet, now that the earth is partitioned among the strong and 
 wealthy, to come to Heaven in his distress, in which there will 
 always be a place for him ; but he has to try the people yet — the 
 weak and poor ; and they whose union makes their strength, 
 depend on it, have a shelter and a welcome for him. 
 
 And so (though the taste of the public might be better than it 
 is now, of which there is no question) I think we have every right 
 to hope that it will be better. There are a thousand men read 
 and think to-day, for one who read on this same day of April, 
 1743. The poet and artist is called upon to appeal to the few 
 no longer. His profit and fame are with the many ; and do not 
 let it be thought irreverence to put the profit and fame together. 
 Nobody ever denies the Duke of Wellington’s genius, because his 
 Grace receives twenty thousand a year from his country in gratitude 
 for the services by him ; and if the nation should take a fancy to 
 reward poets in the same way, we have similarly no right to 
 quarrel with the verdict. 
 
 The dukedoms, twenty-thousands-a-year, Piccadilly-palaces, and 
 the like, are not, however, pleaded for here. Miss Coutts or Mr. 
 Rothschild have the like (or may, no doubt, for the asking), and 
 nobody grudges the wealth, though neither ever were in the battle 
 of Waterloo, that I know of. But let us ask, as the condition of 
 improvement in Art, if not fame and honour, at least sympathy, 
 from the public, for the artist. The refinement of taste will come 
 afterwards ; and as every man a little conversant with the art of 
 painting, or any other art, must know how his judgment improves, 
 and how by degrees he learns to admire justly, so the public will 
 learn to admire more and more justly every day. The sixpenny 
 prints they buy twenty years hence will be better than the six- 
 penny prints now ; the Art Union pictures they select, better than 
 those which frighten the desponding susceptibilities of our 
 philosophers now-a-days. Away with these prophets of ill, these 
 timid old maids of Cassandras, who lift up their crutches, and 
 
 Q 
 
194 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 croak, and cry ‘Woe!’ It is the nature of the old bodies to 
 despond, but let ‘ us youth ’ be not frightened by their prate. If 
 any publisher could find it worth his while to bring out a hundred 
 beautiful engravings for a penny, depend on it Art would not 
 retrograde in the country. If a hundred thousand people chose 
 to subscribe to the Art Unions, the interest for Art would be so 
 much the greater, the encouragement to artists so much the 
 greater ; and if you interest the people and encourage the artists, 
 it is absurd to suppose that one or the other would go back. 
 
 But this, as you will doubtless observe, has nothing to do with 
 the lunatic prospectus (that of Mr. Moon), or with the puerile 
 distribution (that of Mr. Boys). Let us consider the sham Art 
 Unions another day. What I wish to observe in the above 
 sentences is, that the people are the artist’s best friends ; that for 
 his reputation and profit he must henceforth, he had best look to 
 them ; and rather than Avork for a class of patrons^ he had better 
 rely for support on his friends. If you have something that is 
 worth the telling — something for the good of mankind — it is 
 better to take it to a hundred tailors or tinkers than to one duke 
 or two dandies (speaking with perfect respect of both), and as an 
 actor would rather have a hundred people in the pit than but one 
 hearer who had ])aid ten pounds for a private box, an artist need 
 have no squeamish objections to the same popularity, and will 
 find a more sure and lasting profit in it. Many men of genius 
 will say, ‘ No ; we do not want the applause of the vulgar ; give 
 us the opinion of the few.’ Who prevents them? They have 
 those few as before ; but because the artist of a loAver walk 
 changes his patron, and, instead of catering for the private boxes, 
 appeals to the pit, there is no harm done. The pit, it is my firm 
 belief, knows just as much about the matter in question as the 
 boxes know ; and now you have made Art one of the wants of 
 the public, you will find, the providers of the commodity and its 
 purchasers grow more refined in their tastes alike ; and the 
 popular critic of a few years hence calling for good pictures, when 
 now bad ones please him. 
 
 How should he know better as yet ? His betters have taught 
 him to admire Books of Beauty, trashy, flashy coronation pictures, 
 and the like tawdry gimcracks, which please a feeble intellect and 
 a debauched taste. Give him time, and he will learn to like 
 better things. 
 
 And for the artist himself, will he not gain by bringing to the 
 public market the article Avhich he was obliged before to prepare 
 for individual patronage ? He has made many more sacrifices to 
 the latter than ever he will be called upon to do for the former. 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 195 
 
 His independence does not suffer by honest barter in the public 
 place, any more than an author’s does who takes his wares to the 
 bookseller or newspaper, and asks and gets his price. The writer 
 looks to my lord no longer, but he has found a better and surer 
 friend ; and so for Art : I would like to see Art Unions all over 
 England, from London to Little Peddlington : every one of the 
 subscribers become interested in a subject about which he has not 
 thought hitherto, and which was kept as the exclusive privilege 
 of his betters. 
 
 The Spectator has an excellent suggestion with regard to Art 
 Unions, I think ; which is, that a committee should purchase 
 pictures with the funds of the Union, and that the prize-holder 
 should then choose. Bad pictures would not, probably, be bought 
 in this way ; and the threatened degradation of Art would then 
 be averted. Perhaps the majority of the present Unionists, how- 
 ever, would not accede to this plan, and prefer to choose their 
 pictures for themselves. Well : let them keep to the old plan ; 
 and let us have another Art Union as the new. The more* the 
 better — the more read Unions ; as for the sham ones, we will 
 discourse of these anon. 
 
 Yours, my dear McGilp, 
 
 M. A. Titmaksh. 
 
 P.S , — I hope your cartoon is in a state of forwardness ; we 
 shall see in a month or two what the giants of Art can do. But, 
 meantime, do not neglect your little picture out of Gil Bias or 
 The Vicar of Wakefield (of course it is out of one or the other). 
 Let those humble intellects which can only understand common 
 feeling and every-day life have, too, their little gentle gratifications. 
 Why should not the poor in spirit be provided for as well as the 
 tremendous geniuses ? If a child take a fancy to a penny theatrical 
 print, let him have it ; if a workman want a green parrot with a 
 bobbing head to decorate his humble mantel-piece, let us not 
 grudge it to him ; and if an immense supereminent intelligence 
 cannot satisfy his poetical craving with anything less sublime than 
 Milton, or less vast than Michael Angelo, — all I can say, for my 
 part, is, that I wish he may get it. 
 
 The kind and beneficent Genius of Art has pleasures for all 
 according to their degree ; and spreads its harmless happy feast 
 for big and little, — for the Titanic appetite that can’t be satisfied 
 with anything less than a roasted elephant, as well as for the 
 small humble cock-robin of an intellect that can sing its little 
 grace and make its meal on a bread-crumb. 
 
196 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 No. 3. — The Royal Academy.^ 
 
 My dear McGilp, 
 
 I think every succeeding year shows a progress in the 
 English school of painters. They paint from the heart more than 
 of old, and less from the old heroic, absurd, incomprehensible 
 unattainable rules. They look at Nature very hard, and match 
 her with the best of their eyes and ability. They do not aim at 
 such great subjects as heretofore, or at subjects which the world 
 is pleased to call great, viz., tales from Hume or Gibbon of royal 
 personages under various circumstances of battle, murder, and 
 sudden death. Lempriere, too, is justly neglected, and Milton 
 has quite given place to Gil Bias and The Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 The heroic, and peace be with it ! has been deposed ; and 
 our artists, in place, cultivate the pathetic and the familiar. But 
 a few, very few, worshippers of the old gods remain. There are 
 only two or three specimens in the present exhibition of the grand 
 historic style. There is a huge dim-coloured picture, in the large 
 room, by an Academician, probably ; but I have neither the 
 name nor the subject ; there is Mr. HaydoiTs history-piece of ‘ The 
 Maid of Saragossa ^ — a great, coarse, vulgar, ill-drawn, ill-painted 
 caricature ; and an allegory or two by other artists, in the old- 
 fashioned style. 
 
 The younger painters are content to exercise their art on 
 subjects far less exalted : a gentle sentiment, an agreeable, quiet 
 incident, a tea-table tragedy, or a bread-and-butter idyl, suffices 
 for the most part their gentle powers. Nor surely ought one to 
 quarrel at all with this prevalent mode. It is at least natural, 
 which the heroic was not. 
 
 Bread and butter can be digested by every man ; whereas 
 Prometheus on his rock, or Orestes in his strait-waistcoat, or 
 Hector dragged behind Achilles’ car, or Britannia, guarded by 
 Religion and Neptune, welcoming General Tomkins in the Temple 
 of Glory — the ancient, heroic, allegorical subjects — can be 
 supposed deeply to interest very few of the inhabitants of this 
 city or kingdom. We have wisely given up pretending that we 
 were interested in such, and confess a partiality for more simple 
 and homely themes. 
 
 The Exhibition rooms are adorned with numberless very 
 pleasing pictures in this quiet taste. Mr. Leslie offers up to our 
 simple household gods a ‘ Vicar of Wakefield ’ ; Mr. Maclise 
 
 ^ {The Pictorial Times,^ May 13, 1843.] 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 197 
 
 presents a ‘ Gil Bias ’ ; 'Mr. Redgrave gently depicts the woes of 
 a governess who is reading a black -edged note, and the soft 
 sorrows of a country lass going to service ; Mr. Stone has the 
 last appeal of a rustic lover ; Mr. Charles Landseer has a party 
 drinking quietly under the trees ; Mr. McNee shows a young 
 person musing in a quiet no'ok, and thinking of her love. 
 
 All these subjects, it will be observed, are small subjects ; but 
 they are treated, for the most part, with extraordinary skill. As 
 for Lady Blarney, in Mr. Leslie^s picture, with that wonderful 
 leer of her wicked, squinting, vacant eyes, she is as good as the 
 very best Hogarth ; her face is the perfection of comedy ; and 
 the honest primrose countenances round about, charming for their 
 simplicity, and rich kindly humour. The ^ Malade Imaginaire ’ is 
 no less excellent ; more farcical and exaggerated in the arrange- 
 ment ; but the play is farcical and exaggerated ; and the picture, 
 as the play, is full of jovial, hearty laughter. No artist possesses 
 this precious quality of making us laugh kindly so much as Mr. 
 Leslie. There is not the least gall or satire in it ; only sheer 
 irresistible good-humour. 
 
 Now, in the tableau by Mr. Maclise, many of the principal 
 personages are scowling, or ogling, or grinning and showing their 
 teeth, with all their might, and yet the spectator, as I fancy, is 
 by no means so amused as by those more quiet actors in Mr. 
 Leslie’s little comedies. There is, especially in Mr. Maclise’s 
 company, one young fellow who ought to be hissed, or who 
 should have humble parts to act, and not be thrust forward in 
 the chief characters, as he has of late years, with his immense 
 grinning mouthful of white teeth and knowing, leering eyes. The 
 ladies we have seen too, repeatedly, and it must be confessed they 
 are not of the high comedy sort. The characters appear to be, 
 as it were, performing a tableau from Gil Bias, not the actual 
 heroes or heroines of that easy jovial drama. 
 
 As for the ‘ properties ’ of the piece, to use the dramatic phrase, 
 they are admirably rich and correct. The painter’s skill in repre- 
 senting them is prodigious. The plate, the carvings, the wine- 
 flasks, the poor old melancholy monkey on his perch, the little 
 parrots, the carpet, are painted with a truth and dexterity quite 
 marvellous, and equal the most finished productions of the Dutch 
 schools. Terbury never painted such a carpet ; every bit of 
 plate is a curiosity of truthful representation. This extraordinary 
 power of minute representation is shown in another picture by 
 Mr. Maclise, ‘ The Cornish Waterfall,’ round which every leaf in 
 every tree is depicted, and in which the figure of the girl is a 
 delightful specimen of the artist’s graphic power. 
 
198 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Mr. Redgrave’s ‘ Going to Service ’ is not so well drawn as 
 his pictures of former years. An old lady in an arm-chair, two 
 young sisters embracing each other, a brother very stiff and 
 solemn in a smock frock, and a waggon waiting outside, tell the 
 story of this little domestic comedy. It has a milk-and-watery 
 pathos. The governess has her bread-and-butter by her side, 
 too : but the picture is much better, the girl’s figure extremely 
 beautiful and graceful, and the adjuncts of the picture are painted 
 with extreme care and skill. 
 
 Mr. Stone’s ‘ Last Appeal ’ is beautiful. It is evidently the 
 finish of the history of the two young people who are to be 
 seen in the Water-Colour Exhibition. There the girl is smiling 
 and pleased, and there is some hope still for the pale, earnest 
 young man who loves her with all his might. But between the 
 two pictures, between Pall Mall and the Trafalgar Column, sad 
 changes have occurred. The young woman has met a big life- 
 guardsman, probably, who has quite changed her views of things ; 
 and you see that the last appeal is made without any hope for 
 the appellant. The girl hides away her pretty face, and we see 
 that all is over. She likes the poor fellow well enough, but it 
 is only as a brother ; her heart is with the life-guardsman, who 
 is strutting down the lane at this moment, with his laced cap on 
 one ear, cutting the buttercups’ heads off with his rattan cane. 
 The whole story is told, without, alas ! the possibility of a 
 mistake, and the young fellow in the grey stockings has nothing 
 to do but to jump down the well, at the side of which he has 
 been making his appeal. 
 
 The painting of this picture is excellent ; the amateur will not 
 fail to appreciate the beauty of the drawing, the care, and at the 
 same time freedom, of the execution, and a number of excellences 
 of method which are difficult to be described in j^rint, except in 
 certain technical terms that are quite unsatisfactory to the general 
 reader. 
 
 Mr. Charles Landseer’s ‘ Monks of Rubrosi ’ is the best, 
 perhaps, of his pictures. The scene is extremely cheerful, fresh, 
 and brilliant ; the landscape almost as good as the figures, and 
 these are all good. Two grave-looking, aristocratic fathers of the 
 abbey have been fly-fishing ; a couple of humbler brethren in 
 brown are busy at a hamper of good things ; a gallant young 
 sportsman in green velvet lies on the grass and toasts a pretty 
 lass that is somehow waiting upon their reverences. The picture 
 is not only good, but has the further good quality of being 
 2deasant ; and some clever artist will do no harm in condescending 
 so far to suit the general taste. There is no reason, after all. 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 199 
 
 why a man should not humble himself to this extent, and make 
 friends with the public patron. 
 
 For instance, take Mr. Poole’s picture of ‘ Solomon Eagle and 
 the Plague of London.’ It is exceedingly clever ; but who would 
 buy such a piece ? Figures writhe over the picture blue and 
 livid with the plague — some are dying in agony — some stupid 
 with pain. You see the dead-cart in the distance ; and in the 
 midst stands naked Solomon, with blood - shot eyes and wild 
 maniacal looks, preaching death, woe, and judgment. Where 
 should such a piece hang ? It is too gloomy for a hospital, and 
 surely not cheerful enough for a dining-room. It is not a religious 
 picture, that would serve to decorate the walls of a church. A 
 very dismal, gloomy conventicle might, perhaps, be a suitable 
 abode for it ; but would it not be better to tempt the public with 
 something more good-humoured ? 
 
 Of the religious pieces, Mr. Herbert’s ‘Woman of Samaria’ 
 will please many a visitor to the Exhibition, on account of the 
 beauty and dignity of the head of the Saviour. The woman, as 
 I thought, was neither beautiful nor graceful. Mr. Eastlake’s 
 
 ‘Hagar’ is beautiful as everything else by this accomplished 
 artist ; but here, perhaps, the beauty is too great, and the pain 
 not enough. The scene is not represented with its actual agony 
 and despair ; but it is, as it were, a sort of limning to remind 
 you of the scene ; a piece of mystical poetry with Ishmael and 
 Hagar for the theme. I must confess that Mr. Linnett’s ‘ Supper 
 at Emmaus ’ did not strike me as the least mystical or poetical, 
 and that Mr. Etty’s ‘ Entombment ’ was anything but holy and 
 severe. Perhaps the most pious and charming head in the whole 
 Exhibition, is that of the Queen, by Mr. Leslie, in his Coronation 
 picture ; it has a delightful modesty and a purity quite angelical. 
 
 Mr. Etty’s pictures of the heathen sort are delightful ; wonder- 
 ful for a gorgeous flush of colour, such as has belonged, perhaps, 
 to no painter since Kubens. But of these we will discourse next 
 week. 
 
200 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 No. 4. — The Royal Academy.^ (Second Notice.) 
 
 My dear McGilp, 
 
 If her Majesty is the purchaser of all the royal pictures 
 by Paris, by Hayter, by Leslie, by Landseer, — of all the royal 
 portraits by these and a score more in and out of the Academy, — 
 there must be a pretty large gallery at Buckingham Palace by 
 this time, and, let it be said with respect, a considerable sameness 
 in the collection. The royal face is a very handsome one, and 
 especially in the medallion-shape, in gold. I would like to look 
 at thousands of them every week, for my part, and would never 
 tire in extending my cabinet. 
 
 But, confess, my dear Sir, are we not beginning to have 
 enough of royal parade-pictures ? And are not the humbler 
 classes somewhat tired of them? Only the publishers and the 
 grandees, their enlightened patrons, still continue to admire. 
 Dark rooms are still prepared for such ; gas-jets and large sub- 
 scription books artfully laid on and out. The Court Guide still 
 goes to see Winterhalter’s portrait of the Queen (‘ I wish they 
 
 may get it,’ as the Duchess of observes ; the picture is not 
 
 painted by Winterhalter; but what do they know, whether 4t be 
 good or bad ?). The Court Guide still buys huge proofs of her 
 Majesty’s marriage, or the Princess’s christening, or the real 
 authorised coronation picture (every one of the half-dozen are real 
 authorised coronation pictures), and is content therewith. Ah ! 
 Heaven bless that elegant aristocracy of England ; that wise, that 
 enlightened, that noble clan of our betters ! 
 
 The subject of these pictures is worthy of their noble souls, — 
 fit for their vast comprehensions ; and as the poor workman buys 
 his prints of ‘ The Prodigal Son’s Progress,’ the young cockney- 
 buck his portrait of Mrs. Honey, or some other beauty with long 
 ringlets and short petticoats, the sporting man his varnished 
 hunting-piece, so the great have their likings, and we judge them 
 by what they admire. 
 
 And what an admiration theirs is ! There’s her Majesty in 
 state ! What a lovely white satin ! and the velvet, my dear, 
 painted to the very life. Every single jewel’s a portrait, I give 
 you my honour ; and Prince Albert’s own star and garter sat to 
 the artist ; the Archbishop’s wig is done to a hair ; and was there 
 ever a more wonderful piece of art than that picture of the Duke 
 in his orders and his epaulets, and his white Kerseymere 
 
 ^ {The Pictorial Times^ May 27, 1843.] 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 201 
 
 pantaloons ? Round the sovereign are all the maids of honour ; 
 round the maids of honour all the officers of state ; round the 
 officers of state all the beefeaters and gentlemen-at-arms ; and on 
 these magnificent subjects our painters are continually employed. 
 Noble themes for the exercise of genius ! brilliant proofs of 
 enlightened public taste ! The court milliners must be proud to 
 think that their works are thus immortalised, and the descendants 
 of our tailors will look at these pieces with a justifiable family 
 pride. 
 
 Mr. Leslie has had to chronicle coats and satin-slips in this 
 way, and has represented his scene in the drama of the coronation 
 (how many more episodes of the same piece have been represented 
 and by how many more painters, I don’t know), and his picture 
 is so finely done, so full of beauty and grandeur, that for once a 
 court picture has been made interesting. I have remarked on 
 the principal figure before, — the exquisite grace and piety repre- 
 sented in the countenance and attitude of the Queen ; but the 
 judgment of the quality as far as I have been able to gather it 
 (and it is good to this end to play the spy’s part, and overhear 
 the opinions of the genteel personages who come to see the 
 Exhibition) — the genteel judgment is decidedly against the 
 painter, and his portraits are pronounced to be failures, and his 
 pictures quite inferior to many others by others’ hands. Let us 
 hope the opinion will be so general, that this charming painter 
 shall never be called upon to paint a court ceremony again. I 
 would rather see honest Mrs. Primrose s portrait by him than that 
 of the loveliest lady of honour ; and the depicting of uniforms and 
 lappets and feathers left to those politer artists whose genius is 
 suited to subjects so genteel. 
 
 There is no Prince Albert this year, I regret to say ; but we 
 have two portraits of her Majesty, in trains, velvets, arm-chairs, 
 etc. — one by the President ^ and one by Mr. Grant — and neither 
 worth a crown-piece. One of the most exquisite and refined 
 little sketches ever seen is the portrait of Lady Lyttelton, by the 
 latter artist ; it is a delightful picture of a beautiful and high- 
 bred maiden. Mr. Chalon’s aristocracy does not ogle and simper 
 quite so much as in former years ; and their ladyships are painted 
 with all the artist’s accustomed skill. Mr. Richmond’s heads are 
 excellent as usual ; and there is a rival to these gentlemen, who 
 has given us a water-colour portrait of the Bishop of Exeter, in 
 which the amiable and candid features of that prelate are depicted 
 with great fidelity and talent. Mr. Garrick’s men-miniatures are 
 perhaps the best among those pleasing performances ; the likeness 
 ^ Sir Martin Archer Shee, President of the Royal Academy. 
 
202 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 of a former Secretary for Ireland will especially please those who 
 know his lordship^s countenance, and those who do not, by its 
 resemblance to an eminent comedian whose absence from the stage 
 all regret. 
 
 Mr. Thorburn cultivates more, perhaps, than any other 
 miniature painter, the poetry of his art. The gallant knights. 
 Sir Ross and Sir Newton, are as victorious as usual; and Mr. 
 Lover’s head of Mr. Lever deserves praiseworthy mention ; it will 
 be looked at with interest by ‘ Harry Lorrequer’s ’ English 
 readers, and by those who had the opportunity of seeing him in 
 the body, and hearing his manly and kind-hearted speech at the 
 Literary Fund the other day. 
 
 Of Mr. Etty’s colour pieces what words can give an idea ? 
 Many lovers of Titian and Rubens will admit that here is an 
 English painter who almost rivals them in his original way, and 
 all will admire their magnificent beauty. Mr. Turner, our other 
 colourist, is harder to be understood. The last time the gentle 
 reader received a black eye at school and for a moment after the 
 delivery of the blow, when Hashes of blue, yellow, and crimson 
 lightning blazed before the ball so preternaturally excited, he saw 
 something not unlike the ‘ Moses ’ of Mr. Turner. His picture of 
 ‘ Cleopatra Meeting Alexander the Great at Moscow the Morning 
 Before the Deluge ’ (perhaps this may not be the exact title, but 
 it will do as well as another) is of the most transcendental sort. 
 The quotations from the Fallacies of Hope continue still in great 
 force ; as thus : — 
 
 The Ark stood firm on Ararat ; the returning Sun 
 Exhaled Earth’s humid bubbles, and, emulous of light. 
 Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise, 
 
 Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly. 
 
 Which rises, flits, expands, and dies . — Fallacies of Hope. 
 
 The artist has done full justice to these sweet lines. 
 
 We are given to understand by cognoscenti that the Italian 
 skies are always of the bluest cobalt ; hence many persons are 
 dissatisfied with Mr. Stanfield’s Italian landscapes, as unfaithful, 
 because deficient in the proper depth of ultra-marine. On this 
 subject let proper judges speak ; but others less qualified will 
 find the pictures beautiful, and more beautiful for their quiet and 
 calm. Who can praise Mr. Creswick suflficiently ? The ^W^elsh 
 Girl ’ will, one of these days, fetch a sum of money as great as 
 ever was given for Hobbema or Ruysdael ; and ‘ Evening ’ is an 
 English Claude. Air. Lee’s fresh country landscapes will find 
 hundreds of admirers ; and perhaps there are no two prettier 
 
LETTERS ON THE FINE ARTS 
 
 203 
 
 little pictures in the gallery than Mr. Linton’s ‘ Sorrento ’ and 
 Mr. Jutsum’s ‘ Tintern.’ 
 
 In walking round the vault in which the sculpture is entombed, 
 I did not see anything especially worthy of mark, except a bust 
 of Count d’Orsay, who has himself broken ground as an artist, 
 and whose genius will one day no doubt make its way. Why 
 have we not our common share of the admirable pictures of Mr. 
 Edwin Landseer? It can’t be that a man of his facility has 
 painted but three pictures in a year, and picture-lovers wonder 
 where the rest are ? 
 
 M. A. Titmarsh. 
 
THE WATER-COLOUR EXHIBITION.! 
 
 The Water-Colour Exhibitions this year are quite as gay and 
 pretty as in preceding seasons, though presenting no works of very 
 extraordinary merit. The gentlemen of the New Society are com- 
 monly more ambitious than the painters of the old ; but their 
 efforts have not this year been quite so successful as in former 
 seasons. Mr. Warren has a pair of large pictures, in which one is 
 sorry to see so much labour and ingenuity have been expended in 
 vain ; Mr. Corbould has a large Scripture piece, which is as bad, 
 poor, mannered, and feeble a performance as ever was perpetrated 
 by a clever young painter ; Mr. Hay ter, always good, is not quite 
 so good as formerly ; Mr. Wehnert has a large piece representing 
 Luther preaching, and though the figures look as if they were 
 made of wood, they exhibit some powerful painting and expression ; 
 Miss Corbaux has her pretty little, rather caricatured, subject of 
 Cinderella (but, perhaps, the artist is right, and in a fairy tale all 
 the grotesque should be somewhat caricatured) ; Mr. Absalon has 
 a snow-piece from the eternal Vicar of Wakefield — a large picture, 
 and a failure. 
 
 On the other hand, and although the artist’s practice is very 
 imperfect, and he cannot compete in skill and tricks of pencilling 
 with many an inferior workman, he has some qualities which the 
 inferior workman cannot acquire, labour he ever so — an exceed- 
 ingly fine sentiment of pure beauty and tender humour. All his 
 little pieces sparkle with this delicate, kindly sentiment ; here is 
 a little sketch of a young couple passing over a plank across a 
 brook ; you see that they are in love, though they make no big 
 eyes or ogles at each other to express the tender passion, as it is 
 commonly expressed in pictures ; then there is a drawing of a 
 farmer coming home from the cornfield, wife and child at the 
 cottage waiting for him, which little stale rustic history is yet told 
 with remarkable grace and sweetness. Finally, there are two 
 designs of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Widow, of which more 
 
 ^ [The Pictorial Times, May 6, 1843.] 
 
 204 
 
THE WATER-COLOUR EXHIBITIOIST 
 
 205 
 
 need not be said than that they are as good as if Mr. Leslie 
 himself had drawn them. Let all Art Union prize-men have a 
 look at these rough, exquisite little pieces. Perhaps, however, it 
 is for such slight sketches that water-colours are best adapted ; 
 the larger pieces are wonderful and curious, but not satisfactory, 
 any more than an overture when played on a guitar, which can 
 accompany a ballad very sweetly. 
 
 Very wisely, as we think, Mr. Cattermole has exhibited this 
 year a few of those magnificent sketches in which he is unrivalled, 
 in place of more elaborate pieces, which are not so well suited to 
 his style or to the material in which he works. Two sketches on 
 rough brown paper, seemingly, are quite extraordinary for depth 
 and power of colour ; and the large drawing of ‘ Charles and his 
 Army after the battle of Newbury ’ is a magnificent wild composition, 
 full of power and rich colour, and awful romantic gloom. 
 
 Mr. Taylor’s ‘ Vicar of Wakefield ’ is exceedingly pleasant and 
 graceful in humour, and exhibits much of the skill of this artist’s 
 brilliant and flowing pencil. The drawings of Mr. Copley Fielding 
 are, perhaps, even better than in former years. A forest scene 
 may especially be remarked for its extraordinary vigour and rich- 
 ness of tone. There are only a pair of those delightful boys with 
 whose society Mr. Hunt is accustomed to amuse us ; but there are 
 some wonderful fruit pieces from his pencil, and some interiors not 
 quite, we think, so happy. 
 
 Mr. Nash’s ‘ Gothic Halls ’ are drawn with great skill and 
 truth, not so his meagre composition of ‘ Milton and his Daughters,’ 
 as unromantic and likewise unreal a piece as heart can desire. 
 The young ladies’ fingers are like shreds of muslin, the old 
 gentleman’s eyes as inane as Farren’s in ‘Grandfather White- 
 head,’ or as those of a monk in a certain picture by Mr. Richter, 
 from the novel of The Trustee, Words cannot be found in the 
 dictionary strong enough to express our sense of this picture of 
 Father Lawrence, and of a twin abomination from the same 
 hand, and to illustrate the same romance. On the subject of 
 ‘Una and her Lion,’ serious though polite remonstrances should 
 be addressed to Miss Sharpe. Here are represented the biggest 
 lion, the largest tear, and the yellowist head of hair ever painted ; 
 but, alas ! a tear that should be painted big enough to fill a 
 tablespoon would not be necessarily pathetic : nor is a spun-silk 
 wig necessarily pathetic : it is not with stage properties that 
 imagination is manufactured ; and in spite of her tear, and her 
 hair, and her lion, this Una must be set down as the least 
 romantic of young women. 
 
 Mr. S. W. Wright’s beauties have that charm of grace and 
 
206 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IX ART 
 
 delicacy for which all the works of this pleasing artist are known ; 
 and Mr. Stone has a charming little drawing of a pair of lovers, 
 with a motto in an outlandish tongue, very difficult of compre- 
 hension. But it is clear that the ragazza is a franche coquette^ 
 and the povero fanciullo a dummkopf^ whose example nosotros 
 would do well to avoid : — verhum sap. 
 
 The lover of landscape will find at this exhibition many an 
 agreeable recollection of nature in the drawings of De Wint and 
 Gastineau ; and may take his last look at those gloomy and 
 romantic scenes, which only Varley knew how to paint. 
 
 By the way, a gentleman at the New Water-Colour Society 
 has managed to copy the Varley manner very closely. 
 
 Michael Angelo Titmaksh. 
 
MAY GAMBOLS; 
 
 OR, TITMARSH IN THE PICTURE GALLERIES.^ 
 
 The readers of this Miscellany may, perhaps, have remarked that 
 always at the May season and the period of the exhibitions, our 
 eccentric correspondent Titmarsh seems to be seized with a double 
 fit of eccentricity, and to break out into such violent fantastical 
 gambols as might cause us to be alarmed did we not know him to 
 be harmless, and induce us to doubt of his reason but that the fit 
 is generally brief, and passes off after the first excitement occasioned 
 by visiting the picture galleries. It was in one of these fits, some 
 years since, that he announced in this Magazine his own suicide, 
 which we know to be absurd, for he has drawn many hundred 
 guineas from us since — on the same occasion he described his 
 debts and sojourn at a respectable hotel, in which it seems he has 
 never set his foot. But these hallucinations pass away with May, 
 and next month he will, no doubt, be calmer, or, at least, not 
 more absurd than usual. Some disappointments occurring to 
 himself, and the refusal of his great picture of ‘ Heliogabalus ^ in 
 the year 1803 (which caused his retirement from practice as a 
 painter) may account for his extreme bitterness against some of 
 the chief artists in this, or any other school or country. Thus 
 we have him in these pages abusing Raphael ; in the very last 
 month he fell foul of Rubens, and in the present paper he actually 
 pooh-poohs Sir Martin Shee and some of the Royal Academy. 
 This is too much. ‘ Caelum ipsum^^ as Horace says, ^ petimus 
 stultitid.^ But we will quote no more the well-known words of 
 the Epicurean bard. 
 
 We only add that we do not feel in the least bound by any 
 one of the opinions here brought forward, from most of which, 
 except where the writer contradicts himself and so saves us the 
 trouble, we cordially dissent ; and perhaps the reader had best 
 pass on to the next article, omitting all perusal of this, excepting, 
 of course, the editorial notice of — 0. Y. 
 
 ^ [Fraser's Magazine, June, 1844.] 
 
 207 
 
208 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Jack Straw's Castle, Hampstead, May 25. 
 
 This is written in the midst of a general desolation and dis- 
 couragement of the honest practitioners who dwell in the dingy 
 first floors about Middlesex Hospital and Soho. The long-haired 
 ones are tearing their lanky locks; the velvet -coated sons of 
 genius are plunged in despair ; the law has ordered the suppression 
 of Art-Unions, and the wheel of Fortune has suddenly and cruelly 
 been made to stand still. When the dreadful news came that the 
 kindly, harmless Art-lottery was to be put an end to, although 
 Derby-lotteries are advertised in every gin-shop in London, and 
 every ruffian in the City may gamble at his leisure, the men of 
 the brush and palette convoked a tumultuous meeting, where, 
 ainidst tears, shrieks, and wrath, the cruelty of their case was 
 debated. Wyse of Waterford calmly presided over the stormy 
 bladder -squeezers, the insulted wielders of the knife and maul- 
 stick. Wyse soothed their angry spirits with words of wisdom 
 and hope. He stood up in the assembly of the legislators of the 
 land and pointed out their wrongs. The painters^ friend, the 
 kind old Lansdowne, lifted up his cordial voice among the peers 
 of England, and asked for protection for the children of Raphael 
 and Apelles. No one said nay. All pitied the misfortune of the 
 painters ; even Lord Brougham was stilled into compassion, and 
 the voice of Vaux was only heard in sobs. 
 
 These are days of darkness, but there is hope in the vista ; the 
 lottery-subscription lies in limbo, but it shall be released there- 
 from and flourish, exuberantly revivified, in future years. Had 
 the ruin been consummated, this hand should have withered rather 
 than have attempted to inscribe jokes concerning it. No. 
 Fraser is the artists’ friend, their mild parent. While his Royal 
 Highness Prince Albert dines with the Academicians, the rest of 
 painters, less fortunate, are patronised by her majesty Regina. 
 
 Yes, in spite of the Art-Union accident, there is hope for the 
 painters. Sir Martin Archer Shee thinks that the Prince’s con- 
 descension in dining with the Academy will do incalculable benefit 
 to the art. Henceforth its position is assured in the world. This 
 august patronage, the president says, evincing the sympathy of 
 the higher classes, must awaken the interest of the low ; and the 
 public (the ignorant rogues) will thus learn to appreciate what 
 they have not cared for hitherto. Interested ! of course they will 
 be. 0 Academicians ! ask the public to dinner and you will see 
 how much interested they will be. We are authorised to state 
 that next year any person who will send in his name will have a 
 cover provided ; Trafalgar Square is to be awned in, plates are to 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 209 
 
 be laid for 250,000, one of the new basins is to be filled with 
 turtle and the other with cold punch. The president and the 
 Uite are to sit upon Nelson’s pillar, while rows of benches, 
 stretching as far as the Union Club, Northumberland House, and 
 St. Martin’s Church, will accommodate the vulgar. Mr. Toole is 
 to have a speaking trumpet ; and a twenty-four pounder to be 
 discharged at each toast. 
 
 There are other symptoms of awakening interest in the public 
 mind. The readers of newspapers will remark this year that the 
 leaders of public opinion have devoted an unusually large space 
 and print to reviews of the fine arts. They have been employing 
 critics who, though they contradict each other a good deal, are yet 
 evidently better acquainted with the subject than critics of old 
 used to be when gentlemen of the profession were instructed to 
 report on a fire, or an Old Bailey trial, or a Greek play, or an 
 opera, or a boxing match, or a picture gallery, as their turn came. 
 Read now The Times^ The Chronicle^ The Post (especially The Post, 
 of which the painting critiques have been very good) and it will 
 be seen that the critic knows his business, and from the length of 
 his articles it may be conjectured that the public is interested in 
 knowing what he has to say. This is all, probably, from the 
 prince having dined at the Academy. The nation did not care 
 for pictures until then — until the nobility taught us ; gracious 
 nobility. Above all, what a compliment to the public ! 
 
 As one looks round the rooms of the Royal Academy, one can- 
 not but deplore the fate of the poor fellows who have been specu- 
 lating upon the Art-Unions ; and yet in the act of grief there is a 
 lurking satisfaction. The poor fellows can’t sell their pieces ; that 
 is a pity. But why did the poor fellows paint such fiddle-faddle 
 pictures ? They catered for the bourgeois, the sly rogues ! they 
 know honest John Bull’s taste, and simple admiration of namby- 
 pamby, and so they supplied him with an article that was just 
 likely to suit him. In like manner savages are supplied with 
 glass beads ; children are accommodated with toys and trash, by 
 dexterous speculators who know their market. Well, I am sorry 
 that the painting speculators have had a stop put to their little 
 venture, and that the ugly law against lotteries has stepped in 
 and seized upon the twelve thousand pounds, which was to furnish 
 many a hungry British Raphael with a coat and a beefsteak. 
 Many a Mrs. Raphael, who was looking out for a new dress, or a 
 trip to Margate or Boulogne for the summer, must forego the 
 pleasure, and remain in dingy Newman Street. Alany little ones 
 will go back to Turnham Green academies and not carry the 
 amount of last half-year’s bill in the trunk ; many a landlord will 
 
210 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 bully about the non-payment of the rent ; and a vast number of 
 frame-makers will look wistfully at their carving and gilding as it 
 returns after the exhibition to Mr. Tinto, Charlotte Street, along 
 with poor Tinto’s picture from The Vicar of Wakefield that he 
 made sure of selling to an Art -Union prizeman. This is the 
 pathetic side of the question. My heart is tender, and I weep 
 for the honest painters peering dismally at the twelve thousand 
 pounds like hungry boys do at a tart-shop. 
 
 But — here stern justice interposes, and the Man having 
 relented the Critic raises his inexorable voice — but, I say, the 
 enemies of Art-Unions have had some reason for their complaints, 
 and I fear it is too true that the effect of those institutions, as 
 far as they have gone hitherto, has not been mightily favourable 
 to the cause of art. One day, by custom, no doubt, the public 
 taste will grow better, and as the man who begins by intoxicating 
 himself with a glass of gin finishes sometimes by easily absorbing 
 a bottle ; as the law-student, who at first is tired with a chapter 
 of Blackstone, will presently swallow you down with pleasure a 
 whole volume of Chitty ; as Education, in a word, advances, it 
 is humbly to be hoped that the great and generous British public 
 will not be so easily satisfied as at present, and will ask for a better 
 article for its money. 
 
 Meanwhile, their taste being pitiable, the artists sujiply them 
 with poor stuff — pretty cheap tawdry toys and gimcracks in 
 place of august and beautiful objects of art. It is always the 
 case. I do not mean to say that the literary men are a bit 
 better. Poor fellows of the pen and pencil ! We must live. 
 The public likes light literature and we write it. Here am I 
 writing magazine jokes and follies, and why % Because the public 
 like such, will purchase no other. Otherwise, as Mr. Nickisson, 
 and all who are acquainted with M. A. Titmarsh, in private know, 
 my real inclinations would lead me to write works upon mathe- 
 matics, geology, and chemistry, varying them in my lighter hours 
 with little playful treatises on questions of political economy, 
 epic jioems, and essays on the H^olic digamma. So, in fact, 
 these severe rebukes with which I am about to belabour my 
 neighbour must be taken, as they are given, in a humble and 
 friendly spirit \ they are not actuated by pride, but by deep 
 sympathy. Just as we read in holy Mr. Newman^s life of Saint 
 Stephen Harding, that it was the custom among the godly 
 Cistercian monks (in the good old times, which holy Newman 
 would restore) to assemble every morning in full chapter ; and 
 there, after each monk had made his confession, it was free to — 
 nay, it was strictly enjoined on — any other brother to rise and 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 211 
 
 say, ‘ Brother So-and-so hath not told all his sins ; our dear 
 brother has forgotten that yesterday he ate his split-pease with 
 too much gormandise or, ‘ This morning he did indecently 
 rejoice over his water-gruel,’ or what not. These real Christians 
 were called upon to inform, not only of themselves, but to be 
 informers over each other ; and, the information being given, the 
 brother informed against thanked his brother the informer, and 
 laid himself down on the desk, and was flagellated with gratitude. 
 Sweet friends ! be you like the Cistercians ! Brother Michael 
 Angelo is going to inform against you. Get ready your garments 
 and prepare for flagellation. Brother Michael Angelo is about 
 to lay on and spare not. 
 
 Brother Michael lifts up his voice against the young painters 
 collectively in the first place, afterwards individually, when he 
 will also take leave to tickle them with the wholesome stripes of 
 the flagellum. In the first place, then (and my heart is so tender 
 that, rather than begin the operation, I have been beating about 
 the bush for more than a page, of which page the reader is 
 cordially requested to omit the perusal, as it is not the least to 
 the purpose), I say that the young painters of England, whose 
 uprise this Magazine and this critic were the first to hail, 
 asserting loudly their superiority over the pompous old sham- 
 classical big-wigs of the Academy, the young painters of England 
 are not doing their duty. They are going backwards, or rather, 
 they are flinging themselves under the wheels of that great golden 
 Juggernaut of an Art -Union. The thought of the money is 
 
 leading them astray ; they are poets no longer, but money-hunters. 
 They paint down to the level of the public intelligence, rather 
 than seek to elevate the public to them. Why do these great 
 geniuses fail in their duty of instruction ? Why, knowing better 
 things, do they serve out such awful twaddle as we have from 
 them. Alas 1 it is not for art they paint, but for the Art-Union. 
 
 The first dear brother I shall take the liberty to request to get 
 ready for operation is brother Charles Landseer. Brother Charles 
 has sinned. He has grievously sinned. And we will begin with 
 this miserable sinner, and administer to him admonition in a 
 friendly, though most fierce and cutting manner. 
 
 The subject of brother Charles Landseer’s crime is this. The 
 sinner has said to himself, ^ The British public likes domestic 
 pieces. They will have nothing hut domestic pieces. I will give 
 them one, and of a new sort. Suppose I paint a picture that 
 must have a hit. My picture will have every sort of interest. 
 It shall interest the religious public ; it shall interest the domestic 
 public ; it shall interest the amateur for the cleverness of its 
 
212 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 painting ; it shall interest little boys and girls, for I will introduce 
 no end of animals : camels, monkeys, elephants, and cockatoos ; 
 it shall interest sentimental young ladies, for I will take care to 
 have a pretty little episode for them. I will take the town by 
 storm, in a word.^ This is what I conceive was passing in 
 brother Charles Landseer's sinful soul when he conceived and 
 executed his Noah's ark in a domestic point of view. 
 
 Noah and his family (with some supplemental young children, 
 very sweetly painted) are seated in the ark, and a port-hole is 
 opened, out of which one of the sons is looking at the now 
 peaceful waters. The sunshine enters the huge repository of the 
 life of the world, and the dove has just flown in with an olive 
 branch and nestles in the bosom of one of the daughters of Noah ; 
 the patriarch and his aged partner are lifting up their venerable 
 eyes in thankfulness ; the children stand around, the peaceful 
 labourer and the brown huntsman each testifying his devotion 
 after his fashion. The animals round about participate in the 
 joyful nature of the scene, their instinct seems to tell them that 
 the hour of their deliverance is near. 
 
 There, the picture is described romantically and in the best of 
 language. Now let us proceed to examine the poetry critically 
 and to see what its claims are. Well, the ark is a great subject. 
 The history from which we have our account of it, from a poet, 
 surely demands a reverend treatment ; a blacksmith roaring from 
 the desk of a conventicle may treat it familiarly, but an educated 
 artist ought surely to approach such a theme with respect. The 
 point here is only urged aesthetically. As a matter of taste, then 
 (and the present humble writer has no business to speak on any 
 other), such a manner of treating the subject is certainly repre- 
 hensible. The ark is vulgarised here and reduced to the 
 proportions of a Calais steamer. The passengers are rejoicing : 
 they are glad to get away. Their live animals are about them no 
 more nor less sublime than so many cattle or horses in loose 
 boxes. The parrots perched on the hoop yonder have as little 
 signiflcation as a set of birds in a cage at the Zoological Gardens ; 
 the very dove becomes neither more nor less than the 2^et of the 
 pretty girl represented in the centre of the picture. All the 
 greatness of the subject is lost ; and, putting the historical nature 
 of the personages out of the question, they have little more 
 interest than a group of any emigrants in the hold of a shiji, who 
 rouse and rally at the sound of ‘ Land ho ! ' 
 
 AYhy, if all great themes of poetry are to be treated in this 
 way, the art would be easy. We might have Hector shaving 
 himself before going out to fight Achilles, as undoubtedly the 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 213 
 
 Trojan hero did; Priam in a cotton nightcap asleejD in a four- 
 poster on the night of the sack of Troy, Hecuba, of course, by 
 his side, v/ith curl papers, and her tour de tete on the toilet-glass. 
 We might have Dido’s maid coming after her mistress in the 
 shower with pattens and an umbrella ; or Cleopatra’s page 
 guttling the figs in the basket which had brought the asp that 
 killed the mistress of Antony. Absurd trivialities, or pretty 
 trivialities, are nothing to the question ; those I have adduced here 
 are absurd, but they are just as poetical as prettiness, not a whit 
 less degrading and commonplace. No painter has a right to treat 
 great historical subjects in such a fashion : and though the public 
 are. sure to admire, and young ladies, in raptures, look on at the 
 daring of a dove, and little boys in delight cry, ‘ Look, papa, at 
 the parroquets ! ’ — ‘ Law, ma, what big trunks the elephants 
 have ! ’ it yet behoves the critic to say this is an unpoetical piece, 
 and severely to reprehend the unhappy perpetrator thereof 
 
 I know brother Charles will appeal. I know it will be 
 pleaded in his favour that the picture is capitally painted, some 
 of the figures very pretty ; two, that of the old woman and the 
 boy looking out, quite grand in drawing and colour ; the picture 
 charming for its silvery tone and agreeable pleasantry of colour. 
 All this is true. But he has sinned, he has greatly sinned ; let 
 him acknowledge his fault in the presence of the chapter, and 
 
 receive the customary and wholesome reward thereof 
 
 Prater Kedgrave is the next malefactor whose sins deserve a 
 reprobation. In the namby-pamby line his errors are very sad. 
 Has he not been already warned in this very miscellany of his 
 propensity to small sentiment ? Has he corrected himself of that 
 grievous tendency ? No ; his weakness grows more and more 
 upon him, and he is now more sinful than ever. One of his 
 pictures is taken from the most startling lyric in our language, 
 the ‘ Song of the Shirt,’ a song as bitter and manly as it is ex- 
 quisitely soft and tender, a song of which the humour draws tears. ^ 
 Mr. Kedgrave has illustrated everything except the humour, 
 the manliness, and the bitterness of the song. He has only 
 depicted the tender, good-natured part of it. It is impossible to 
 quarrel with the philanthropy of the painter. His shirt-maker 
 sits by her little neat bed, work, working away. You may see 
 how late it is, for the candle is nearly burnt out, the clock 
 (capital poetic notion !) says what o’clock it is, the grey-streaked 
 dawn is rising over the opposite house seen through the cheerless 
 
 ^ How is it that none of the papers have noticed the astonishing poem by 
 Mr. Hood in the May number of his magazine, to which our language con- 
 tains no parallel ? M. A. T. 
 
214 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 casement, and where (from a light which it has in its window) 
 you may imagine that another poor shirt-maker is toiling too. 
 The one before us is pretty, pale and wan ; she turns up the 
 whites of her fine, fatigued eyes to the little ceiling. She is ill, 
 as the artist has shewn us by a fine stroke of genius — a parcel of 
 medicine bottles on the mantelpiece ! The picture is carefully 
 and cleverly painted — extremely popular — gazed at with vast 
 interest by most spectators. Is it, however, a poetical subject ? 
 Yes, Hood has shewn that it can be made one, but by surprising 
 turns of thought brought to bear upon it, strange, terrible unex- 
 pected lights of humour which he has flung upon it. And, to 
 ‘ trump ^ this tremendous card, Mr. Redgrave gives us this 
 picture ; his points being the clock, which tells the time of day, 
 the vials which show the poor girl takes physic, and such other 
 vast labours of intellect ! 
 
 Mr. Redgrave’s other picture, the ‘ Marriage Morning,’ is also 
 inspired by that milk-and-water of human kindness, the flavour of 
 which is so insipid to the roast-beef intellect. This is a scene of 
 a marriage morning ; the bride is taking leave of her mamma after 
 the ceremony, and that amiable lady, reclining in an easy-chair, is 
 invoking benedictions upon the parting couple, and has a hand of 
 her daughter and her son-in-law clasped in each of hers. She is 
 smiling sadly, restraining her natural sorrow, which will break 
 out so soon as the post-chaise you see through the window, and 
 on which the footman is piling the nuptial luggage, shall have 
 driven off to Salt Hill, or Rose Cottage, Richmond, which I 
 recommend.. The bride’s father, a venerable, bald-headed gentle- 
 man, with a most benignant, though slow-coachish look, is trying 
 to console poor Anna Maria, the unmarried sister, who is losing 
 the companion of her youth. Never mind, Anna Maria, my dear, 
 your turn will come too ; there is a young gentleman making a 
 speech in the parlour to the health of the new-married pair, who, 
 I lay a wager, will be struck by your fine eyes, and be for serving 
 you as your sister has been treated. This small fable is worked 
 out with great care in a picture in which there is much clever and 
 conscientious painting, from which, however, I must confess I 
 derive little pleasure. The sentiment and colour of the picture 
 somehow coincide ; the eye rests upon a variety of neat tints of 
 pale drab, pale green, pale brown, pale puce colour, of a sickly 
 warmth, not pleasant to the eye. The drawing is feeble, the 
 expression of the face pretty, but lackadaisical. The penance I 
 would order Mr. Redgrave should be a pint of port wine to be 
 taken daily, and a devilled kidney every morning for breakfast 
 before beginning to paint. 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 215 
 
 A little of the devil, too, would do Mr. Frank Stone no harm. 
 He, too, is growing dangerously sentimental. His picture, with 
 a quotation from Horace, ^ Moecenas atavis edite regihm^^ 
 represents a sort of game of tender cross-purposes, very difficult 
 to describe in print. Suppose two lads, Jocky and Tommy, and 
 two lasses, Jenny and Jessamy. They are placed thus : — 
 
 Tommy. 
 
 Jessamy. Jenny. Jocky. 
 
 A dog. 
 
 Now Jocky is making love to Jenny in an easy, offhand sort of 
 way, and though, or, perhaps, hecxiuse he doesiiT care for her 
 much, is evidently delighting the young woman. She looks 
 round, with a pleased smile on her fresh, plump cheeks, and 
 turns slightly towards Heaven a sweet little retroussd nose, and 
 twiddles her fingers (most exquisitely these hands are drawn and 
 painted, by the way) in the most contented way. But, ah ! how 
 little does she heed Tommy, who, standing behind Jocky, reclin- 
 ing against a porch, is looking and longing for this light-hearted 
 Jenny. And, oh ! why does Tommy cast such sheep’s eyes upon 
 Jenny, when by her side sits Jessamy^ the tender and romantic, 
 the dark-eyed and raven-haired being, whose treasures of affection 
 are flung at heedless Tommy’s feet ? All the world is interested 
 in Jessamy ; her face is beautiful, her look of despairing love is 
 so exquisitely tender, that it touches every spectator; and the 
 ladies are unanimous in wondering how Tommy can throw himself 
 away upon that simpering Jenny, when such a superior creature 
 as Jessamy is to be had for the asking. But such is the way of 
 the world, and Tommy will marry, simply because everybody 
 tells him not. 
 
 Thus far for the sentiment of the picture. The details are very 
 good ; there is too much stippling and show of finish, perhaps, in the 
 handling, and the painting might have been more substantial and 
 lost nothing. But the colour is good, the group very well com- 
 posed, the variety of expression excellent. There is great passion, 
 as well as charming delicacy, in the disappointed maiden’s face ; 
 much fine appreciation of character in the easy, smiling triumph of 
 the rival ; and, although this sentence was commenced with the 
 express determination of rating Mr. Stone soundly, lo ! it is 
 finished without a word of blame. Well, let’s vent our anger on 
 the dog. That is very bad, and seems to have no more bones than 
 
216 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 an apple-dumpling. It is only because the artist has been paint- 
 ing disappointed lovers a great deal of late, that one is disposed to 
 grumble not at the work, but the want of variety of subject. 
 
 As a sentimental picture, the best and truest, to my taste, is 
 that by Mr. Webster, the ‘Portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Webster,^ 
 painted to celebrate their fiftieth wedding-day. Such a charming 
 old couple were never seen. There is delightful grace, sentiment, 
 and purity in these two gentle, kindly heads ; much more senti- 
 ment and grace than even in Mr. Eastlake’s ‘Heloise,’ a face 
 which the artist has painted over and over again ; a beautiful 
 woman, but tiresome, unearthly, unsubstantial, and no more like 
 Heloise than like the Duke of Wellington. If the late Mr. 
 Pope’s epistle be correct, Eloisa was a most unmistakable 
 woman ; this is a substanceless, passionless, solemn, mystical 
 apparition ; but I doubt if a woman be not the more poetical being 
 of the two. 
 
 Being on the subject of sentimental pictures, Mr. Delaroche’s 
 great ‘ Holy Family ’ must be mentioned here ; and, if there is 
 reason to quarrel with the unsatisfactory nature of English senti- 
 ment, in truth it appears that the French are not much better pro- 
 vided with the high poetical quality. This picture has all the 
 outside of poetry, all the costume of religion, all the prettiness and 
 primness of the new German dandy-pietistical school. It is an 
 agreeable compound of Correggio and Raphael with a strong dash 
 of Overbeck ; it is painted as clean and pretty as a tulip on a 
 dessert-plate, the lines made out so neatly that none can mistake 
 them. The drawing good, the female face as pretty and demure 
 as can be, her drapery of spotless blue, and the man’s of approved 
 red, the infant as pink as strawberries and cream, every leaf of the 
 tree SAveetly drawn, and the trunk of the most delicate dove- 
 coloured grey. All these merits the picture has ; it is a well- 
 appointed picture. But is that all ? Is that enough to make a 
 poet ? There are lines in the Oxford prize poems that are smooth 
 as Pope’s ; and it is notorious that, for colouring, there is no 
 painting like the Chinese. But I hope the French artists have 
 better men springing up among them than the president of the 
 French Academy at Rome. 
 
 Biard, the Hogarthian painter, whose slave-trade picture was 
 so noble, has sent us a couple of pieces, which both, in their way, 
 deserve merit. The one is an Arabian caravan moving over a 
 brickdust coloured desert, under a red, arid sky. The picture is 
 lifelike, and so far poetical that it seems to tell the truth. Then 
 there is a steam-boat disaster, with every variety of sea-sickness, 
 laughably painted. Shuddering soldiery, sprawling dandies, 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 217 
 
 Englishmen, Savoyards, guitars, lovers, monkeys — a dreadful con- 
 fusion of qualmish people, whose agonies will put the most 
 philanthropic observer into good - humour. Biard’s ‘ Havre 
 Packet ’ is much more praiseworthy in my mind than Delaroche’s 
 ‘ Holy Family ’ ; for I deny the merit of failing greatly in pictures, 
 the great merit is to succeed. There is no greater error, surely, 
 than that received dictum of the ambitious, to aim at high 
 things ; it is best to do what you mean to do ; better to kill a 
 crow than to miss an eagle. 
 
 As the French artists are sending in their works from across 
 the water, why, for the honour of England, will not some of our 
 painters let the Parisians know that here, too, are men whose 
 genius is worthy of appreciation ? They may be the best draughts- 
 men in the world, but they have no draughtsman like Maclise, 
 they have no colourist like Etty, they have no painter like 
 Mulready, above all, whose name I beg the printer to place in 
 the largest capitals, and to surround with a wreath of laurels. 
 Mr. Mulready was crowned in this Magazine once before. Here 
 again he is proclaimed. It looks like extravagance, or flattery, for 
 the blushing critic to tell his real mind about the ^ Whistonian 
 Controversy.^ 
 
 And yet, as the truth must be told, why not say it now at 
 once ? I believe this to be one of the finest cabinet pictures in 
 the world. It seems to me to possess an assemblage of excellences 
 so rare, to be in drawing so admirable, in expression so fine, in 
 finish so exquisite, in composition so beautiful, in humour and 
 beauty of expression so delightful, that I can’t but ask where is a 
 good picture if this be not one. And, in enumerating all the 
 above perfections I find I have forgotten the greatest of all, the 
 colour ; it is quite original this — brilliant, rich, astonishingly 
 luminous and intense. The pictures of Van Eyck are not more 
 brilliant in tone than this magnificent combination of blazing reds, 
 browns, and purples. I know of no scheme of colour like it, and 
 heartily trust that time will preserve it ; when this little picture, and 
 some of its fellows, will be purchased as eagerly as a Hemlinck or a 
 Gerald Douw is bought nowadays. If Mr. Mulready has a mind 
 to the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, he has but to send 
 this picture to Paris next year, and, with the recommendation of 
 Fraser’s Magazine^ the afiair is settled. Meanwhile it is pleasant to 
 know that the artist (although his work will fetch ten times as 
 much money a hundred years hence) has not been ill rewarded, as 
 times go, for his trouble and genius. 
 
 We have another great and original colourist among ns, as 
 luscious as Rubens, as rich almost as Titian, Mr. Etty ; and every 
 
218 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 year the exhibition sparkles with magnificent little canvases, the 
 works of this indefatigable strenuous admirer of rude Beauty. 
 The form is not quite so sublime as the colour in this artist’s paint- 
 ings ; the female figure is often rather too expansively treated, 
 it swells here and there to the proportions of the Caffrarian, 
 rather than the Medicean, Venus; but, in colour, little can be 
 conceived that is more voluptuously beautiful. This year intro- 
 duces us to one of the artist’s noblest compositions, a classical and 
 pictorial orgy^ as it were, — a magnificent vision of rich colours 
 and beautiful forms ; — a grand feast of sensual poetry. The 
 verses from Cormis^ which the painter has taken to illustrate, 
 have the same character — 
 
 All amidst the gardens fair 
 Of Hesperus and his daughters three, 
 
 That sing about the golden tree, 
 
 Along the crisped shades and bowers. 
 
 Revels the spruce and jocund spring. 
 
 Beds of hyacinths and roses. 
 
 Where young Adonis oft reposes, 
 
 Waxing well of his deep wound. 
 
 In slumber soft and on the ground 
 Sadly sits the Assyrian queen ; 
 
 But far above in spangled sheen 
 Celestial Cupid, her famed son, advanced. 
 
 Holds his dear Psyche sweet entranced. 
 
 It is a dream rather than a reality, the words and images 
 purposely indistinct and incoherent. In the same way the painter 
 has made the beautiful figures sweep before us in a haze of golden 
 sunshine. This picture is one of a series to be painted in fresco, 
 and to decorate the walls of a summer-house in the gardens of 
 Buckingham Palace, for which edifice Mr. Maclise and Mr. Leslie 
 have also made paintings. 
 
 That of Mr. Leslie’s is too homely, he is a prose painter. His 
 kind, buxom young lass has none of the look of Milton’s lady, 
 that charming compound of the saint and the fine lady — that 
 sweet impersonation of the chivalric mythology — an angel, but 
 with her sixteen quarterings — a countess descends from the skies. 
 Leslie’s lady has no such high breeding, the Comus above her 
 looks as if he might revel on ale ; a rustic seducer with an air of 
 rude, hob-nailed health. Nor are the demons and fantastic figures 
 introduced imaginative enough ; they are fellows with masks from 
 Covent Garden. Compare the two figures at the sides of the 
 picture with the two Cupids of Mr. Etty. In the former there is 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 219 
 
 no fancy. The latter are two flowers of poetry ; there are no 
 words to characterise those two delicious little figures, no more 
 than to describe a little air of Mozart, which, once heard, remains 
 with you for ever ; or a new flower, or a phrase of Keats or 
 Tennyson, which blooms out upon you suddenly, astonishing as 
 much as it pleases. Well, in endeavouring to account for his 
 admiration, the critic pumps for words in vain ; if he uses such as 
 he finds, he runs the risk of being considered intolerably pert and 
 affected ; silent pleasure, therefore, best beseems him ; but this I 
 know, that were my humble recommendations attended to at 
 court, when the pictures are put in the pleasure-house, her sacred 
 majesty, giving a splendid banquet to welcome them and the 
 painters, should touch Mr. Etty on the left shoulder, and say, 
 ‘ Kise, my knight of the Bath, for painting the left-hand Cupid ; 
 and the Emperor of Kussia (being likewise present) should tap 
 him on the right shoulder, exclaiming, ‘Eise, my knight of the 
 Eagle, for the left-hand Cupid.’ 
 
 Mr. Maclise’s Comus picture is wonderful for the variety of its 
 design, and has, too, a high poetry of its own. All the figures 
 are here still and solemn as in a tableau ; the lady still on her 
 unearthly snaky chair, Sabrina still stooping over her. On one 
 side the brothers, and opposite the solemn attendant spirit ; round 
 these interminable groups and vistas of fairy beings, twining in a 
 thousand attitudes of grace, and sparkling white and bloodless 
 against a leaden blue sky. It is the most poetical of the artist’s 
 pictures, the most extraordinary exhibition of his proper skill. 
 Is it true that the artists are only to receive three hundred guineas 
 apiece for these noble compositions ? Why, a print-seller would 
 give more, and artists should not be allowed to paint simply for 
 the honour of decorating a royal summer-house. 
 
 Among the poetical pictures of the Exhibition should be 
 mentioned with especial praise Mr. Cope’s delightful ‘ Charity,’ 
 than the female figures in which Raphael scarce painted anything 
 more charmingly beautiful. And Mr. Cope has this merit that 
 his work is no prim imitation of the stiff old Cimabue and Giotto 
 manner, no aping of the crisp draperies and hard outlines of the 
 missal illuminations, without which the religious artist would 
 have us believe religious expression is impossible. It is pleasant 
 after seeing the wretched caricature of the old-world usages which 
 stare us in the face in every quarter of London now — little dumpy 
 Saxon chapels built in raw brick, spick and span handbox churches 
 of the pointed Korman style for Cockneys in zephyr coats to 
 assemble in, new old painted windows of the twelfth century, 
 tessellated pavements of the Byzantine school, gimcrack imitations 
 
220 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 of the Golden Legend printed with red letters, and crosses, and 
 quaint figures stolen out of Norman missals — to find artists aim- 
 ing at the Beautiful and Pure without thinking it necessary to 
 resort to these paltry archaeological quackeries, which have no 
 Faith, no Truth, no Life in them ; but which give us ceremony 
 in lieu of reality, and insist on forms as if they were the conditions 
 of belief. 
 
 Lest the reader should misunderstand the cause of this anger, 
 we beg him to take the trouble to cross Pall Mall to St. James’s 
 Street, where objects of art are likewise exhibited ; he will see 
 the reason of our wrath. Here are all the ornamental artists 
 of England sending in their works, and what are they? — All 
 imitations. The Alhambra here ; the Temple Church there ; 
 here a Gothic Saint; yonder a Saxon altar - rail ; farther on a 
 sprawling rococo of Louis XY. ; all worked neatly and cleverly 
 enough, but with no originality, no honesty of thought. The 
 twelfth century revived in Mr. Crockford’s bazaar, forsooth ! with 
 examples of every century except our own. It would be worth 
 while for some one to write an essay, shewing how astonishingly 
 Sir Walter Scott ^ has influenced the world ; how he changed the 
 character of novelists, then of historians, whom he brought from 
 their philosophy to the study of pageantry and costume ; how the 
 artists then began to fall back into the middle ages and the 
 architects to follow; until now behold Ave haA^e Mr. Newman and 
 his congregation of Littlemore marching out with taper and crosier, 
 and falling down to Avorship St. Willibald, and St. Winnibald, 
 and St. Walberga the Saxon virgin. But Mr. Cope’s picture is 
 leading the reader rather farther than a critique about exhibitions 
 has any right to divert him, and let us Avalk soberly back to 
 Trafalgar Square. 
 
 Remark the beautiful figures of the children in Mr. Cope’s 
 picture ( 276 ), the fainting one, and the golden-haired infant at the 
 gate. It is a noble and touching Scripture illustration. The 
 artist’s other picture, ‘ Genevieve,’ is not so successful ; the faces 
 seem to have been painted ftom a dirty palette, the evening tints 
 of the sky are as smoky as a sunset in St. James’s Park ; the 
 composition unpleasant, and not enough to fill the surface of 
 canvas. 
 
 Mr. Herbert’s picture of ^ The Trial of the Seven Bishops ’ is 
 painted Avith better attention to costume than most English 
 painters are disposed to pay. The characters in our artist’s 
 
 ^ Or more properly Goethe. Gotz von Berlichingen was the fatter of the 
 Scottish romances, and Scott remained constant to that mode, while the 
 greater artist tried a thousand others. 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 221 
 
 history-pieces, as indeed on our theatres, do not look commonly 
 accustomed to the dresses which they assume ; wear them 
 awkwardly, take liberties of alteration and adjustment, and spoil 
 thereby the truth of the delineation. The French artists, on the 
 canvas or the boards, understand this branch of their art much 
 better. Look at M. Biard’s ‘ Mecca Pilgrims,’ how carefully and 
 accurately they are attired; or go to the French play and see 
 Cartigny in a Hogarthian dress. He wears it as though he had 
 been born a hundred years back — looks the old marquess to per- 
 fection. In this attention to dress, Mr. Herbert’s picture is very 
 praiseworthy ; the men are quite at home in their quaint coats 
 and periwigs of James the Second’s time ; the ladies at ease in 
 their stiff, long-waisted gowns, their fans, and their queer caps 
 and patches. And the picture is pleasing from the extreme 
 brightness and cleanliness of the painting. All looks as neat and 
 fresh as Sam Pepys when he turned out in his new suit, his lady 
 in her satin and brocade. But here the praise must stop. The 
 great concourse of people delineated, the bishops and the jury, 
 the judges and the sheriffs, the halberdiers and the fine ladies, 
 seem very little interested in the transaction in which they are 
 engaged, and look as if they were assembled rather for show than 
 business. Hor, indeed, is the artist much in fault. Painters 
 have not fair-play in these parade pictures. It is only with us 
 that Reform-banquets, or views of the House of Lords at the 
 passing of the Slopperton Railway bill, or Coronation Processions, 
 obtain favour ; in which vast numbers of public characters are 
 grouped unreally together, and politics are made to give an interest 
 to art. 
 
 Mr. Herbert’s picture of ‘ Sir Thomas Moore and his Daughter 
 watching from the prisoner’s room in the Tower four Monks led 
 away to Execution,’ is the most elaborate, perhaps, but the very 
 best of this painter’s works. It is full of grace, and sentiment, 
 and religious unction. You see that the painter’s heart is in the 
 scenes which he represents. The countenances of the two figures 
 are finely conceived ; the sorrowful, anxious beauty of the 
 daughter’s face, the resigned humility of the martyr at her side, 
 and the accessories or properties of the pious little drama are 
 cleverly and poetically introduced ; such as mystic sentences of 
 hope and trust inscribed by former sufferers on the walls, the 
 prisoner’s rosary and book of prayers to the Virgin that lie on 
 his bed. These types and emblems of the main story are not 
 obtruded, but serve to increase the interest of the action ; just as 
 you hear in a concerted piece of music a single instrument playing 
 its little plaintive part alone, and yet belonging to the whole. 
 
222 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 If you want to see a picture where costume is not represented, 
 behold Mr. Lauder’s ‘ Claverhouse ordering Morton to Execution.’ 
 There sits Claverhouse in the centre in a Kean wig and ringlets, 
 such as was never worn in any age of this world, except at the 
 theatre in 181 6 , and he scowls with a true melodramatic ferocity ; 
 and he lifts a sign-post of a finger towards Morton, who forthwith 
 begins to writhe and struggle into an attitude in the midst of a 
 group of subordinate, cuirassed, buff-coated gentry. Morton is 
 represented in tights, slippers, and a tunic, something after the 
 fashion of Retzch’s figures in Faust (which are refinements of 
 costumes worn a century and a half before the days when Charles 
 disported at Tillietudlem) ; and he, too, must proceed to scowl 
 and frown ‘with a flashing eye and a distended nostril,’ as they 
 say in the novels, — -as Gomersal scowls at Widdicomb before the 
 combat between those two chiefs begins ; and while they are 
 measuring each other according to the stage wont, from the toe 
 of the yellow boot up to the tip of the stage wig. There is a 
 tragedy heroine in Mr. Lauder’s picture striking her attitude too, 
 to complete this scene. It is entirely unnatural, theatrical, of 
 the Davidgian, nay Richardsonian drama, and all such attempts 
 at effect must be reprehended by the stern critic. When such a 
 cool practitioner as Claverhouse ordered a gentleman to be shot, 
 he would not put himself into an attitude ; when such a quiet 
 gentleman as Morton received the imj^leasant communication in 
 the midst of a company of grenadiers who must overpower him, 
 and of ladies to Avhom his resistance would be unpleasant, he 
 would act like a man and go out quietly, not stop to rant and 
 fume like a fellow in a booth. I believe it is in Mr. Henningsen’s 
 book that there is a story of Zumalacarreguy, Don Carlos’s Dundee, 
 who, sitting at table with a Christine prisoner, smoking cigars 
 and playing picquet very quietly, received a communication which 
 he handed over to the Christino. ‘Your people,’ says he, ‘have 
 shot one of my officers, and I have promised reprisals ; I am sorry 
 to say, my dear general, that I must execute you in twenty 
 minutes ! ’ And so the two gentlemen finished their game at 
 picquet, and parted company — the one to inspect his lines, the 
 other for the courtyard hard by, where a file of grenadiers was 
 waiting to receive his excellency — with mutual politeness and 
 regret. It was the fortune of war. There was no help for it ; 
 no need of ranting and stamping, which would ill become any 
 person of good-breeding. 
 
 The Scotch artists have a tragic taste ; and we should mention 
 with especial praise Mr. Duncan’s picture with the agreeable 
 epigraph, ‘ She set the bairn on the ground and tied up his head, 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 223 
 
 and straighted his body, and covered him with her plaid, and lay 
 down and wept over him/ The extract is from Walker’s Life of 
 Peden ; the martyrdom was done on the body of a boy by one of 
 those bloody troopers whom we have seen in Mr. Lauder’s picture 
 carrying off poor shrieking Morton. Mr. Duncan’s picture is very 
 fine — dark, rich, and deep in sentiment ; the woman is painted 
 with some of Kubens’ swelling lines (such as may be seen in some 
 of his best Magdalens) and with their rich tones of grey. If a 
 certain extremely heavy Cupid poising in the air by a miracle be 
 the other picture of Mr. Duncan’s, it can be only said that his 
 tragedy is better than his lightsome compositions — an arrow from 
 yonder lad would bruise the recipient black and blue. 
 
 Another admirable picture of a Scotch artist is 427, ^ The 
 Highland Lament,’ by Alexander Johnston. It is a shame to put 
 such a picture in such a place. It hangs on the ground almost 
 invisible, while dozens of tawdry portraits are staring at you on 
 the line. Could Mr. Johnston’s picture be but seen properly, its 
 great beauty and merit would not fail to strike hundreds of 
 visitors who pass it over now. A Highland piper comes running 
 forward, playing some wild laments on his dismal instrument ; 
 the women follow after, wailing and sad ; the mournful procession 
 winds over a dismal moor. The picture is as clever for its fine 
 treatment and colour, for the grace and action of the figures, as 
 it is curious as an illustration of national manners. 
 
 In speaking of the Scotch painters, the Wilkie-like pictures of 
 Mr. Fraser, with their peculiar smeary manner, their richness of 
 tone, and their pleasant effect and humour, should not be passed 
 over ; while those of Mr. Geddes and Sir William Allan may be 
 omitted with perfect propriety. The latter represents her majesty 
 and Prince Albert perched on a rock ; the former has a figure 
 from Walter Scott, of very little interest to any but the parties 
 concerned. 
 
 Among the Irish painters we remark two portraits by Mr. 
 Crowley, representing Mrs. Aikenhead, superiore^ss of the Sisters 
 of Charity in Ireland, who gives a very favourable picture of the 
 Society — for it is impossible to conceive an abbess more comfortable, 
 kind, and healthy-looking ; and a portrait of Dr. Murray, Koman 
 Catholic archbishop of Dublin, not a good picture of a fine, 
 benevolent and venerable head. We do not know whether the 
 painter of 149, ^An Irish Peasant awaiting her Husband’s 
 return,’ Mr. Anthony, is an Irishman ; but it is a pretty sad 
 picture, which well characterises the poverty, the affection, and 
 the wretchedness of the poor Irish cabin, and tells sweetly 
 and modestly a plaintive story. The largest work in the 
 
224 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 exhibition is from the pencil of an Irishman, Mr. Leahy, ‘ Lady 
 Jane Grey praying before execution.' One cannot but admire the 
 courage of artists who paint great works upon these tragic 
 subjects ; great works quite unfitted for any private room, and 
 scarcely suited to any public one. But, large as it is, it may be 
 said (without any playing upon words) that the work grows upon 
 estimation. The painting is hard and incomplete ; but the 
 principal figure excellent ; the face, especially, is finely painted, 
 and full of great beauty. Also, in the Irish pictures may be 
 included Mr. Solomon Hart's Persian gentleman smoking a 
 calahan — a sly hit at the learned sergeant, member for Cork, 
 who has often done the same thing. 
 
 Mr. Maclise's little scene from Undine does not seem to us 
 German in character, as some of the critics call it, because it is 
 clear and hard in line. What German artist is there who can 
 draw with this astonishing vigour, precision, and variety of 
 attitude ? The picture is one of admirable and delightful fancy. 
 The swarms of solemn little fairies crowding round Undine and 
 her somewhat theatrical lover may keep a spectator for hours 
 employed in pleasure and wonder. They look to be the real 
 portraits of the little people, sketched by the painter in some 
 visit to their country. There is, especially on a branch in the 
 top corner of the picture, a conversation going on between a fairy 
 and a squirrel (who is a fairy too) which must have been taken 
 from nature, or Mother Bunch's delightful super-nature. How 
 awful their great glassy blue eyes are ! How they peer out from 
 under grass, and out of flowers, and from twigs and branches, 
 and swing off over the tree-top, singing shrill little fairy choruses 1 
 We must have the Fairy Tales illustrated by this gentleman, that 
 is clear ; he is the only person, except Tieck, of Dresden, who 
 knows anything about them. Yes, there is some one else; and 
 a word may be introduced here in welcome to the admirable 
 young designer, whose hand has lately been employed to illustrate 
 the columns of our facetious friend (and the friend of everybody) 
 Punch, This young artist (who has avowed his name, a very 
 well-known one, that of Doyle) has poured into Punches columns 
 a series of drawings quite extraordinary for their fancy, their 
 variety, their beauty, and fun. It is the true genius of fairy-land, 
 of burlesque which never loses sight of beauty. Friend Punches 
 very wrapper is quite a marvel in this way, at which we can 
 never look without discovering some new little quip of humour or 
 pleasant frolic of grace. 
 
 And if we have had reason to complain of Mr. Leslie's ‘ Comus ' 
 as deficient in poetry, what person is there that will not welcome 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 225 
 
 ‘ Sancho/ although we have seen him before almost in the same 
 attitude, employed in the same way, recounting his adventures to 
 the kind, smiling duchess, as she sits in state ? There is only the 
 sour old duenna, who refuses to be amused, and nothing has ever 
 amused her these sixty years. But the ladies are all charmed, 
 and tittering with one another ; the black slave who leans against 
 the pillar has gone oft* in an honest fit of downright laughter. 
 Even the little dog, the wonderful little Blenheim, by the lady’s 
 side, would laugh if she could (but, alas ! it is impossible), as the 
 other little dog is said to have done on the singular occasion when 
 ‘ the cow jumped over the moon.’ ^ The glory of dulness is in 
 Sancho’s face. I don’t believe there is a man in the world — no, 
 not even in the House of Commons — so stupid as that. On the 
 Whig side there is, certainly, — but no, it is best not to make 
 comparisons which fall short of the mark. This is, indeed, the 
 Sancho that Cervantes drew. 
 
 Although the editor of this Magazine had made a solemn con- 
 dition with the writer of this notice that no pictures taken from 
 The Vicar of Wakefield or Gil Bias should, by any favour or 
 pretence, be noticed in the review ; yet, as the great picture of Mr. 
 Mulready compelled the infraction of the rule, rushing through 
 our resolve by the indomitable force of genius, we must, as the 
 line is broken, present other Vicars, Thornhills, and Olivias, to 
 walk in aitid promenade themselves in our columns, in spite of the 
 vain placards at the entrance, Wicaes of Wakefield not ad- 
 mitted.’ In the first place, let the Rev. Dr. Primrose and Miss 
 Primrose walk up in Mr. Hollins’ company. The vicar is mildly 
 expostulating with his daughter regarding the attentions of Squire 
 Thornhill. He looks mildly, too mild ; she looks ill-humoured, 
 very sulky. Is it about the scolding, or the squire ? The figures 
 are very nicely painted ; but they do not look accustomed (the 
 lady especially) to the dresses they wear. After them come Mrs. 
 Primrose, the Misses, and the young Masters Primrose, presented 
 by Mr. Frith in his pretty picture (491). Squire Thornhill sits 
 at his ease, and recounts his town adventures to the ladies ; the 
 beautiful Olivia is quite lost in love with the slim red-coated 
 dandy ; her sister is listening with respect ; but above all, the old 
 lady and children hearken with wonder. These latter are charm- 
 ing figures, as, indeed, are all in the picture. As for Gil Bias, — 
 but we shall be resolute about kim. Certain Gil Bias there are in 
 the exhibition eating ollapodridas, and what not. lYot a word, 
 however, shall be said regarding any one of them. 
 
 ^ Qualia jorospiciens Catulus ferit cethera risu 
 Ipsaque trans lunce cornua Vacca salit . — Lucretius. 
 
226 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Among the figure-pieces Mr. Ward^s ‘ Lafleur ’ must not be for- 
 gotten, which is pleasant, lively, and smartly drawn and painted ; 
 nor Mr. Gilbert's ‘Pear-tree Well,’ which contains three graceful 
 classical figures, which are rich in effect and colour ; nor Mr. 
 Macinnes’ good picture of Luther listening to the sacred ballad 
 (the reformer is shut up in the octagon-room) ; nor a picture of 
 Oliver Goldsmith on his rambles, playing the ffute at a peasant’s 
 door, in which the colour is very pretty ; the character of the 
 French peasants not French at all, and the poet’s figure easy, 
 correct, and well drawn. 
 
 Among more serious subjects may be mentioned with praise Mr. 
 Dyce’s two fierce figures, representing King Joash shooting the 
 arrow of deliverance, which if the critics call ‘ French,’ because 
 they are well and carefully drawn, Mr. Dyce may be proud of 
 being a Frenchman. Mr. Lauder’s ‘ Wise and Foolish Virgins ’ 
 is a fine composition ; the colour sombre and mysterious ; some 
 of the figures extremely graceful, and the sentiment of the picture 
 excellent. This is a picture which would infallibly have had a 
 chance of a prize, if the poor, dear Art-Union were free to act. 
 
 Mr. Elmore’s ‘ Rienzi addressing the People ’ is one of the 
 very best pictures in the gallery. It is well and agreeably 
 coloured, bright, pleasing, and airy. A group of people are gathered 
 round the tribune, who addresses them among Roman ruins under 
 a clear blue sky. The grouping is very good ; the figures rich 
 and picturesque in attitude and costume. There is a group in 
 front of a mother and child, who are thinking of anything but 
 Rienzi and liberty ; who, perhaps, ought not to be so prominent, 
 as they take away from the purpose of the picture, but who are 
 beautiful wherever they are. And the picture is further to be 
 remarked for the clear, steady, and honest painting which dis- 
 tinguishes it. 
 
 What is to be said of Mr. Poole’s ‘ Moors beleaguered in 
 Valencia?’ A clever hideous picture in the very worst taste; 
 disease and desperation characteristically illustrated. The 
 Spaniards beleaguer the town, and everybody is starving. Mothers 
 with dry breasts unable to nourish infants ; old men, with lean 
 ribs and blood-shot eyes, moaning on the pavement ; brown young 
 skeletons pacing up and down the rampart, som^e raving, all 
 desperate. Such is the agreeable theme which the painter has 
 taken up. It is worse than last year, when the artist only 
 painted the plague of London. Some did recover from that. All 
 these Moors will be dead before another day, and the vultures 
 will fatten on their lean carcasses, and pick out their red-hot 
 eyeballs. Why do young men indulge in these horrors ? Young 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 227 
 
 poets and romancers often do so and fancy they are exhibiting 
 ‘ power ^ ; whereas nothing is so easy. Any man with mere 
 instinct can succeed in the brutal in art. The coarse fury of 
 Zurbaran and Alorales is as far below the sweet and beneficent 
 calm of Murillo as a butcher is beneath a hero. DonT let us 
 have any more of these hideous exhibitions — these Ghoul festivals. 
 It may be remembered that Amina in The Arabian Nights^ who 
 liked churchyard suppers, could only eat a grain of rice when she 
 came to natural food. There is a good deal of sly satire in the 
 apologue which might be applied to many (especially French) 
 literary and pictorial artists of the convulsionary school. 
 
 We must not take leave of the compositions without mentioning 
 Mr. Landseer’s wonderful ^ Shoeing ’ and ‘ Stag ’ ; the latter the 
 most poetical, the former the most dexterous, perhaps, of the 
 works of this accomplished painter. The latter picture, at a 
 little distance, expands almost into the size of nature. The 
 enormous stag by the side of a great blue northern lake stalks 
 over the snow down to the shore, whither his mate is coming 
 through the water to join him. Snowy mountains bend round 
 the lonely landscape, the stars are shining out keenly in the deep 
 icy blue overhead ; in a word, your teeth begin to chatter as you 
 look at the picture, and it can’t properly be seen without a great- 
 coat. The donkey and the horse in the shoeing picture are 
 prodigious imitations of nature ; the blacksmith only becomes 
 impalpable. There is a charming portrait in the great room by 
 the same artist in which the same defect may be remarked. A 
 lady is represented with two dogs in her lap ; the dogs look real ; 
 the lady a thin unsubstantial vision of a beautiful woman. You 
 ought to see the landscape through her. 
 
 Amongst the landscape-painters, Mr. Stanfield has really painted 
 this year better than any former year — a difficult matter. The 
 pictures are admirable, the drawing of the water wonderful, the 
 look of freshness, and breeze, and motion conveyed with delightful 
 skill. All Mr. Creswick’s pictures will be seen with pleasure, 
 especially the delicious ‘ Summer Evening ’ ; the most airy and 
 clear, and also the most poetical of his landscapes. The fine 
 ‘ Evening Scene ’ of Danby also seems to have the extent and 
 splendour, and to suggest the solemn feelings of a vast mountain- 
 scene at sunset. The admirers of Sir Augustus Callcott’s soft, 
 golden landscapes will here find some of his most delightful 
 pieces. Mr. Roberts has painted his best in his Nile scene, and 
 his French architectural pieces are of scarce inferior merit. Mr. 
 Lee, Mr. Witherington, and Mr. Leitch have contributed works, 
 showing all their well-known qualities and skill. And as for Mr. 
 
228 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 Turner, he has out-prodigied almost all former prodigies. He has 
 made a picture with real rain, behind which is real sunshine, and 
 you expect a rainbow every minute. Meanwhile, there comes a 
 train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an 
 hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it 
 should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross 
 through the wall opposite. All those wonders are performed 
 with means not less wonderful than the effects are. The rain, in 
 the astounding picture called ‘ Rain — Steam — Speed,’ is composed 
 of dabs of dirty putty dapped on to the canvas with a trowel ; 
 the sunshine scintillates out of very thick, smeary lumps of 
 chrome yellow. The shadows are produced by cool tones of 
 crimson lake, and quiet glazings of vermilion, although the fire in 
 the steam-engine looks as if it were red. I am not prepared to 
 say that it is not painted with cobalt and pea-green. And as for 
 the manner in which tlie ‘ Speed. ’ is done, of that the less said 
 the better, — only it is a positive fact that there is a steam coach 
 going fifty miles an hour. The world has never seen anything 
 like this picture. 
 
 In respect of the portraits of the Exhibition, if Royal 
 Academicians will take the word of The Morning Post^ The 
 Morning Chronicle^ The Spectator, and, far above all, of Frase7'‘^s 
 Magazine, they will pause a little before they hang such a noble 
 portrait as that of W. Conyngham, Esq., by Samuel Lawrence, * 
 away out of sight, while some of their own paltry canvases meet 
 the spectator nose to nose. The man with the glove of Titian in 
 the Louvre has evidently inspired Mr. Lawrence, and his picture 
 is so far an imitation ; but what then ? it is better to imitate 
 great things well, than to imitate a simpering^ barber’s dummy, 
 like No. 10,000, let us say, or to perpetrate yonder horror, weak, 
 but oh ! how heavy, smeared, flat, pink and red, grinning, ill- 
 drawn portraits (such as Nos. 99,999 and 99,999^) which the old 
 Academicians perpetrate. You are right to keep the best picture 
 in the room out of the way, to be sure ; it would sternly frown 
 your simpering unfortunates out of countenance ; but let us have 
 at least a chance of seeing the good picture. Have one room, 
 say, for the Academicians, and another for the clever artists. 
 Diminish your nuinber of exhibited pictures to six, if you like, 
 but give the young men a chance. It is pitiful to see their 
 works pushed out of sight, and to be offered v/hat you give us in 
 exchange. 
 
 This does not apply to all the esquires who paint portraits ; 
 but, v\dth regard to the names of the delinquents, it is best to be 
 silent, lest a showing up of them should have a terrible effect on 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 229 
 
 the otherwise worthy men, and drive them to an untimely despera- 
 tion. So I shall say little about the portraits, mentioning merely 
 that Mr. Grant has one or two, a small one especially, of great 
 beauty and lady -like grace ; and one very bad one, such as that 
 of Lord Forrester. Mr. Pickersgill has some good heads ; the 
 little portrait of Mr. Ainsworth by Mr. Maclise is as clever 
 and like as the artist knows how to make it. Mr. Middleton 
 has some female heads especially beautiful. Mrs. Carpenter is 
 one of the most manly painters in the Exhibition ; and if you 
 v/alk into the miniature room, you may look at the delicious 
 little gems from the pencil of Sir William Boss, those still more 
 graceful and poetical by Mr. Thorburn, and the delightful cox- 
 combries of Mr. Chalon. I have found out a proper task for that 
 gentleman, and hereby propose that he should illustrate Coningshy. 
 
 In the statue-room, Mr. Gibson’s classic group attracts atten- 
 tion and deserves praise ; and the busts of Parker, Macdonald, 
 Behnes, and other well-known portrait sculptors have all their 
 usual finish, skill and charm. 
 
 At the Water-Colour Gallery the pleased spectator lingers as 
 usual delighted, surrounded by the pleasantest drawings and the 
 most genteel company. It requires no small courage to walk 
 through that avenue of plush breeches with which the lobby is 
 lined, and to pass two files of whiskered men in canes and huge 
 calves, who contemptuously regard us poor fellows with Bluchers 
 and gingham umbrellas. But these passed, you are in the best 
 society. Bishops, I have remarked, frequent this Gallery in 
 venerable numbers ; likewise dignified clergymen with rosettes ; 
 Quakeresses, also, in dove-coloured silks meekly changing colour ; 
 squires and their families from the country ; and it is a fact that 
 you never can enter the Gallery without seeing a wonderfully 
 pretty girl. This fact merits to be generally known, and is alone 
 worth the price of the article. 
 
 I suspect that there are some people from the country who 
 admire Mr. Pont still ; those fresh, honest, unalloyed country 
 appetites! There are the Prout Nurembergs and Venices still; 
 the awnings, the waterposts, and the red-capped bargemen drawn 
 with a reed pen ; but we hlash young roues about London get 
 tired of these simple dishes, and must have more excitement. 
 There, too, are Mr. Hill’s stags with pink stomachs, his spinach 
 pastures and mottled farm-houses ; also innumerable windy downs 
 and heaths by Mr. Copley Fielding ; — in the which breezy flats I 
 have so often wandered before with burnt-sienna ploughboys, that 
 the walk is no longer tempting. 
 
230 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Not so, however, the marine pieces of Mr. Bentley. That 
 gentleman, to our thinking, has never painted so well. Witness 
 his ‘ Indiaman towed up the Thames ^ (53), his ‘ Signalling the 
 Pilot ^ (161), and his admirable view of ‘ Mount St. Michel ’ (127), 
 in which the vessel quite dances and falls on the water. He 
 deserves to divide the prize with Mr. Stanfield at the Academy. 
 
 All the works of a clever young landscape-painter, Mr. G. A. 
 Fripp, may be looked at with pleasure ; they show great talent, 
 no small dexterity and genuine enthusiastic love of nature. Mr. 
 Alfred Fripp, a figure painter, merits likewise very much praise ; 
 his works are not complete as yet, but his style is thoughtful, 
 dramatic, and original. 
 
 Mr. Hunks dramas of one or two characters are as entertaining 
 and curious as ever. His ‘ Outcast ^ is amazingly fine, and tragic 
 in character. His ‘ Sick Cigar-boy,’ a wonderful delineation of 
 nausea. Look at the picture of the toilette, in which, with the 
 parlour-tongs, Betty, the housemaid, is curling little miss’s hair : 
 there is a dish of yellow soap in that drawing, and an old comb 
 and brush, the fidelity of which make the delicate beholder 
 shudder. On one of the screens there are some ‘ birds’ nests,’ out 
 of which I am surprised no spectator has yet stolen any of the 
 eggs — you have but to stoop down and take them. 
 
 Mr. Taylor’s delightful drawings are even more than ordinarily 
 clever. His ‘ Houseless Wanderers ’ is worthy of Hogarth in 
 humour ; most deliciously coloured and treated. ‘ The Gleaner ’ 
 is full of sunshine ; the larder quite a curiosity as showing the 
 ease, truth, and dexterity with which the artist washes in his 
 flowing delineations from nature. In his dogs, you don’t know 
 which most to admire, the fidelity with which the animals are 
 painted, or the ease with which they are done. 
 
 This gift of facility Mr. Cattermole also possesses to an amaz- 
 ing extent. As pieces of effect, his ‘ Porch ’ and ‘ Book-Shooting ’ 
 are as wonderful as they are pleasing. His large picture of 
 ^ Monks in a Befectory ’ is very fine ; rich, original and sober in 
 colour ; excellent in sentiment and general grouping ; in individual 
 attitude and drawing not sufficiently correct. As the figures are 
 much smaller than that in the refectory, these faults are less 
 visible in the magnificent ‘ Battle for the Bridge,’ a composition, 
 perhaps, the most complete that the artist has yet produced. 
 The landscape is painted as grandly as Salvator ; the sky wonder- 
 fully airy, the sunshine shining through the glades of the wood, 
 the huge trees rocking and swaying as the breeze rushes by them ; 
 the battling figures are full of hurry, fire and tumult. All these 
 things are rather indicated by the painter than defined by him ; 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 231 
 
 hut such hints are enough from such a genius. The charmed and 
 captivated imagination is quite ready to supply what else is wanting. 
 
 Mr. Frederick Kash has some unpretending, homely, exquisitely 
 faithful scenes in the Khine country. ‘ Boppart,’ ‘ Bacharach,^ 
 etc., of which a sojourner in those charming districts will always 
 be glad to have a reminiscence. Mr. Joseph Nash has not some 
 of the cleverest of his mannerism, nor Mr. Lake Price the best of 
 his smart, dandified, utterly unnatural exteriors. By far the best 
 designs of this kind are the Windsor and Buckingham Palace 
 sketches of Mr. Douglas Morison, executed with curious fidelity 
 and skill. There is the dining hall in Buckingham Palace, with 
 all the portraits, all the candles in all the chandeliers ; the China 
 gimcracks over the mantelpiece, the dinner table set out, the 
 napkins folded mitrewise, the round water glasses, the sherry 
 glasses, the champagne ditto, and all in a space not so big as two 
 pages of this Magazine. There is the Queen’s own chamber at 
 Windsor, her Majesty’s piano, her royal writing table, an escritoire 
 with pigeon holes, where the august papers are probably kept ; 
 and very curious, clever, and ugly all these pictures of furniture 
 are too, and will be a model for the avoidance of upholsterers 
 in coming ages. 
 
 Mr. John William Wright’s sweet female figures must not be 
 passed over ; nor the pleasant Stothard-like drawings of his 
 veteran namesake. The ‘ Gripsies ’ of Mr. Oakley will also be 
 looked at with pleasure ; and this gentleman may be complimented 
 as likely to rival the Kichmonds and the Chalons ‘in another 
 place,’ where may be seen a very good full-length portrait drawn 
 by him. 
 
 The exhibition of the New Society of Water-Colour Painters 
 has grown to be quite as handsome and agreeable as that of its 
 mamma, the old society in Pall Mall East. Those who remember 
 the first ventures of this little band of painters, to whom the 
 gates of the elder gallery were hopelessly shut, must be glad to 
 see the progress the younger branch had made ; and we have 
 every reason to congratulate ourselves that instead of one pleasant 
 exhibition annually, the amateur can recreate himself now with 
 two. Many of the pictures here are of very great merit. 
 
 Mr. Warren’s Egyptian pictures are clever, and only need to 
 be agreeable where he takes a pretty subject, such as that of the 
 ‘Egyptian Lady’ (150); his work is pretty sure to be followed 
 by that welcome little ticket of emerald green in the corner, 
 which announces that a purchaser has made his appearance. But 
 the eye is little interested by views of yellow deserts and sheikhs, 
 and woolly-headed warriors with ugly wooden swords. 
 
232 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 And yet mere taste, grace, and beauty, won’t always succeed ; 
 witness Mr. Absolon’s drawings, of which few — far too few — 
 boast the green seal, and which are one and all of them charming. 
 There is one in the first room from The V-c-r of W-kef-ld (we 
 are determined not to write that name again), which is delightfully 
 composed, and a fresh happy picture of a country fete. ‘ The 
 Dartmoor Turf-gatherers ’ (87) is still better; the picture is full 
 of air, grace, pretty drawing, and brilliant colour, and yet no 
 green seal. ‘A little Sulky,’ ^ The Devonshire Cottage Door,’ 
 ‘ The Widow on the Stile,’ ‘ The Stocking-knitter,’ are all, too, 
 excellent in their way, and bear the artist’s cachet of gentle and 
 amiable grace. But the drawings, in point of execution, do not 
 go far enough ; they are not sufficiently bright to attract the eyes 
 of that great and respectable body of amateurs who love no end 
 of cobalt, carmine, stippling, and plenty of emerald green, and ver- 
 milion ; they are not made out sufficiently in line to rank as pictures. 
 
 Behold how Mr. Corbould can work when he likes — how he 
 can work you off the carmine stippling ! In his large piece, ‘ The 
 Britons deploring the Departure of the Romans,’ there is much 
 very fine and extraordinary cleverness of pencil. Witness the 
 draperies of the two women, which are painted with so much 
 cleverness and beauty, that indeed, one regrets that one of them 
 has not got a little drapery more. The same tender regret 
 pervades the bosom while looking at that of Joan of Arc, ‘while 
 engaged in the servile offices of her situation as a menial at an 
 inn, ruminating upon the distressing state of France.’ Her 
 ‘ servile situation ’ seems to be that of an ostler at the establish- 
 ment in question, for she is leading down a couple of animals to 
 drink; and as for ‘the distressing state of France,’ it ought not, 
 surely, to affect such a fat little comfortable simple -looking 
 undressed body. Bating the figure of Joan, who looks as pretty 
 as a young lady out of the last novel, bating, I say, baiting Joan, 
 who never rode horses, depend on’t, in that genteel way, the 
 picture is exceedingly skilful, and much better in colour than Mr. 
 Corbould’s former works. 
 
 Mr. Wehnert’s great drawing is a failure, but an honourable 
 defeat. It shews great power and mastery over the material 
 with which he works. He has two pretty German figures in the 
 fore-room: ‘The Innkeeper’s Daughter’ (38) and ‘ Perdita and 
 Florizel ’ (316). Perhaps he is the author of the pretty arabesques 
 with which the Society have this year ornamented their list of 
 pictures ; he has a German name, and English artists can have 
 no need to be copying from the Dusseldorf’s embellishments to 
 decorate their catalogues. 
 
MAY GAMBOLS 
 
 23 : 
 
 Mr. Haghe’s great drawing of the ‘ Death of Zurbarab ^ is not 
 interesting from any peculiar fineness of expression in the faces of 
 the actors who figure in this gloomy scene ; but it is largely and 
 boldly painted, in deep sombre washes of colours, with none of 
 the niggling prettinesses to which artists in water colours seem 
 forced to resort in order to bring their pictures to a high state of 
 finish. Here the figures and the draperies look as if they were 
 laid down at once with a bold yet careful certainty of hand. The 
 effect of the piece is very fine, the figures grandly grouped. 
 Among all the water-colour painters we know of none who can 
 wield the brush like Mr. Haghe, with his skill, his breadth, and 
 his certainty. 
 
 Mr. Jenkins’ beautiful female figure in the drawing called 
 ‘Love’ (123) must be mentioned with especial praise; it is 
 charming in design colour and sentiment. Another female figure 
 ‘ The Girl at the Stile,’ by the same artist, has not equal finish, 
 roundness, and completeness, but the same sentiment of tender 
 grace and beauty. 
 
 Mr. Bright’s landscape-drawings are exceedingly clever, but 
 there is too much of the drawing master in the handling, too 
 much dash, skurry, sharp cleverness of execution. Him Mr. 
 Jutsum follows with cleverness not quite equal, and mannerism 
 still greater. After the performance of which the eye reposes 
 gracefully upon some pleasant evening scenes by Mr. Duncan 
 (3, 10); and the delightful ‘Shady Lane’ of Mr. Youngman. 
 Mr. Boys’ pictures will be always looked at and admired for the 
 skill and correctness of a hand which, in drawing, is not inferior 
 to that of Oanaletti. 
 
 As for Suffolk Street, that delicious retreat may or may not be 
 still open. I have been there, but was frightened from the place 
 by the sight of Hay don’s Napoleon, with his vast head, his large 
 body, and his little legs, staring out upon the indigo sea, in a 
 grass-green coat. Nervous people avoid that sight, and the 
 Emperor remains in Suffolk Street as lonely as at St. Helena. 
 
PICTUEE GOSSIP : 
 
 IN A LETTER FROM MICHAEL ANGELO TTTMAESH. 
 
 AlL Illustkissimo Signor, il mio Signor Colendissimo, 
 Augusto Ha Arve, Pittore in Roma.^ 
 
 I AM going to fulfil the promise, my dear Augusto, which I uttered, 
 with a faltering voice and streaming eyes, before I stepped into 
 the jingling old courier’s vehicle, which was to bear me from Rome 
 to Florence. Can I forget that night — that parting Gaunter 
 stood by so affected, that for the last quarter of an hour he did 
 not swear once ; Flake’s emotion exhibited itself in audible sobs ; 
 Jellyson said naught, but thrust a bundle of Torlonia’s four 
 baiocchi cigars into the hand of the departing friend ; and you 
 yourself were so deeply agitated by the event, that you took four 
 glasses of absinthe to string up your nerves for the fatal moment. 
 Strange vision of past days ! — for vision it seems to me now. And 
 have I been in Rome really and truly ? Have I seen the great 
 works of my Christian namesake of the Buonarroti family, and the 
 light arcades of the Vatican? Have I seen the glorious Apollo, 
 and that other divine fiddle-player whom Raphael painted? Yes 
 — and the English dandies swaggering on the Pincian Hill ! Yes 
 — and have eaten woodcocks and drank Ovieto hard by the huge, 
 broad-shouldered Pantheon Portico, in the comfortable parlours of 
 the Falcone. Do you recollect that speech I m.ade at Bertini’s in 
 proposing the health of the Pope of Rome on Christm.as Day ? — do 
 you remember it ? I don’t. But his Holiness, no doubt, heard of 
 the oration, and was flattered by the compliment of the illustrious 
 English traveller. 
 
 I went to the exhibition of the Royal Academy lately, and all 
 these reminiscences rushed back on a sudden with affecting 
 volubility ; not that there was anything in or out of the gallery 
 which put me specially in mind of sumptuous and Liberal Rome ; 
 but in the great room was a picture of a fellow in a broad Roman 
 hat, in a velvet Roman coat, and large yellow moustachios, and 
 
 ^ [Fraser s Magazine , June, 1845.] 
 
 234 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 235 
 
 that prodigious scowl which young artists assume when sitting for 
 their portraits — he was one of our set at Kome ; and the scenes of 
 the winter came back pathetically to my mind, and all the friends 
 of that season, — Orifice and his sentimental songs ; Father Giraldo 
 and his poodle, and MacBrick, the trump of bankers. Hence the 
 determination to write this letter ; but the hand is crabbed, and 
 the postage is dear, and instead of despatching it by the mail, I 
 shall send it to you by means of the printer, knowing well that 
 Fraser'^s Magazine is eagerly read at Eome, and not (on account 
 of its morality) excluded in the Index Expurgatorius. 
 
 And it will be doubly agreeable to me to write to you regarding 
 the fine arts in England, because I know, my dear Augusto, that 
 you have a thorough contempt for my opinion — indeed, for that of 
 all persons, excepting, of course, one whose name is already written 
 in this sentence. Such, however, is not the feeling respecting my 
 critical powers in this country ; here they know the merit of 
 Michael Angelo Titmarsh better, and they say, ‘ He paints so 
 badly, that, hang it ! he must be a good judge ; ’ in the latter part 
 of which opinion, of course, I agree. 
 
 You should have seen the consternation of the fellows at my 
 arrival ! — of our dear brethren who thought I was safe at Rome 
 for the season, and that their works exhibited in May would be 
 spared the dreadful ordeal of my ferocious eye. When I entered 
 the club-room in St. Martin’s Lane, and called for a glass of 
 brandy-and-water like a bombshell, you should have seen the 
 terror of some of the artists assembled ! They knew that the 
 frightful projectile just launched into their club-room must hurst 
 in the natural course of things. Who would be struck down by 
 the explosion ? was the thought of every one. Some of the 
 hypocrites welcomed me meanly back, some of the timid trembled, 
 some of the savage and guilty muttered curses at my arrival. You 
 should have seen the ferocious looks of Daggerly, for example, as 
 he scowled at me from the supper-table, and clutched the trenchant 
 weapon with which he was dissevering his toasted cheese. 
 
 From the period of my arrival until that of the opening of the 
 various galleries, I maintained with the artists every proper 
 affability, but still was not too familiar. It is the custom of their 
 friends before their pictures are sent in to the exhibition, to visit 
 the painter’s works at their private studios, and there encourage 
 them by saying ‘Bravo, Jones (I don’t mean Jones, R.A., for I 
 defy any man to say “bravo” to A^m, but Jones in general)!’ 
 ‘ Tomkins, this is your greatest work ! ’ ‘ Smith, my boy, they 
 
 must elect you an Associate for this ! ’ and so forth. These harm- 
 less banalities of compliment pass between the painters and their 
 
236 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 friends on such occasions. I, myself, have uttered many such 
 civil phrases in former years under like circumstances. But it is 
 different now. Fame has its privileges as well as its pleasures. 
 The friend may see his companions in private, but the Judge 
 must not pay visits to his clients. I stayed away from the ateliers 
 of all the artists (at least I only visited one, kindly telling him 
 that he didn’t count as an artist at all), would only see their 
 pictures in the public galleries, and judge them in the fair race with 
 their neighbours. This announcement and conduct of mine filled 
 all the Berners Street and Fitzroy Square district with terror. 
 
 As I am writing this after having had my fill of their works, 
 so publicly exhibited in the country, at a distance from catalogues, 
 my only book of reference being an orchard whereof the trees are 
 now bursting into full blossom, — it is probable that my remarks 
 will be rather general than particular, that I shall only discourse 
 about those pictures which I especially remember, or, indeed, upon 
 any other point suitable to my honour and your delectation. 
 
 I went round the galleries with a young friend of mine, who, 
 like yourself at present, has been a student of ‘ High Art ’ at 
 Rome. He had been a pupil of Monsieur Ingres, at Paris. He 
 could draw rude figures of eight feet high to a nicety, and had 
 produced many heroic compositions of that pleasing class and size, 
 to the great profit of the paper-stretchers both in Paris and Rome. 
 He came back from the latter place a year since, with his beard 
 and moustachios of course. He could find no room in all Newman 
 Street and Soho big enough to hold him and his genius, and was 
 turned out of a decent house because, for the purposes of art, he 
 wished to batter down the partition-wall between the two drawing 
 rooms he had. His great cartoon last year (whether it was ‘ Car- 
 actacus before Claudius,’ or a scene from The Vicar of Wahefielf 
 I won’t say) failed somehow. He was a good deal cut up by the 
 defeat, and went into the country to his relations, from whom he 
 returned after a while, with his moustachios shaved, clean linen, 
 and other signs of depression. He said (with a hollow laugh) he 
 should not commence on his great canvas this year, and so gave 
 up the completion of his composition of ‘ Boadicea addressing the 
 Iceni : ’ quite a novel subject, which, with that ingenuity and 
 profound reading which distinguishes his brethren, he had deter- 
 mined to take up. 
 
 Well, sir, this youth and I v/ent to the exhibitions together, 
 and I watched his behaviour before the pictures. At the tragic, 
 swaggering, theatrical, historical pictures, he yawned ; before some 
 of the grand, flashy landscapes, he stood without the least emotion : 
 but before some quiet scenes of humour or pathos, or some easy 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 237 
 
 little copy of nature, the youth stood in pleased contemplation, 
 the nails of his high-lows seemed to be screwed into the floor there, 
 and his face dimpled over with grins. 
 
 ‘ These little pictures,’ said he, on being questioned, ‘ are worth 
 a hundred times more than the big ones. In the latter you see 
 signs of ignorance of every kind, weakness of hand, poverty of 
 invention, carelessness of drawing, lamentable imbecility of thought. 
 Their heroism is borrowed from the theatre, their sentiment is so 
 maudlin that it makes you sick. I see no symptoms of thought 
 or of minds strong and genuine enough to cope with elevated 
 subjects. No individuality, no novelty, the decencies of costume 
 (my friend did not mean that the figures we were looking at were 
 naked, like Mr. Etty^s, but that they were dressed out of all 
 historical propriety) are disregarded ; the people are striking 
 attitudes, as at the Coburg. There is something painful to me in 
 this naive exhibition of incompetency, this imbecility that is so 
 unconscious of its own failure. If, however, the aspiring men 
 don’t succeed, the modest do ; and what they have really seen or 
 experienced, our artist can depict with successful accuracy and 
 delightful skill. ‘ Hence,’ says he, ‘ I would sooner have So-and-so’s 
 little sketch (“A Donkey on a Common ”) than What-d’ye-call-’em’s 
 enormous picture (‘^Sir Walter Manny and the Crusaders dis- 
 covering Nova Scotia”), and prefer yonder unpretending sketch, 
 ‘‘ Shrimp Catchers, Morning,” (how exquisitely the long and level 
 sands are touched off ! how beautifully the morning light touches 
 the countenances of the fishermen, and illumines the rosy features 
 of the shrimps !) to yonder pretentious illustration from Spenser, 
 “Sir Botibol rescues Una from Sir Uglimore in the Cave of the 
 Enchantress Ichthyosaura.” ’ 
 
 I am only mentioning another’s opinion of these pictures, and 
 would not of course, for my own part, wish to give pain by pro- 
 voking comparisons that must be disagreeable to some persons. 
 But I could not help agreeing with my young friend, and saying, 
 ‘Well, then, in the name of goodness, my dear fellow, if you only 
 like what is real, and natural, and unaffected — if upon such works 
 you gaze with delight, while from more pretentious performers you 
 turn away with weariness, why the deuce must yon be in the 
 heroic vein ? Why don’t you do what you like '? ’ The young 
 man turned round on the iron heel of his high-lows, and walked 
 downstairs clinking them sulkily. 
 
 There are a variety of classes and divisions into which the 
 works of our geniuses may be separated. There are the heroic 
 pictures, the theatrical -heroic, the religious, the historical -senti- 
 mental, the historical-familiar, the namby-pamby, and so forth. 
 
238 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Among the heroic pictures of course Mr. Haydon’s ranks the 
 first, its size and pretensions call for that place. It roars out to 
 you as it were with a Titanic voice from among all the competition 
 to public favour, ‘ Come and look at me.^ A broad-shouldered, 
 swaggering, hulking archangel, with those rolling eyes and dis- 
 tending nostrils which belong to the species of sublime caricature, 
 stands scowling on a sphere from which the devil is just descend- 
 ing bound earthwards. Planets, comets, and other astronomical 
 phenomena roll and blaze round the pair and flame in the new 
 blue sky. There is something burly and bold in this resolute 
 genius which will attack only enormous subjects, which will deal 
 with nothing but the e})ic, something respectable even in the 
 defeats of such characters. I was looking the other day at 
 Southampton at a stout gentleman in a green coat and white hat, 
 who a year or two since fully believed that he could walk upon 
 the water, and set off in the presence of a great concourse of people 
 upon his supermarine journey. There is no need to tell you that 
 the poor fellow got a wetting and sank amidst the jeers of all his 
 beholders. I think somehow they should not have laughed at that 
 honest ducked gentleman, they should have respected the faith 
 and simplicity which led him unhe^ritatingly to venture upon that 
 watery experiment ; and so, instead of laughing at Haydon, which 
 you and I were just about to do, let us check our jocularity, and 
 give him credit for his great earnestness of purpose. I begin to 
 find the world growing more pathetic daily, and laugh less every 
 year of my life. Why laugh at idle hopes, or vain purposes, or 
 utter blundering self-confidence'? Let us be gentle wuth them 
 henceforth, who knows whether there may not be something of 
 the sort chez nous ? But I am wandering from Haydon and his 
 big picture. Let us hope somebody will buy. Who, I cannot 
 tell ; it will not do for a chapel ; it is too big for a house : I have 
 it — it might answer to hang up over a caravan at a fair, if a 
 travelling orrery were exhibited inside. 
 
 This may be sheer impertinence and error, the picture may suit 
 some tastes, it does The Times for instance, which pronounces it 
 to be a noble work of the highest art ; whereas the Tost won’t 
 believe a bit, and passes it by with scorn. What a comfort it is 
 that there are different tastes then, and that almost all artists have 
 thus a chance of getting a livelihood somehow ! There is Martin, 
 for another instance, wdth his brace of pictures about Adam and 
 Eve, which I would venture to place in the theatrical-heroic chiss. 
 One looks at those strange pieces and wonders how people can be 
 found to admire, and yet they do. Grave old people, with chains 
 and seals, look dumb-foundered into those vast perspectives, and 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 239 
 
 think the apex of the sublime is reached there. In one of Sir 
 Bulwer Lytton’s novels there is a passage to that effect. I forget 
 where, but there is a new edition of them coming out in single 
 volumes, and am positive you will find the sentiment somewhere ; 
 they come up to his conceptions of the sublime, they answer his 
 ideas of beauty of the Beautiful as he writes with a large B. He 
 is himself an artist and a man of genius. What right have we 
 poor devils to question such an authority ? Do you recollect how 
 we used to laugh in the Capitol at the Domenichino Sybil which 
 this same author praises so enthusiastically a wooden, pink-faced, 
 goggle-eyed, ogling creature, we said it was, with no more beauty 
 or sentiment than a wax doll. But this was our conceit, dear 
 Angus to ; on subjects of art, perhaps, there is no reasoning after 
 all : or who can tell why children have a passion for lollypops, and 
 this man worships beef while t’other adores mutton ? To the 
 child lollypops may be the truthful and beautiful, and why should 
 not some men find Martin’s pictures as much to their taste as 
 Milton ? 
 
 Another instance of the blessed variety of tastes may be 
 mentioned here advantageously ; while, as you have seen. The 
 Times awards the palm to Haydon, and Sir Lytton exalts Martin 
 as the greatest painter of the English school. The Chronicle^ quite 
 as well informed, no doubt, says that Mr. Eddis is the great genius 
 of the present season, and that his picture of Moses’s mother parting 
 with him before leaving him in the bulrushes is a great and noble 
 composition. 
 
 This critic must have a taste for the neat and agreeable, that 
 is clear. Mr. Eddis’s picture is nicely coloured ; the figures in 
 fine clean draperies, the sky a bright clean colour ; Moses’s mother 
 is a handsome woman ; and as she holds her child to her breast 
 for the last time, and lifts up her fine eyes to heaven, the beholder 
 may be reasonably moved by a decent bourgeois compassion ; a 
 handsome woman parting from her child is always an object of 
 proper sympathy ; but as for the greatness of the picture as a 
 work of art, that is another question of tastes again. This picture 
 seemed to me to be essentially a prose composition, not a poetical 
 one. It tells you no more than you can see. It has no more 
 wonder or poetry about it than a police report or a newspaper 
 paragraph, and should be placed, as I take it, in the historic- 
 sentimental school, which is pretty much followed in England — 
 nay, as close as possible to the namby-pamby quarter. 
 
 Of the latter sort there are some illustrious examples ; and as 
 it is the fashion for critics to award prizes, I ’would for my part 
 cheerfully award the prize of a new silver teaspoon to Mr. Redgrave, 
 
240 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 that champion of suffering female innocence, for his ‘Governess.’ 
 That picture is more decidedly spoony than, perhaps, any other of 
 this present season ; and the subject seems to be a favourite with 
 the artist. We have had the ‘Governess’ one year before, or a 
 variation of her under the name of ‘ The Teacher,’ or vice versa. 
 The Teacher’s young pupils are at play in the garden, she sits sadly 
 in the schoolroom, there she sits, poor dear ! — the piano is open 
 beside her, and (oh, harrowing thought !) ‘ Home, sweet home ! ’ 
 is open in the music-book. She sits and thinks of that dear place, 
 with a sheet of black-edged note-paper in her hand. They have 
 brought her her tea and bread and butter on a tray. She has 
 drunk the tea, she has not tasted the bread and butter I There is 
 pathos for you ! there is art ! This is, indeed, a love for lollypops 
 with a vengeance, a regular babyhood of taste, about which a man 
 with a manly stomach may be allowed to protest a little peevishly, 
 and implore the public to give up such puling food. 
 
 There is a gentleman in the Octagon Room who, to be sure, 
 runs Mr. Redgrave rather hard, and should have a silver pap-spoon 
 at any rate, if the teaspoon is irrevocably awarded to his rival. 
 The Octagon Room prize is a picture called the ‘Arrival of the 
 Overland Mail.’ A lady is in her bed-chamber, a portrait of her 
 husband. Major Jones (cherished lord of that bridal apartment, 
 with its drab-curtained bed), hangs on the wainscot in the distance, 
 and you see his red coat and moustachios gleaming there between 
 the wardrobe and the washhand-stand. But where is his lady ? 
 She is on her knees by the bed-side, her face has sunk into the 
 feather-bed ; her hands are clasped agonisingly together ; a most 
 tremendous black-edged letter has just arrived by the overland 
 mail. It is all up with Jones. Well, let us hope she will marry 
 again, and get over her grief for poor J. 
 
 Is not there something naive and simple in this downright way 
 of exciting compassion ? I saw people looking at this pair of 
 pictures evidently with yearning hearts. The great geniuses 
 who invented them have not, you see, toiled in vain. They can 
 command the sympathies of the public, they have gained Art- 
 Union prizes, let us hope, as well as those humble imaginary ones 
 which I have just awarded, and yet my heart is not naturally 
 hard, though it refuses to be moved by such means as are here 
 employed. 
 
 If the simple statement of a death is to harrow up the feelings, 
 or to claim the tributary tear, mon Dieti I a man ought to howl 
 every morning over the newspaper obituary. If we are to cry for 
 every governess who leaves home, what a fund of pathos The 
 Times advertisements would afford daily ; we might weep down 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 241 
 
 whole columns of close type. I have said before I am growing 
 more inclined to the pathetic daily, but let us in the name of 
 goodness make a stand somewhere, or the namby-pamby of the 
 world will become unendurable ; and we shall melt away in a 
 deluge of blubber. This drivelling, hysterical sentimentality, it is 
 surely the critic’s duty to grin down, to shake any man roughly 
 by the shoulder who seems dangerously affected by it, and not 
 sparing his feelings in the least, tell him he is a fool for his pains, 
 to have no more respect for those who invent it, but expose their 
 error with all the downrightness that is necessary. 
 
 By far the prettiest of the maudlin pictures is Mr. Stone’s 
 Premier Pas. It is that old pretty, rococo, fantastic Jenny and 
 Jessamy couple, whose loves the painter has been chronicling any 
 time these five years, and whom he has spied out at various wells, 
 porches, etc. The lad is making love with all his might, and the 
 maiden is in a pretty confusion — her heart flutters, and she only 
 seems to spin. She drinks in the warm words of the young fellow 
 with a pleasant conviction of the invincibility of her charms. He 
 appeals nervously, and tugs at a pink wdiich is growing up the 
 porch-side. It is that pink, somehow, which has saved the picture 
 from being decidedly namby-pamby. There is something new, 
 fresh, and delicate about the little incident of the flower. It 
 redeems Jenny, and renders that young prig, Jessamy, bearable. 
 The picture is very nicely painted, according to the careful artist’s 
 wont. The neck and hands of the girl are especially pretty. The 
 lad’s face is effeminate and imbecile, but his velveteen breeches 
 are painted with great vigour and strength. 
 
 This artist’s picture of the ‘Queen and Ophelia’ is in a much 
 higher walk of art. There may be doubts about Ophelia. She is 
 too pretty to my taste. Her dress (especially the black bands 
 round her arms) too elaborately conspicuous and coquettish. The 
 queen is a noble dramatic head and attitude. Ophelia seems to be 
 looking at us, the audience, and in a pretty attitude expressly to 
 captivate us. The queen is only thinking about the crazed girl, 
 and Hamlet, and her own gloomy affairs, and has quite forgotten 
 her own noble beauty and superb presence. The colour of the 
 picture struck me as quite new, sedate, but bright and very 
 agreeable ; the chequered light and shadow is made cleverly to 
 ahl informing the composition; it is very picturesque and good. 
 It is by far the best of Mr. Stone’s works, and in the best line. 
 Good-bye, Jenny and Jessamy ; we hope never to see you again — 
 no more rococo rustics, no more namby-pamby : the man who can 
 paint the queen of Hamlet must forsake henceforth such fiddle- 
 faddle company. 
 
242 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 By the way, has any Shaksperian commentator ever remarked 
 how fond the queen really was of her second husband, the excellent 
 Claudius ? How courteous and kind the latter always was towards 
 her ? So excellent a family man ought to be pardoned a few 
 errors in consideration of his admirable behaviour to his wife. He 
 did go a little far, certainly, but then it was to possess a jewel of 
 a woman. 
 
 More pictures indicating a fine appreciation of the tragic 
 sentiment are to be found in the Exhibition. Among them may 
 be mentioned specially Mr. Johnson^s picture of ‘Lord Russell 
 taking the Communion in Prison before Execution.^ The story is 
 finely told liere, the group large and noble. The figure of the 
 kneeling wife, who looks at her husband meekly engaged in the 
 last sacred office, is very good indeed ; and the little episode of 
 the gaoler, who looks out into the yard indifferent, seems to me to 
 give evidence of a true dramatic genius. In Hamlet^ how those 
 indifferent remarks of Guildenstern and Eosencrantz, at the end, 
 bring out the main figures and deepen the surrounding gloom of 
 the tragedy ! 
 
 In Mr. Frith’s admirable picture of the ‘Good Pastor,’ from 
 Goldsmith, there is some sentiment of a very quiet, refined, Sir- 
 Roger-de-Coverley-like-sort — not too much of it — it is indicated 
 rather than expressed. ‘Sentiment, sir,’ Walker of the Original 
 used to say, — ‘ sentiment, sir, is like garlic in made dishes : it 
 should be felt everywhere and seen nowhere.’ 
 
 Now, I won’t say that Mr. Frith’s sentiment is like garlic, 
 or provoke any other savoury comparison regarding it ; but say, 
 in a word, this is one of the pictures I would like to have sent 
 abroad to be exhibited at a European congress of painters, to shew 
 what an English artist can do. The young painter seems to me 
 to have had a thorough comprehension of his subject and his own 
 abilities. And what a rare quality is this, to know what you can 
 do ! An ass will go and take the grand historic walk, while, with 
 lowly wisdom, Mr. Frith prefers the lowly path where there are 
 plenty of flowers growing, and children prattling along the walks. 
 This is the sort of picture that is good to paint nowadays — kindly, 
 beautiful, inspiring delicate sympathies, and awakening tender 
 good-humour. It is a comfort to have such a companion as that 
 in a study to look up at when your eyes are tired with work, and 
 to refresh you with its gentle, quiet good-fellowship. I can see 
 it now, as I shut my own eyes, displayed faithfully on the camera 
 obscura of the brain — the dear old parson wdth his congregation of 
 old and young clustered round him ; the little ones plucking him 
 by the gown, with wondering eyes, half-roguery, half-terror ; tlie 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 243 
 
 smoke is curling up from the cottage chimneys in a peaceful, 
 Sabbath-sort of way ; the three village quidnuncs are chattering 
 together at the churchyard stile ; there’s a poor girl seated there 
 on a stone, who has been crossed in love evidently, and looks 
 anxiously to the parson for a little doubtful consolation. That’s 
 the real sort of sentiment — there’s no need of a great, clumsy, 
 black-edged letter to placard her misery, as it were, after Mr. 
 Redgrave’s fashion; the sentiment is only the more sincere for 
 being unobtrusive, and the spectator gives his compassion the more 
 readily, because the unfortunate object makes no coarse demands 
 upon his pity. 
 
 The painting of this picture is exceedingly clever and dexterous. 
 One or two of the foremost figures are painted with the breadth 
 and pearly delicacy of Greuze. The three village politicians, in 
 the background, might have been touched by Teniers, so neat, 
 brisk, and sharp is the execution of the artist’s facile brush. 
 
 Mr. Frost (a new name, I think, in the Catalogue) has given 
 us a picture of ‘ Sabrina,’ which is so pretty that I heartily hope 
 it has not been purchased for the collection from Comus, which 
 adorns the Buckingham Palace summer-house. It is worthy of a 
 better place and price than our royal patrons appear to be disposed 
 to give for the works of English Arts. What victims have those 
 poor fellows been of this awful patronage ! Great has been the 
 commotion in the pictorial world, dear Augusto, regarding the 
 fate of those frescoes which royalty was pleased to order, which it 
 condescended to purchase at a price that no poor amateur would 
 have the face to offer. Think of the greatest patronage in the 
 world giving forty pounds for pictures worth four hundred — 
 condescending to buy works from humble men who could not 
 refuse, and paying for them below their value ! Think of august 
 powers and principalities ordering the works of such a great man 
 as Etty to be hacked out of the palace wall — that was a slap in 
 the face to every artist in England ; and I can agree with the 
 conclusion come to by an indignant poet of PuncNs band, who 
 says, for his part, — 
 
 I will not toil for queen and crown, 
 
 If princely patrons spurn me down ; 
 
 I will not ask for royal job — 
 
 Let my Maecenas be A snob ! ^ 
 
 This is, however, a delicate, an awful subject, over which loyal 
 subjects like you and I had best mourn in silence ; but the fate 
 
 ^ The indignant poet of PuncJis band was Thackeray. The lines occur in 
 the verses, A Painter s Wish (Punch, April 5, 1845), which is reprinted in 
 vol. xviii. of this edition : Ballads, etc. 
 
244 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS m ART 
 
 of Etty’s noble picture of last year made me tremble lest Frost 
 should be similarly nipped ; and I hope for more genuine patronage 
 for this promising young painter. His picture is like a mixture 
 of very good Hilton and Howard raised to a state of genius. 
 There is sameness in the heads, but great grace and beauty — a 
 fine sweeping movement in the composition of the beautiful fairy 
 figures, undulating gracefully through the stream, while the lilies 
 lie gracefully overhead. There is another submarine picture of 
 ‘ Nymphs cajoling Young Plylas,’ which contains a great deal of 
 very clever imitations of Boucher. 
 
 That youthful Goodall, whose early attempts promised so much, 
 is not quite realising those promises, I think, and is cajoled, like 
 Hylas before mentioned, by dangerous beauty. His ‘ Connemara 
 Girls going to Market ’ are a vast deal too clean and pretty for 
 such females. They laugh and simper in much too genteel a 
 manner ; they are washing such pretty white feet as I don’t think 
 are common about Leenane or Ballynahinch, and would be better 
 at ease in white satin slippers than trudging up Croaghpatrick» 
 There is a luxury of geographical knowledge for you ! I have 
 not done with it yet. Stop till we come to Eoberts’s ‘ View of 
 Jerusalem,’ and Muller’s pictures of ‘Rhodes,’ and ‘Xanthus,’ and 
 ‘Telmessus.’ This artist’s sketches are excellent; like nature, and 
 like Decamps, that best of painters of Oriental life and colours. 
 In the pictures the artist forgets the brilliancy of colour which is 
 so conspicuous in his sketches, and ‘ Telmessus ’ looks as grey and 
 heavy as Dover in March. 
 
 Mr. Pickersgill (not the Acamedician, by any means) deserves 
 great praise for two very poetical pieces ; one from Spenser, I 
 think (Sir Botibol, let us say, as before, with somebody in some 
 hag’s cave) ; another called the ‘ Four Ages,’ which has still better 
 grace and sentiment. This artist, too, is evidently one of the 
 disciples of Hilton ; and another, who has also, as it seems to me, 
 studied with advantage that graceful and agreeable English painter, 
 Mr. Hook, whose ‘ Song of the Olden Time ’ is hung up in the 
 Octagon Closet, and makes a sunshine in that exceedingly shady 
 j)lace. The female figure is faulty, but charming (m.any charmers 
 have their little faults, it is said) ; the old bard who is singing 
 the song of the olden time a most venerable, agreeable, and hand- 
 some old minstrel. In Alnaschar-like moods a man fancies himself 
 a noble patron, and munificent re warder of artists ; in which case 
 I should like to possess myself of the works of these two young 
 
 men, and give them four times as large a price as the gave 
 
 for pictures five times as good as theirs. 
 
 I suppose Mr. Eastlake’s composition from Comus is the 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 245 
 
 contribution in which he has been mulcted, in company with his 
 celebrated brother artists, for the famous Buckingham Palace 
 pavilion. Working for nothing is very well ; but to work for 
 a good, honest, remunerating price is, perhaps, the best way, after 
 all. I can’t help thinking that the artist’s courage has failed him 
 over his Comus picture. Time and pains he has given, that is 
 quite evident. The picture is prodigiously laboured, and hatched, 
 and tickled up with a Chinese minuteness ; but there is a woeful 
 lack of vis in the work. That poor labourer has kept his promise, 
 has worked the given number of hours ; but he has had no food 
 all the while, and has executed his job in a somewhat faint 
 manner. The face of the lady is pure and beautiful ; but we 
 have seen it at any time these ten years, with its red transparent 
 shadows, its mouth in which butter wouldn’t melt, and its beautiful 
 brown madder hair. She is getting rather tedious, that sweet, 
 irreproachable creature, that is the fact. She may be an angel ; 
 but sky-blue, my wicked senses tell me, is a feeble sort of drink, 
 and men require stronger nourishment. 
 
 Mr. Eastlake’s picture is a prim, mystic, cruciform composition. 
 The lady languishes in the middle ; an angel is consoling her, and 
 embracing her with an arm out of joint ; little rows of cherubs 
 stand on each side the angels and the lady, — wonderful little 
 children, with blue or brown beady eyes, and sweet little flossy 
 curly hair, and no muscles or bones, as becomes such supernatural 
 beings, no doubt. I have seen similar little darlings in the toy- 
 shops in the Lowther Arcade for a shilling, with just such pink 
 cheeks and round eyes, their bodies formed out of cotton-wool, 
 and their extremities veiled in silver paper. Well ; it is as well, 
 perhaps, that Etty’s jovial nymphs should not come into such a 
 company. Good Lord ! how they would astonish the weak nerves 
 of Mr. Eastlake’s precieuse young lady ! 
 
 Quite unabashed by the squeamishness exhibited in the highest 
 quarter (as the newspapers call it), Mr. Etty goes on rejoicing in 
 his old fashion. Perhaps he is worse than ever this year, and 
 despises nee dulces amoves nec choraeas^ because certain great 
 personages are offended. Perhaps, this year, his ladies and Cupids 
 are a little hazardes ; his Venuses expand more than ever in the 
 line of Hottentot beauty ; his drawing and colouring are still more 
 audacious than they were ; patches of red shine on the cheeks of 
 his blowsy nymphs ; his idea of form goes to the verge of mon- 
 strosity. If you look at the pictures closely (and, considering all 
 things, it requires some courage to do so), the forms disappear; 
 feet and hands are scumbled away, and distances appear to be 
 dabs and blotches of lakes, and brown, and ultramarine. It must 
 
246 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 be confessed that some of these pictures would not be suitable to 
 hang up everywhere — in a young ladies’ school, for instance. But, 
 how rich and superb is the colour ! Did Titian paint better, or 
 Rubens as well ? There is a nymph and child in the left corner 
 of the Great Room, sitting, without the slightest fear of catching 
 cold, in a sort of moonlight, of which the colour appears to me to 
 be as rich and wonderful as Titian’s best — ‘ Bacchus and Ariadne,’ 
 for instance — and better than Rubens’. There is a little head of 
 a boy in a blue dress (for once in a way) which kills every picture 
 in the room, outstares all the red-coated generals, out-blazes Mrs. 
 Thwaites and her diamonds (who has the place of honour) ; and 
 has that unmistakable, inestimable, indescribable mark of the 
 GREAT painter about, which makes the soul of a man kindle up as 
 he sees it, and owns that there is Genius. How delightful it is 
 to feel that shock, and how few are the works of art that can 
 give it ! 
 
 The author of that sybilline book of mystic rhymes, the un- 
 revealed bard of the Fallacies of Ilope^ is as great as usual, 
 vibrating between the absurd and the sublime, until the eye grows 
 dazzled in watching him, and can’t really tell in what region he 
 is. If Etty’s colour is wild and mysterious, looking here as if 
 smeared with the finger, and there with the palette-knife, what 
 can be said about Turner ? Go up and look at one of his pictures, 
 and you laugh at yourself and at him, and at the picture, and 
 that wonderful amateur who is invariably found to give a thousand 
 pounds for it, or more — some sum wild, prodigious, unheard-of, 
 monstrous, like the picture itself. All about the author of the 
 Fallacies of Hope is a mysterious extravaganza; price, poem, 
 purchaser, picture. Look at the latter for a little time, and it 
 begins to affect you too, — to mesmerise you. It is revealed to 
 you ; and, as it is said in the East, the magicians make children 
 see the sultans, carpet-bearers, tents, etc., in a spot of ink in 
 their hands; so the magician, Joseph Mallord, makes you see 
 what he likes on a board, that to the first view is merely dabbed 
 over with occasionally streaks of yellow, and flicked here and 
 there with vermilion. The vermilion blotches become little boats 
 full of harpooners and gondolas, with a deal of music going on on 
 board. That is not a smear of purple you see yonder, but a 
 beautiful whale, whose tail has just slapped a half dozen whale- 
 boats into perdition ; and as for what you fancied to be a few zig- 
 zag lines spattered on the canvas at hap-hazard, look ! they turn 
 out to be a ship with all her sails ; the captain and his crew are 
 clearly visible in the ship’s bows ; and you may distinctly see the 
 oil-casks getting ready under the superintendence of that man 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 247 
 
 with the red whiskers and the cast in his eye ; who is, of course, 
 the chief mate. In a word, I say that Turner is a great and 
 awful mystery to me. I don’t like to contemplate him too much, 
 lest I should actually begin to believe in his poetry as well as his 
 paintings, and fancy tiie Fallacies of Hope to be one of the finest 
 poems in the world. 
 
 Now Stanfield has no mysticism or oracularity about him. You 
 can see what he means at once. His style is as simple and manly 
 as a seaman’s song. One of the most dexterous, he is also one of 
 the most careful of painters. Every year his works are more 
 elaborated, and you are surprised to find a progress in an artist 
 who had seemed to reach his acme before. His battle of frigates 
 this year is a brilliant, sparkling pageant of naval war. His great 
 picture of the ‘ Mole of Ancona,’ fresh, healthy, and bright as breeze 
 and sea can make it. There are better pieces still by this painter, 
 to my mind ; one in the first room, especially, — a Dutch landscape, 
 with a warm, sunny tone upon it, worthy of Cuyp and Callcott. 
 Who is Gr. Stanfield, an exhibitor and evidently a pupil of the 
 Royal Academician ? Can it be a son of that gent ? If so, the 
 father has a worthy heir to his name and honours. G. Stanfield’s 
 Dutch picture may be looked at by the side of his father’s. 
 
 Roberts has also distinguished himself and advanced in skill, 
 great as his care had been and powerful his effects before. ‘ The 
 Ruins of Carnac ’ is the most poetical of this painter’s works, I 
 think. A vast and awful scene of gloomy Egyptian ruin ! the sun 
 lights up tremendous lines of edifices, which were only parts 
 formerly of the enormous city of the hundred gates ; long lines of 
 camels come over the reddening desert, and camps are set by the 
 side of the glowing pools. This is a good picture to gaze at, and 
 to fill your eyes and thoughts with grandiose ideas of Eastern life. 
 
 This gentleman’s large picture of ‘Jerusalem’ did not satisfy 
 me so much. It is yet very faithful j anybody who had visited 
 this place must see the careful fidelity with which the artist has 
 mapped the rocks and valleys and laid down the lines of the 
 buildings ; but the picture has, to my eyes, too green and trim a 
 look ; the mosques and houses look fresh and new, instead of being 
 mouldering, old, sun-baked, edifices of glaring stone rising amidst 
 wretchedness and ruin. There is not, to my mind, that sad, fatal 
 aspect, which the city presents from whatever quarter you view it, 
 and which haunts a man who has seen it ever after with an im- 
 pression of terror. Perhaps in the spring for a little while, at 
 which season the sketch for this picture was painted, the country 
 round about may look very cheerful. When we saw it in autumn, 
 the mountains that stand round about Jerusalem were not green, 
 
248 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 but ghastly piles of hot rock, patched here and there with yellow, 
 weedy herbage. A cactus or a few bleak olive-trees made up the 
 vegetation of the wretched, gloomy landscape ; whereas in Mr. 
 Roberts’s picture the valley of Jehoshaphat looks like a glade in a 
 park, and the hills, up to the gates, are carpeted with verdure. 
 
 Being on the subject of Jerusalem, here may be mentioned with 
 praise Mr. Hart’s picture of a Jewish ceremony, with a Hebrew 
 name I have forgotten. This piece is exceedingly bright and 
 pleasing in colour, odd and novel as a representation of manners 
 and costume, a striking and agreeable picture. I don’t think as 
 much can be said for the same artist’s ‘ Sir Thomas More going to 
 Execution.’ Miss More is crying on papa’s neck, pa looks up to 
 heaven, halberdiers look fierce, etc. : all the regular adjuncts and 
 property of pictorial tragedy are here brought into play. But 
 nobody cares, that is the fact ; and one fancies the designer himself 
 cannot have cared much for the orthodox historical group whose 
 misfortunes he was depicting. 
 
 These pictures are like boy’s hexameters at school. Every lad 
 of decent parts in the sixth form has a knack of turning out great 
 quantities of respectable verse, without blunders, and with scarce 
 any mental labour ; but these verses are not the least like poetry, 
 any more than the great academical paintings of the artists are like 
 great painting. You want something more than a composition, and 
 a set of costumes and figures decently posed and studied. If these 
 were all, for instance, Mr. Charles Landseer’s picture of ‘ Charles 
 I. before the battle of Edge Hill,’ would be a good work of art. 
 Charles stands at a tree before the inn-door, officers are round 
 about, the little princes are playing with a little dog, as becomes 
 their youth and innocence, rows of soldiers appear in red coats, 
 nobody seems to have anything particular to do, except the royal 
 martyr, who is looking at a bone of ham that a girl out of the inn 
 has hold of. 
 
 Now this is all very well, but you want something more than 
 this in an historic picture, which should have its parts, characters, 
 varieties, and climax like a drama. You don’t want the Deus 
 inter dt for no other purpose than to look at a knuckle of ham ; 
 and here is a piece well composed, and (bating a little want of life 
 in the figures) well drawn, brightly and pleasantly painted, as all 
 this artist’s works are, all the parts and accessories studied and 
 executed with care and skill, and yet meaning nothing — the part 
 of Hamlet omitted. The king in this attitude (with the baton 
 in his hand, simpering at the bacon aforesaid) has no more of the 
 heroic in him than the pork he contemplates, and he deserves to 
 lose every battle he fights. I prefer the artist’s other still-life 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 249 
 
 pictures to this. He has a couple more, professedly so called, very 
 cleverly executed and capital cabinet pieces. 
 
 Strange to say, I have not one picture to remark upon taken 
 from The Vicar of Wakefield. Mr. Ward has a very good 
 Hogarthian work, with some little extravagance and caricature, 
 representing J ohnson w^aiting in Lord Chesterfield’s ante-chamber, 
 among a crowd of hangers-on and petitioners, who are sulky, or 
 yawning, or neglected, while a pretty Italian singer comes out, 
 having evidently had a very satisfactory interview with his 
 lordship, and who (to lose no time) is arranging another rendezvous 
 with another admirer. This story is very well, coarsely, and 
 humorously told, and is as racy as a chapter out of Smollett. 
 There is a yawning chaplain, whose head is full of humour ; and a 
 pathetic episode of a widow and pretty child, in which the artist 
 has not succeeded so well. There is great delicacy and beauty in 
 Mr. Herbert’s picture of ‘ Pope Gregory teaching Children to Sing.’ 
 His Holiness lies on his sofa languidly beating time over his book. 
 He does not look strong enough to use the scourge in his hands, 
 and with which the painter says he used to correct his little 
 choristers. Two ghostly aides-de-camp in the shape of worn, 
 handsome, shaven ascetic friars, stand behind the pontiff demurely ; 
 and all the choristers are in full song, with their mouths as wide 
 open as a nest of young birds when the mother comes. The 
 painter seems to me to have acquired the true spirit of the 
 middle-age devotion. All his works have unction ; and the prim, 
 subdued, ascetic race, which forms the charm and mystery of the 
 missal -illuminations, and which has operated to convert some 
 imaginative minds from the new to the old faith. 
 
 And, by way of a wonder, behold a devotional picture from 
 Mr. Edwin Landseer, ‘A Shepherd praying at a Cross in the 
 Fields.’ I suppose the Sabbath church-bells are ringing from the 
 city far away in the plain. Do you remember the beautiful lines 
 ofUhland? 
 
 Es ist der Tag des Herrn : 
 
 Ich hin allein auf weitern Flur, 
 
 Noch eine Morgen- Glocke nur 
 Und Stille nah und fern. 
 
 Anbetend knie ich hier. ' 
 
 0 susses Graun, geheimes Wehn, 
 
 A Is knieten viele ungesehn 
 Und heteten mit mir. 
 
 Here is a noble and touching pictorial illustration of them — of 
 Sabbath repose and recueillement — an almost endless flock of sheep 
 
250 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 lies around the pious pastor ; the sun shines peacefully over the 
 vast fertile plain ; blue mountains keep watch in the distance ; 
 and the sky above is serenely clear. I think this is the highest 
 Right of poetry the painter has dared to take yet. The numbers 
 and variety of attitude and expression in that flock of sheep quite 
 startle the spectator as he examines them. The picture is a 
 wonder of skill. 
 
 How richly the good pictures cluster at this end of the room ! 
 There is a little Mulready, of which the colour blazes out like 
 sapphires and rubies ; a pair of Leslies — one called the ^ Heiress ’ 
 — one a scene from Molim^e — both delightful : — these are flanked 
 b}^ the magnificent nymphs of Etty, before mentioned. What 
 school of art in Europe, or what age, can show better painters 
 than these in their various lines ? The young men do well, but 
 the elders do best still. No wonder the English pictures are 
 fetching their thousands of guineas at the sales. They deserve 
 these great prices as well as the best works of the Hollanders. 
 
 I am sure that three such pictures as Mr. Webster’s ‘Dame’s 
 School’ ought to entitle the proprietor to pay the income-tax. 
 There is a little caricature in some of the children’s faces ; but 
 the schoolmistress is a perfect figure, most admirably natural, 
 humorous, and sentimental. The picture is beautifully painted, 
 full of air, of delightful harmony and tone. 
 
 There are works by Ores wick that can hardly be praised too 
 much. One particularly, called ‘A Place to be Remembered,’ 
 which no lover of pictures can see and forget. Danby’s great 
 ‘ Evening Scene ’ has portions which are not surpassed by Cuyp 
 or Claude ; and a noble landscape of Lee’s, among several others 
 — a height with some trees and a great expanse of country 
 beneath. 
 
 From the fine pictures you come to the class which are very 
 nearly being fine pictures. In this I would enumerate a landscape 
 or two by Collins. Mr. Leigh’s ‘Polyphemus,’ of which the 
 landscape part is very good, and only the figure questionable ; and 
 let us say Mr. Elmore’s ‘Origin of the Guelf and Ghibelline 
 Factions,’ which contains excellent passages, and admirable draw- 
 ing and dexterity, but fails to strike as a whole somehow. There 
 is not sufficient purpose in it, or the story is not enough to 
 interest, or, though the parts are excellent, the whole is some- 
 what deficient. 
 
 There is very little comedy in the Exhibition, most of the 
 young artists tending to the sentimental rather than the ludicrous. 
 Leslie’s scene from Moliere is the best comedy. Collins’s ‘ Fetch- 
 ing the Doctor’ is also delightful fun. The greatest farce, how- 
 
PICTURE GOSSIP 
 
 251 
 
 ever, is Chalon’s picture with an Italian title, ‘B. Virgine col,’ 
 etc. Impudence never went beyond this. The infant’s hair has 
 been curled into ringlets, the mother sits on her chair with painted 
 cheeks and a Haymarket leer. The picture might serve for the 
 oratory of an opera girl. 
 
 Among the portraits, Knight’s and Watson Gordon’s are the 
 best. A ‘Mr. Pigeon’ by the former hangs in the place of 
 honour usually devoted to our gracious Prince, and is a fine rich 
 state picture. Even better are these by Mr. Watson Gordon : 
 one representing a gentleman in black silk stockings whose name 
 has escaped the memory of your humble servant ; another, a fine 
 portrait of Mr. De Quincey, the opium-eater. Mr. Lawrence’s 
 heads, solemn and solidly painted, look out at you from their 
 frames, though they be ever so high placed, and push out of 
 sight the works of more flimsy but successful practitioners. A 
 portrait of great power and richness of colour is that of Mr. 
 Lopez by Linnell. Mr. Grant is the favourite ; but a very un- 
 sound painter to my mind, painting like a brilliant and graceful 
 amateur rather than a serious artist. But there is a quiet refine- 
 ment and beauty about his female heads, which no other painter 
 can perhaps give, and charms in spite of many errors. Is it 
 Count D’Orsay, or is it Mr. Ainsworth, that the former has 
 painted ? Two peas are not more alike than these two illustrious 
 characters. 
 
 In the miniature -room, Mr. Eichmond’s drawings are of so 
 grand and noble a character, that they fill the eye as much as 
 full-length canvasses. Nothing can be finer than Mrs. Fry and 
 the grey-haired lady in black velvet. There is a certain severe, 
 respectable, Exeter Hall look about most of this artist’s pictures, 
 that the observer may compare with the Catholic physiognomies 
 of Mr. Herbert : see his picture of Mr. Pugin, for instance ; it 
 tells of chants and cathedrals, as Mr. Eichmond’s work somehow 
 does of Clapham Common and the May meetings. The genius 
 of Mayfair fires the bosom of Chalon, the tea-party, the 
 quadrille, the hairdresser, the tailor, and the flunkey. All Eoss’s 
 miniatures sparkle with his wonderful and minute skill ; Carrick’s 
 are excellent ; Thorburn’s almost take the rank of historical 
 pictures. In his picture of two sisters one has almost the most 
 beautiful head in the world ; and his picture of Prince Albert, 
 clothed in red and leaning on a turquoise sabre, has ennobled that 
 fine head, and given his royal highness’s pale features an air of 
 sunburnt and warlike vigour. Miss Corbaux, too, has painted 
 one of the loveliest heads ever seen. Perhaps this is the 
 pleasantest room of the whole, for you are sure to meet your 
 
252 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 friends here ; kind faces smile at you from the ivory ; and features 
 of fair creatures, oh ! how . . 
 
 Here the eccentric author breaks into a rhapsody of thirteen 
 pages regarding No. 2576, Mrs, Major Blogg, who was formerly 
 Miss Poddy of Cheltenham, whom it appears that Michael Angelo 
 knew and admired. The feelings of the Poddy family might be 
 hurt, and the jealousy of Major Blogg aroused, were we to print 
 Titmarsh’s rapturous description of that lady ; nor, indeed, can 
 we give him any further space, seeing that this is nearly the last 
 page of the Magazine, He concludes by a withering denunciation 
 of most of the statues in the vault where they are buried ; praising, 
 however, the children, Paul and Virginia, the head of Bayly’s 
 nymph, and M‘DowalPs boy. He remarks the honest character 
 of the English countenance as exhibited in the busts, and contrasts 
 it with Louis Philippe’s head by Jones, on whom, both as a 
 sculptor and a singer, he bestows great praise. He indignantly 
 remonstrates with the committee for putting by hir the finest 
 female bust in the room. No. 1434, by Powers of Florence, in 
 a situation where it cannot be seen ; and, quitting the gallery 
 finally, says he must go before he leaves town and give one more 
 look at Hunt’s ‘Boy at Prayers,’ in the Water-Colour Exhibition, 
 which he pronounces to be the finest serious work of the year. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 
 
 By L. Marvy. 
 
 WITH SHORT NOTICES BY W. M. THACKERAY. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The revolutionary storm whicli raged in France in 1848, drove 
 many peaceful artists, as well as kings, ministers, tribunes, and 
 socialists of state, for refuge to our country ; and amongst the 
 former was Monsieur Louis Marvy, a friend of the present writer, 
 who has passed many happy hours in the French artist’s atelier^ 
 which, with his friends and his family, and its constant cheerfulness 
 and sunshine, the Parisian was obliged to exchange for a dingy 
 parlour and the fog and solitude of London. A fine and skilful 
 landscape painter himself, M. Marvy, during his residence herd, 
 made the following series of engravings, after the works of our 
 English landscape painters ; and, amongst other persons, especially 
 and thankfully owes an obligation to my kind friend, Mr. Thomas 
 Baring, for permission to make several sketches after pictures in 
 his rich collection. 
 
 The task of describer or narrator for the little exhibition 
 devolved upon myself, without whose introduction the publishers 
 would not hear of M. Marvy’s appearance before the English public, 
 and who must bespeak its indulgence for the discharge of a task 
 which was one of no small difficulty. There are no incidents in 
 our show upon which the showman can dilate ; in most cases he 
 has to introduce his audience to the sight of a simple and quiet 
 landscape, over which ideal pleasure is ever the best commentary, 
 and concerning which it is as hard to explain one’s own emotions, 
 as to cause another to share in them ; but the promise being made, 
 the pictures engraved, and the publisher peremptory, there is 
 nothing for it but to step forward, make a bow to the audience, 
 and begin the lecture. 
 
 253 
 
254 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 SIR AUGUSTUS WALL CALLCOTT. 
 
 Sir Augustus takes the precedence in our series, to which his 
 rank entitles him. The present age seldom witnesses combined 
 excellences in any art or science, but Callcott tried every branch 
 of his, before he finally settled down in landscape. He first began 
 by portrait-painting ; he then took to historical subjects, by which 
 he won the mastery which adds so much value and interest to his 
 landscapes of English scenery, or to his Dutch and Italian river 
 or canal borders. By treating the subjects which were before 
 handled by Cuyp and Canaletti, he has laid himself open to the 
 charge of plagiarism, but undeservedly ; for a genuine vein of 
 English colouring pervades his works, particularly his smaller 
 works, in which, less hampered by the breadth of effect he was 
 bound and successfully to seek, he devoted his admirable skill in 
 finishing. His house in Kensington was long a focus of all that 
 was eminent in art or criticism, from Elaxman to Waagen. The 
 charms of his dwelling made his works looked upon more as the 
 successful efforts of an amateur, than those of an accomplished 
 painter, to which their sterling merit fully entitles them. That 
 from which the artist, permitted by the kindness of Mr. T. Baring, 
 lias been enabled to copy, is one of the best-known of Callcott’s 
 works, and can bear to be looked at by the side of the Cuyp in 
 the splendid collection where it hangs. 
 
SIR A. W. CALLCOTT, R.A. 
 
 
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S^ER, 11. A. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISFI LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 255 
 
 TURNER. 
 
 Some people cannot understand that prodigious poem the 
 Fallacies of Hope^ with Delphic sentences, from which the notices 
 of Mr. Turner’s pictures are often accompanied in the Academy 
 catalogues. Many cannot comprehend the late pictures themselves, 
 but stand bewildered before those blazing wonders, those blood-red 
 shadows, those whirling gamboge suns — awful hieroglyphics which 
 even the Oxford Graduate, Turner’s most faithful priest and wor- 
 shipper, cannot altogether make clear. Nay, who knows whether 
 the priest himself has any distinct idea of the words which break 
 out from him, as he sits whirling on the tripod ; or of what spirits 
 will come up as he waves his wand, and delivers his astounding 
 incantation ? In Mr. Irving’s latter days, it was the gift of some 
 to utter, of others to interpret the utterances : and possibly the 
 prophet was as much surprised and edified as anybody else in the 
 congregation, when the interpreter rose and translated his mystic 
 cries. It is not given to all to understand ; but at times we have 
 glimpses of comprehension, and in looking at such pictures as the 
 ‘ Fighting T^m^raire,’ for instance, or the ‘ Star Ship,’ we admire 
 (and can scarce find words adequate to express our wonder) the 
 stupendous skill and genius of this astonishing master. If these 
 works which we think we understand are sublime, what are those 
 others which are unintelligible h Are they sublime too, or have they 
 reached that next and higher step, which by some is denominated 
 ridiculous ? Perhaps we have not arrived at the ' right period for 
 judging; and Time, which is proverbial for settling squabbles, is 
 also required for sobering pictures. As we cannot look at the sun 
 but through a blackened glass, it has seemed to us that the most 
 dazzling of Turner’s fancies have often been improved by the 
 sobering influence of the graver, and in nothing has his style 
 proved more triumphant than in withstanding this test. There 
 are no clap-trap light or shadows to serve the purpose of effect. 
 This may be owing to his having himself wielded the point. He 
 first exhibited in 1790. He first published his celebrated Liber 
 Studiorum in 1812, those sepia etchings which far surpass Claude’s 
 in variety of composition as well as feeling. We are tired by the 
 ever-recurring architecture and clumps of trees of the latter. 
 Turner gleans sublimity from the whole Continent, and when 
 satiated with that, rests in more quiet scenes of our shores, glens, 
 and mountains. They contain the germ of what he hereafter 
 created : his mind has ever been expanding, could not rest confined 
 and cramped to common laws. 
 
256 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS lET ART 
 
 The picture before us is of the Master’s earlier and more intel- 
 ligible style, before he spoke oracles, and when he wrote poetry : 
 poetry how grand, how sumptuous, how admirably beautiful and 
 true to nature, any one can say who has looked at the picture 
 painted in 1811, exhibited in 1849; at Mr. Grundy’s Trossachs; 
 at Sir John Swinburne’s picture ; or at the Carthage in the 
 Master’s own gallery ; works which seem to us to give him the 
 very foremost place of the landscape artists ; — epic works, so to 
 speak — the greatest in aim, the greatest in art, the greatest in 
 truth to nature. 
 
 But these may be mere outer works, and decorations which 
 anybody can understand — who knows what the adept sees behind 
 the curtain, beyond which (and indeed it is so beautiful that one 
 is content to admire but that) the uninitiated cannot peep? 
 Admiring the early and comprehensible works of the painter is like 
 admiring the early works of Swedenborg, and saying that he was 
 a man of vast science, and a skilled mathematician — he was all 
 this, but his disciples only know how much beside. 
 
 In fine, the Fallacies of Hope is a mystery, and a wonder, 
 and a perplexity. 
 
 HOLLAND. 
 
 Mr. Holland is alike skilled in oil and water-colour painting; 
 and the amateur has long ere this admired, on the walls of our 
 exhibitions, his rich and luminous colouring, his sunny buildings 
 of his favourite Venetian architecture, his clear waters, and his 
 deep Italian skies. This painter claims, as a right, to take his 
 place in any gallery of English landscape ; and we hope that his 
 French imitator has succeeded in giving a faithful translation of 
 the skilful and brilliant master’s manner. 
 
HOLLAND. 256. 
 

 
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DANJ5Y 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 257 
 
 DANBY. 
 
 The French artist has given a very successful imitation of the 
 beautiful and poetical sepia drawing of Mr. Danby. We have 
 scarcely ever seen a work by that great painter in which a 
 similar poetical beauty was not conveyed, and in regarding which 
 the spectator does not feel impressed by something of that solemn 
 contemplation, and reverent worship of nature, which seems to 
 pervade the artist’s mind and pencil. His pictures are always 
 still. You stand before them alone, and with a hushed admira- 
 tion, as before a great landscape when it breaks on your view. 
 He describes a scene of natural grandeur and beauty — of darkling 
 forests tinged with the brightening dawn of woods, and calm 
 waters gilded with sunset or fading into twilight ; and, as in 
 reading Wordsworth or the Georgies, the mind submits itself, awe- 
 stricken and delighted, to the majestic repose and splendour of the 
 poet’s art, one may say of Mr. Danby that he paints morning and 
 evening odes. His works are vast, polished, elaborate. With 
 other painters, differently constituted, it is as if they trilled a 
 ballad, or sang a sea-song. 
 
 As the blind man who said that he supposed the colour of 
 scarlet was like the sound of a trumpet, I suppose most persons 
 called upon to give an account of their sensations with regard to 
 art, must be driven to compare pictures to poems, and poems to 
 pictures. One always feels as if they were the same. 
 
 s 
 
258 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 CRESWICK. 
 
 Perhaps, more than any landscape painter, ancient or modern, 
 Mr. Creswick has united the perfection of aerial perspective in his 
 distances, with a precision in the foregrounds only equalled by the 
 pictures formed in convex glasses, and, we believe, frequently used 
 by artists, to see how nature is ‘ done.’ He seems to take a secret 
 pleasure in unravelling the mysteries of intricate groves as they 
 overarch the trout stream, of which he renders the evanescent 
 form and colour, with the hand of one who has spent many long 
 summers of careful thought and observation amidst such scenes. 
 Here is everything to admire, and nothing hard to understand. 
 The beholder has a perfect confidence in the painter whose happy 
 gift it is to receive and translate nature with an admirable fidelity 
 and truthfulness. We are as much charmed in watching this 
 artist’s work and manner, by the delightful instinct which enables 
 him to perceive the truth of nature, as by the perfect skill with 
 which he renders his perceptions. One can speak of art but 
 by illustration. Creswick is a composer singing his own airs with 
 the most charming fresh voice. Which is the more pleasing? the 
 beautiful organ, or the beautiful theme? With a happy organiza- 
 tion, a perfect cultivation, and a still constant variety of incident 
 in an occupation always harmless, interesting, beautiful ; surely 
 the landscape painters ought to be amongst the happiest people in 
 the world ; and, as one looks at these charming works of Mr. 
 Creswick, one fancies the painter happy in his serene occupation, 
 amidst the beautiful scene ; tracing the course of the river, the 
 forms of rocks, the play of the sunshine amidst the leaves. 
 
T. C RES WICK, A.R.A. 
 
 P. 258. 
 

 
W. COLLINS. P- 259. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGTLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 259 
 
 COLLINS. 
 
 In the pleasant Life of Collins by his son, the writer describes 
 how, when his father was preparing studies for his picture of the 
 ‘Skittle Players,’ he used to frequent a public garden in the 
 neighbourhood of Bayswater where that amusement was practised, 
 and watch, sketchbook in hand, the performers in the play. ‘ He 
 made studies unobserved of the individual character, the momentary 
 posture, the accidental arrangement of figures. He bought 
 skittles, and set them up in his garden. He risked turning his 
 gardener — a great skittle player, and the model for one of his 
 figures — into a permanent Colossus of Rhodes, by keeping him 
 striding in the action of bowling with all his might, as long as his 
 legs would uphold him, and the result was the production of a 
 picture which will go down to posterity as one of the standard 
 works of the Engish school.’ 
 
 The affectionate biographer holds up this as a fair example, to 
 show much care, constancy, ingenuity, and patient previous labour 
 are requisite to enable the painter to work out his design. The 
 man who set up the honest gardener for his model, may now serve 
 in his turn as a model himself to students in his art, and out of it 
 indeed. To the very last days of his life he loved his art, and 
 humbly laboured to perfect himself in it ; with what success the 
 delighted spectator knows, who has seen and must recollect his 
 works with a grateful personal kindness ; — something like that 
 which one feels on reading a page of The Traveller or The 
 Deserted Village^ from which one brings away the memory of 
 the beautiful sunny landscape, the pretty groups of figures, and of 
 the charming and gentle poet who portrayed them. 
 
260 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 REDGRAVE. 
 
 Very many of our figure painters excel as delineators of landscape. 
 The backgrounds of Mr. Mulready’s pictures may be matched with 
 the works of the finest Dutch painters. Whether of lake or mountain 
 scenery, whether of distance or foreground, whether of desert or 
 moorland, what artist can be a more skilful painter than Sir Edwin 
 Landseer? The air and sunshine, the murmuring trees, and 
 rippling waters, in the midst of which Etty’s buxom nymphs dis- 
 port themselves, are painted with a brilliancy of tone which no 
 landscape painter, since the time of Velasquez (another splendid in- 
 stance of our theory), has caught. And in Mr. Redgrave’s works, 
 which are chiefly character pieces of the pathetic and domestic cast, 
 the observer will remark with how much delicacy and truth the 
 landscape portions of the picture are rendered, and with what keen 
 observation and relish this accomplished painter evidently pursues 
 nature. The little picture from which tliis design is taken, is a 
 happy proof of the artist’s faithful taste, and talent ; a quiet little 
 piece of chequered shade and sunshine, suggestive of repose and 
 peaceful meditation. Wandering through the Academy rooms 
 every year, the visitor will be pretty sure to catch glimpses in 
 quiet nooks of other such works of the painter’s hand : — calm little 
 insights into quiet nooks of nature, and glimpses of the artist’s 
 mind at work. The figure painter relieves himself with these 
 prolusions, as he might by rhyming a sonnet, or touching a tune 
 on the piano. 
 
IlEDGRAYE, A.K.A. P. 260. 
 
"v 
 
 1 
 
 
 
n.A. p. 261. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 261 
 
 LEE. 
 
 It is refreshing to the eyes of the Londoner, on visiting the 
 Exhibition of the Royal Academy, to pause before the healthy and 
 cheerful landscapes of Mr. Lee. Whilst other painters go abroad in 
 search of subjects for their easel, more picturesque or romantic than 
 those which can be found at home ; Mr. Lee has confined himself 
 to English scenery, we believe, almost entirely — to English plains 
 and corn-fields, and English rivers, and avenues of English trees, 
 bright with native air and sunshine. It is not so much, in our 
 opinion, the art with which he executes his works as their 
 admirable fidelity to nature, which renders them always so 
 pleasant ; they are kindly fresh and homely, as a sonnet by Crabbe. 
 Not at all of the idealist school, the sight of them yet serves to 
 please and charm, and the eye gazes delighted in the silvery clouds 
 and blue distances, the chequered shades and lights of those 
 favourite lanes in which the artist loves to linger, and the wide 
 fields and meadows with the clouds and the light overhead. Those 
 rustic ploughmen and industrious fishermen who people his land- 
 scapes, or throw the fly by his shining river sides, ought all to be 
 people, as we imagine, of happy temperament and robust constitu- 
 tion. For it always seems to us in Mr. Lee’s pictures, that there 
 is cheerfulness in the landscape, and health in the air. 
 
262 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 CATTERMOLE. 
 
 This is scarcely a favourable specimen of the genius of this 
 dashing and vigorous painter. The peculiar tastes of the French 
 artist would lead him to give better imitations of pictures of land- 
 scape and woodland scenery, than of those romantic architectural 
 subjects, vast cathedrals and sombre Gothic dungeons, which Mr. 
 Cattermole’s hand delights to depict. 
 
 No man can have examined his works upon the walls of the 
 Water-Colour Exhibition, which they have adorned for some 
 twenty years, without having been struck, not merely with the 
 admirable harmony of colour and tone, — a tone and colour quite 
 original — which pervades them, but with the profound knowledge 
 of chiaroscuro which they exhibit. As, in listening to a composer 
 performing a fine piece of music, one is often led away from one’s 
 admiration of the work itself to astonishment at the skill of the 
 performer, so, in examining Mr. Catterm ole’s pictures, one pauses, 
 breathless almost, before the astonishing dexterity, and the brilliant 
 feats of hand, which the artist flings over his paper. A few 
 strokes are sufiicient to represent long lines of columns or the most 
 intricate and delicate Gothic tracery. A few glittering dashes of 
 the brush, and wonderful cups and salvers, and shining suits of 
 armour, are represented by this marvellously facile pencil. 
 
 Monks, cavaliers, battles, banditti, knightly halls, and awful 
 enchanted forests in which knights and distressed damsels wander 
 — the pomp and circumstance of feudal war, are subjects in which 
 Mr. Cattermole chiefly delights. He is the English Salvator, with 
 more poetry and equal skill. 
 
 This vast facility, which we admire in Mr. Cattermole’s works, 
 was not learned without long and previous preparation. Five 
 and twenty years back, some of the most elaborate architectural 
 drawings in Britton’s Cathedrals are to be found with the signature 
 of the young student, who afterwards applied the knowledge, of 
 which he thus laid the ground-work, in the execution of the 
 thousand brilliant and beautiful works which we owe to his 
 abundant genius. 
 
 Among the finest of his works, everybody who saw it will 
 remember the ‘ Skirmish on the Bridges : ’ and his Scottish designs, 
 illustrating the life of Queen Mary, are as remarkable for their 
 beauty of design and colour as for their poetry, which is gloomy 
 and grand. Some fine delineations of his favourite Cavaliers, and 
 Roundheads, are to be found ornamenting his brother’s volumes of 
 
P. 2G2. 
 
 G. CATTEKMOLE. 
 

 
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P. 263. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 263 
 
 the history of the civil wars. In the present year’s exhibition he 
 has taken Shakespeare and Chivalry for his theme. With what 
 a rapid skill has he delineated the combat of the knights — how 
 magnificent is the drear landscape in which the weird sisters 
 appear before Macbeth, quivering in the air, and about to vanish 
 before him, spreading their bloody tartans to ride away in the 
 storm 1 
 
 W. J. MULLER. 
 
 The latter part of Muller’s career has, in its eastern splendour, 
 eclipsed his more sober and earlier efforts. We know him chiefly 
 as the intrepid follower of the Xanthian expedition, indefatigable 
 in material-gathering for future fame, till the thorough exhaustion 
 of a vast stock of paper on the very day he sailed to reap in his 
 native land the noble and short-lived fruits of his industry. 
 
 With more elasticity of composition, or may-be an eye better 
 formed to seize the impromptu groupings of nature, he equalled 
 the French Decamps in his colouring ; and in the works of these 
 two painters, the East, in all its magic and splendour, has been 
 for the first time revealed to us. In the delightful glimpses of 
 Eastern life which they discover, they are not unworthy of siding 
 with the Arabian Nights, the illustration of which by these two 
 masters we can only enjoy in imagination. Amongst the first 
 results of Muller’s sojourn in the East, was his brilliant view of 
 Rhodes. Exhibition dalliers were amazed by his prolific pencil, 
 but perhaps secretly preferred his less ambitious bits : such a one, 
 it may be recollected, was the Maltese Guard, and his verdigris- 
 coloured culverin. He was of the city of Chatterton, had a good 
 deal of his poetry and genius, and was, like his brother, nipped 
 early by morbid disappointment. 
 
264 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 HARDING. 
 
 If one may find a fault with Mr. Harding’s works, it is that one 
 is almost too conscious of the artist in his works. The efiects are 
 too palpable, the contrasts between light and dark too self-evident ; 
 and yet the ensemble is always brilliant and rich, and every 
 individual work of the painter sure to command admiration. As 
 a painter, he is skilled in the use of every weapon of his art — 
 paints alike upon canvas, and paper, and stone — and has never 
 been excelled in the breadth, richness, and facility with which he 
 handles every subject which he treats. He designs architecture 
 with the brilliancy and dexterity of Bonningtou, and possesses 
 over the trees of the forest and park a mastery of delineation 
 of which no other artist can boast. Some of his lithographic 
 sketches of forest scener}^, published in the admirable Elementary 
 books, strike upon the eye as fine pictures. 
 
 The completed works of no artist can, perhaps, be measured by 
 his sketches ; but it may be said of Mr. Harding, as a landscape 
 painter, that his sketches are among the very finest which any 
 artist has ever produced. Like others of his fortunate brethren, 
 he has pursued his art into a hundred countries, and brought home 
 delightM reminiscences of Alps and Tyrolese mountains, Italian 
 lakes, and quaint Norman cities, in his rich portfolio. 
 
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 J. 1). HAllDING. 
 
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NASMYTH. P. 265. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 265 
 
 NASMYTH. 
 
 Nasmyth has taken his quiet place amongst our landscape 
 painters, and may rank almost as an English Hobbema. A little 
 more light in his pictures, and perhaps a selection of a better 
 vehicle in which to paint, would have rendered them more 
 agreeable to the amateur’s eye, which has been accustomed to 
 brighter attractions than are afforded by the somewhat sombre 
 and Quaker-like tone which these modest works wear. But, on 
 closer examination into the pictures, the admirable care and 
 finish of the details, the various minuteness of foreground, foliage, 
 cottage -wall, and garden -v/eed, the calm silvery tones of the 
 delicately -painted distance will strike everybody who examines 
 the artist’s rather rare works, and will strike us with the more 
 admiration when we remember at what time this artist began to 
 paint, and that he came after the sloven Morland, and the some- 
 what careless practitioners of the English school of that day. 
 
266 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 RICHARD WILSON. 
 
 Wilson wanted the force which might have made him an original 
 genius. Had he remained at home, there is no knowing what he 
 would have done. However, he got whirled into the Roman 
 vortex, where two or three living minds swayed those who only 
 went to seek inspiration from its traditions. 
 
 Wilson adopted the Vernet themes, and in some respects 
 surpassed the man he admired. This abdication of self was not 
 forgiven in England — the public supported him feebly ; and he 
 was snubbed for his ale-house tastes, by the purist Reynolds. We 
 find him feted and admired while in Rome by Mengs amongst 
 others, who, wonderful condescension ! has handed down to us 
 Wilson’s physiognomy in one of his mild pastels. He dragged a 
 slovenly existence in Covent Garden, till he was enabled by pawning 
 a picture to retreat into Wales and die there miserably. Reynolds 
 has mercilessly dissected the figures in his landscapes, which in- 
 fliction, it must be owned, they deserved, though his views in Italy 
 ought now to be cherished more than ever for their happy accuracy 
 in the anatomy of villas, some of them now destroyed. 
 
 We are still proud of Wilson : his classicism makes his name 
 respectable ; though there is little sympathy between his bold 
 stroke and the more careful productions of our day. This, never- 
 theless, does not apply to all his works, as some of them of exquisite 
 finish turn up now and then oddly at sales. 
 
 Amongst his works that are engraved, his pictures in the 
 National Gallery are about the worst ; they are coarse in effect, 
 and leave a sort of impression on the mind that he was not happy 
 in their somewhat theatrical execution, for the pains and delight 
 of a painter in his own work have almost always a winning 
 influence. 
 
 He was one of the founders of the Royal Academy. Cunningham 
 relates that he painted with one brush, and standing : it is singular 
 that Mengs has represented him sitting with several brushes in his 
 hand, so much for art anecdote. 
 
EICHARD WILSON, 
 
 p. 266 , 
 
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W. COOKE. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 267 
 
 E. W. COOKE. 
 
 Mr. Cooke, we believe, is as skilled with the graver as with the 
 pencil ; and this is one of the many of his river scenes, which have 
 earned the artist’s reputation. The showman who has engaged 
 himself to describe his friend’s exhibition in truth finds the task 
 to be one of uncommon difficulty; and, as the ingenuous reader 
 has perhaps remarked, is often compelled to speak about anything 
 but the subject in hand, while the scene is passing before the 
 public eye. We are not here to bawl out that this is the 
 wonderful wonder of wonders, that our giant is the biggest, our 
 dwarf the smallest, or our picture the most beautiful, in the world. 
 Our audience is too knowing to be taken in, were any deception 
 attempted. Nor is much comment necessary about the quiet little 
 picture which now comes in our series, and merits a place there as 
 a specimen of the work of a very favourite and accomplished 
 English painter. 
 
268 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 JOHN CONSTABLE. 
 
 John Constable was intended by nature for a landscape painter ; 
 but, by his parents, for the honourable craft of miller. For a 
 while, he served two masters : when grinding corn he still had 
 leisure to examine the fleeting effects of nature, and thus turn the 
 mill into an observatory. This influenced his style ever after, as 
 clouds always occupied the prominent part of his compositions ; it 
 was in clouds that he excelled, whether in their transparency and 
 misty appearance, or in their masses of light. 
 
 When he returned from a sketching excursion, he used to say, 
 
 ‘ I have had a good skying ; ’ and wlien he displayed these sketches, 
 they were found marked with the day, hour, and which way the 
 wind blew. 
 
 Fie resided latterly in Hampstead, and has left innumerable 
 reminiscences of its everlasting heath, that untiring ‘ sitter.^ The 
 amateur will recognise in the accompanying excellent sketch, the 
 ‘CornfiekP of the National Gallery. This beautiful piece of 
 autumn seems to be under the influence of a late shower ; the 
 shrubs, trees, and distance, are saturated with it — what a lover of 
 water that youngster must be, who is filling himself within after 
 he has been wetted to the skin by the rain which has just passed 
 away ! As one looks at this delightful picture one cannot but 
 admire the manner in which the specific character of every object 
 is made out ; the undulations of the ripe corn, the chequered light 
 on the road, the freshness of the banks, the trees and their leafage, 
 the brilliant cloud artfully contrasted against the trees, and here 
 and there broken with azure. Fuseli’s standing joke, as he looked 
 at Constable’s pictures, was to call for his greatcoat and umbrella. 
 The wit of the Academy showed a better appreciation of the great 
 landscape painter’s genius than Chantrey did, who one day took 
 up Constable’s palette, and rubbed his picture with a glaze of 
 asphaltum. ‘There goes all my dew,’ the poor artist said to 
 Leslie, his charming biographer. Is not many another poet’s dew, 
 and delightful natural bloom, unseen by dull observers, and rubbed 
 away by coarse patrons ? 
 
 Not fairly appreciated during his lifetime, every suceeeding 
 year adds to the public appreciation of this great genius. Before 
 he was admired as he deserved to be amongst ourselves, the Parisian 
 painters had greatly and justly appreciated him, and he w^as as 
 much the originator of the modern French landscape, as Scott was 
 the father of French romance. 
 
p. 268 . 
 
 JOHN CONSTABLE. 
 
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T)E WINT. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER EK'GLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 269 
 
 P. DE WINT 
 
 OuE, well-beloved De Wint has gone like one of those calm summer 
 days he used to depict. He spent his life in one revel of sunshine. 
 He caught well the warm purplish blue of the summer sky. All 
 artists generally choose morning or evening, as the long sweeping 
 shadows form at once easy pictures, but De Wint was not frightened 
 by the sun in its meridian. 
 
 Wilson is said to have aimed at representing the subtle air, in 
 which buzzed the ephemeral insects ; we think De Wint, with the 
 more slender material of water, has better succeeded. Fuseli, who 
 wanted his umbrella to look at Constable’s showers, might have 
 called for a pot of porter at seeing one of De Wint’s hay-makings. 
 Distant towns, most unpromising in aspect, became pleasant-looking 
 under his pencil ; large masses of trees grew of intelligent shape : 
 he caught the murmuring undulations of quiet streams ; everything 
 basked lazily with him, and one wondered whether he remained 
 torpid in winter. 
 
 There was not much depth in his scheme of manipulation, but 
 the charm was in the instinctive perception of nature’s cunning 
 simplicity, the simple means by which so much is brought about, 
 as to make us exclaim ‘how is it done?’ As Rousseau said, 
 
 ‘ Ce n’est pas ainsi que Ton invente ; ’ if man invents, he plunges 
 into affected mannerism, and it must always be so, unless he 
 follows the complaisant model, which is ever posture-making, for 
 him who takes the trouble to look out. De Wint was one of 
 these ; it is evident in all his works that he never invented the 
 smallest personage, but followed the wise maxim for landscapists 
 — ‘ always to wait for a figure, which will be sure to appear 
 when wanted.’ And so all faithful painters always awaited 
 patiently the coming man. De Wint painted freely and without 
 effort, avoiding all modern innovations. He was married to 
 Hilton’s sister, and was his early friend and associate. 
 
270 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 DAVID COX. 
 
 Wales is Cox’s field of battle. He is said to have invariably 
 bent his steps towards Llanrwst and Bettws-y-Coed for the last 
 five and thirty years. The very stones are christened after him ; 
 as you wind out of Capel Carig, a little turret, in which a stone 
 seat is inserted, bulges from the walled road-side, and is known as 
 Cox’s pulpit. One of the greatest favourites amongst our water- 
 colour painters, the public and the artists alike admire this veteran 
 painter. His drawings have the fresh impromptu look of nature, 
 and never savour of home-manufacture His hand would seem to 
 be rapid, and his eye certain, and the delighted beholder wonders 
 where the secret is, and how, with strokes so rough, and on such 
 small spaces of paper, air and distance, storm and sunshine, should 
 be described so lucidly. 
 
DAVID COX. 
 

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GAINSBOROUGH. 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 271 
 
 GAINSBOROUGH. 
 
 The great name of Gainsborough needs scarce any comment or 
 eulogy here. Comparatively obscure when Reynolds was in the 
 full blaze of his reputation, his works are as familiar among us 
 as those of the great President, and we may say of him, that he 
 is the most beloved of English painters. All the works which he 
 has bequeathed to us, whether portraits or landscapes, seem 
 graceful and charming, beautiful and serene. He ennobles every- 
 thing he approaches ; his rustic subjects have an idyllic beauty ; 
 he touches his courtly figures with a splendid courtesy, so to 
 speak. In Mr. Baring’s gallery, as you look at the charming and 
 famous original from which the accompanying sketch is taken, the 
 picture seems to illuminate the place where it hangs with calm, 
 lambent radiance, and we gaze at its shadowy gloom and soft 
 prismatic flicker of light, with such a pleased hush and tranquillity 
 as a fine sunset inspires. 
 
272 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS ART 
 
 EGBERTS. 
 
 What region of earth is there that does not show signs of the 
 Englishman’s labour ? Our painters share the spirit of enterprise 
 along with the rest of our people, and Mr. Roberts, the author of 
 the original sketch from which the accompanying engraving has 
 been taken, has visited at least three of the quarters of the globe, 
 and brought away likenesses of their cities and people, in his 
 portfolio. He travelled for years in Spain ; he set up his tent 
 in the Syrian desert ; he has sketched the spires of Antwerp, the 
 peaks of Lebanon, the rocks of Calton Hill, the towers and castles 
 that rise by the Rhine ; the airy Cairo minarets, the solemn 
 pyramids and vast Theban columns, and the huts under the date 
 trees, along the banks of the Nile. Can any calling be more 
 pleasant than that of such an artist ? The life is at once thought- 
 ful and adventurous ; gives infinite variety and excitement, and 
 constant opportunity for reflection. As one looks at the multi- 
 farious works of this brave and hardy painter, whose hand is the 
 perfect and accomplished slave of his intellect, and ready, like 
 a genius in an eastern tale, to execute the most wonderful feats 
 and beautiful works with the most extraoi dinary rapidity, any man 
 who loves adventure himself must envy the lucky mortal whose lot 
 it is to enjoy it in such a way. He reads the magnificent book of 
 nature for himself, and at first hand : tihi suavis dciedala tellus 
 submittit flares. 0 ! happy painter — tihi rident aequora ponti. 
 From the deck of your boat you sketch the sea and the shore : you 
 moor under the city walls ; and mosque and dome. Gothic 
 cathedral, tower, and ancient fortress rise up with their long 
 perspectives, and varied outlines, and hues, and solemn shadows, 
 fantastic and beautiful, built in an hour or two under the magical 
 strokes of your delightful obedient little genius, the pencil ! The 
 ferry-boat puts off from the stairs, and makes its way across the 
 river to the grey old town on the bank yonder, where the windows 
 in the quaint-gabled houses, and the vanes on the towers are still 
 flaming in the sunset, and reflected in the river beneath. Tower 
 and town, river and distant hill, boat and ferry, and the steers- 
 man with his paddle, and the peasants with the grape-baskets 
 singing in the boat, are all sketched down on the painter’s drawing 
 board before the sun has sunk, and before he returns to his snug 
 supper at the inn, where the landlord’s pretty daughter comes 
 and peers over the magician’s portfolio. Or the Cangia moors. 
 
ROBERTS, 
 
SKETCHES AFTER ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS 273 
 
 by the bank-side : the Arab crew are cooking their meal and 
 chanting their chant : the camels come down to the water and 
 receive their loads of cotton, and disappear with their shouting 
 drivers under the date trees, to the village with the crumbled 
 wall and minaret, where the grave elders are seated smoking 
 under the gate, and the women pass to and fro, straight and 
 stately, robed in flowing blue robes, bearing pitchers on their 
 graceful heads : the painter sees, and notes them all down, while 
 the light lasts him, and before he smokes his own pipe under the 
 stars on the deck ; after a long day of pleasant labour, and before 
 he closes Ids eyes which have been so busy and so pleased all 
 day. Or he is up before dawn upon his mule to see the sun rise 
 over the heights of Sierra ; or he is seated at morning, the 
 Sheikh with his long gun over his shoulder watching, and the 
 Arabs lying round the tent, ‘ silent upon a peak in Lebanon.’ 
 
 T 
 
274 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 STANFIELD. 
 
 Me. Stanfield and Air. Roberts, but especially the former, who 
 has executed more, and more various, works in the scenic depart- 
 ment than his brilliant coadjutor, have had the means of doing 
 more towards advancing the taste of the English public for land- 
 scape art, than any other living painter. Mr. Stanfield for many 
 years taught the public from the stage — taught the pit and the 
 gallery to admire landscape art, and the boxes to become 
 connoisseurs ; and decorated the theatre with works so beautiful, 
 that one regrets the frail material of which they were constructed ; 
 and the necessity for ^ new and gorgeous effects ’ and ‘ magnificent 
 novelties,’ which caused the artist’s works to be carried away. 
 Mr. Stanfield has created, and afterwards painted out with his 
 own brush, more scenic masterpieces than any man. Clown and 
 Pantaloon in his time tumbled over and belaboured one another, 
 and bawled out their jokes, before the most beautiful and dazzling 
 pictures which ever were presented to the eyes of the theatre- 
 goer. How a man could do so much and so well as Air. Stanfield did 
 during the time when he was the chief of the Drury Lane scene- 
 room, was a wonder to everybody ; and it was not the public 
 only which he delighted, and awakened and educated into 
 admiration, but the members of his owm profession were as 
 enthusiastic as the rest of the world to recognise and applaud 
 his magnificent imagination and skill. 
 
 All through the painter’s life his industry and his genius have 
 been alike remarkable, and it is curious to note, in his perform- 
 ances of the present time, how the carefulness of the artist seems 
 to increase with his skill ; as if this conscientious man were bent 
 each day upon improving, on elaborating and polishing his works, 
 on approaching more nearly to nature. Does not such a progress 
 seem to tell of more than mere talent ? of honesty, of modesty, of 
 fixithful and cheerful labour, of constant love for truth ? It 
 seems to me that the pictures of some artists tell of these things 
 too, and that these are amongst the precious qualities which go 
 to make a painter. 
 
STANFIELD. 
 

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PICTUEES OF LIFE AND CHAEACTEE. BY 
 JOHN LEECHJ 
 
 We, who can recall the consulship of Plancus, and quite respect- 
 able old fogeyfied times, remember amongst other amusements 
 which we had as children the pictures at which we were permitted 
 to look. There was Boydelbs Shakespeare, black and ghastly 
 gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling Fuselis ! 
 there were Lear, Oberon, Hamlet, with starting muscles, rolling 
 eyeballs, and long pointing quivering fingei s ; there was little 
 Prince Arthur (Northcote) crying, in white satin, and bidding 
 good Hubert not put out his eyes ; there was Hubert crying ; 
 there was little Eutland being run through the poor little body by 
 bloody Clifford ; there was Cardinal Beaufort (Eeynolds) gnashing 
 his teeth, and grinning and howling demoniacally on his deathbed 
 (a picture frightful to the present day) ; there was Lady Hamilton 
 (Eomney) waving a torch and dancing before a black background 
 — a melancholy museum indeed. Smirke’s delightful Seven Ages 
 only fitfully relieved its general gloom. AVe did not like to inspect 
 it unless the elders were present and plenty of lights and company 
 were in the room. 
 
 Cheerful relatives used to treat us to Miss Linwood’s. Let 
 the children of the present generation thank their stars that tragedy 
 is put out of their way. Miss Linwood’s was worsted work. 
 Your grandmother or grand-aunts took you there, and said the 
 pictures were admirable. You saw ‘ The Woodman ’ in worsted, 
 with his axe and dog, tramping through the snow; the snow 
 bitter cold to look at, the woodman’s pipe wonderful ; a gloomy 
 piece, that made you shudder. There were large dingy pictures 
 of woollen martyrs, and scowling warriors with limbs strongly 
 knitted ; there was especially, at the end of a long passage, a den 
 of lions that would frighten any boy not born in Africa, or Exeter 
 Change, and accustomed to them. 
 
 ^ Pictures of Life and Character. By John Leech. London: 1854. 
 
 275 
 
276 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Another exhibition used to be West’s Gallery, where the 
 pleasing figure of Lazarus in his grave-clothes, and Death on the 
 pale horse, used to impress us children. The tombs of West- 
 minster Abbey, the vaults at St. Paul’s, the men in armour at the 
 Tower, frowning ferociously out of their helmets, and wielding 
 their dreadful swords ; that superhuman Queen Elizabeth at the 
 end of the room, a livid sovereign with glass eyes, a ruff, and a 
 dirty satin petticoat, riding a horse covered with steel : who does 
 not remember these sights in London in the consulship of Plancus ? 
 and the waxwork in Fleet Street, not like that of Madame Tussaud’s, 
 whose chamber of death is gay and brilliant, but a nice old gloomy 
 waxwork, full of murderers ; and, as a chief attraction, the dead 
 baby and the Princess Charlotte lying in state. 
 
 Our story-books had no pictures in them for the most part. 
 Frank (dear old Frank!) had none ; nor the Parent’s Assistant; 
 nor the Evenings at Home ; nor our copy of the Ami des Enfans ; 
 there were just a few at the end of the Spelling-Book ; besides 
 the allegory at the beginning, of Education leading up Youth to 
 the temple of Industry, where Dr. Dilworth and Professor 
 Walkinghame stood with crowns of laurel ; there were, w^e say, 
 just a few pictures at the end of the Spelling-Book, little oval 
 grey woodcuts of Bewick’s, mostly of the Wolf and the Lamb, the 
 Dog and the Shadow, and Brown, Jones, and Kobinson with long 
 ringlets and little tights ; but for pictures, so to speak, what had 
 we ? The rough old wood-blocks in the old harlequin-backed fairy 
 books had served hundreds of years ; before our Plancus, in the 
 time of Priscus Plancus — in Queen Anne’s time, who knows? We 
 were flogged at school ; we were fifty boys in our boarding house, 
 and had to wash in a leaden trough, under a cistern, wdth lumps 
 of fat yellow soap floating about in the ice and water. Are our 
 sons ever flogged ? Have they not dressing rooms, hair oil, hip 
 baths, and Baden towels ? And what picture-books the' young 
 villains have ! What have these children done that they should 
 be so much happier than we were ? 
 
 We had the Arabian Nights and Walter Scott, to be sure. 
 Smirke’s illustrations to the former are very fine. We did not 
 know how good they were then ; but we doubt whether we did 
 not prefer the little old Miniature Library Nights with frontis- 
 pieces by Unwins ; for these books the pictures don’t count. 
 Every boy of imagination does his own pictures to Scott and the 
 Arabian Nights best. 
 
 Of funny pictures there were none especially intended for us 
 children. There was Rowlandson’s Dr. Syntax ; Dr. Syntax in 
 a fuzz wig, on a horse with legs like sausages, riding races, making 
 
PICTURES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 277 
 
 love, frolicking with rosy exuberant damsels. Those pictures 
 were very funny, and that aqua -tinting and the gay coloured 
 plates were very pleasant to witness ; but if we could not read the 
 poem in those days, could we digest it in this? Nevertheless, 
 apart from the text which we could not master, we remember Dr. 
 Syntax pleasantly, like those cheerful painted hieroglyphics in the 
 Nineveh Court at Sydenham. What matter for the arrow-head, 
 illegible stuff? Give us the placid grinning kings, twanging their 
 jolly bows over their rident horses, wounding those good-humoured 
 enemies, who tumble gaily off the towers, or drown, smiling in 
 the dimpling waters, amidst the anerithmon gelasma of the 
 fish. 
 
 After Dr. Syntax, the apparition of Corinthian Tom, Jerry 
 Hawthorne, and the facetious Bob Logic must be recorded — a 
 wondrous history indeed theirs was ! When the future student 
 of our manners comes to look over the pictures and the writing of 
 these queer volumes, w^hat will he think of our society, customs 
 and language in the consulship of Plancus? We have still in our 
 mind’s eye some of the pictures of that sportive gallery ; the white 
 coat, Prussian blue pantaloons, Hessian boots and hooked nose of 
 Corinthian Tom; Jerry’s green cutaway and leather gaiters; Bob 
 Logic’s green spectacles, and high-waisted surtout. ‘ Corinthian,’ 
 it appears, was the phrase applied to men of fashion and ton in 
 Plancus’s time ; they were the brilliant predecessors of the ‘ swell ’ 
 of the present period — brilliant, but somewhat barbarous, it must 
 be confessed. The Corinthians were in the habit of drinking a 
 great deal too much in Tom Cribb’s parlour ; they used to go and 
 see ‘life’ in the gin-shops; of nights, walking home (as well as 
 they could), they used to knock down ‘ Charleys,’ poor harmless 
 old watchmen with lanterns, guardians of the streets of Pome, 
 Plance Consule. They perpetrated a vast deal of boxing; they 
 put on the ‘mufflers’ in Jackson’s rooms; they ‘sported their 
 prads ’ in the Ring in the Park ; they attended cock-fights and 
 were enlightened patrons of dogs and destroyers of rats. Besides 
 these sports, the delassemens of gentlemen mixing with the people, 
 our patricians, of course, occasionally enjoyed the society of their 
 own class. What a wonderful picture that used to be of Corinthian 
 Tom dancing with Corinthian Kate at Almack’s ! What a pro- 
 digious dress Kate wore ! With what graceful abandon the pair 
 flung their arms about as they swept through the mazy quadrille, 
 with all the noblemen standing round in their stars and uniforms ! 
 You may still, doubtless, see the pictures at the British Museum, 
 or find the volumes in the corner of some old country-house 
 library. 
 
278 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 You are to suppose that the English Aristocracy of 1820 did 
 dance and caper in that way, and box and drink at Tom Cribb’s 
 and knock down watchmen ; and the children of to-day, turning 
 to their elders, may say ‘Grandmamma, did you wear such a 
 dress as that when you danced at Almack’s ? There was very 
 little of it, grandmamma. Did grandpapa kill many watchmen 
 when he was a young man, and frequent thieves^ gin-shops, cock- 
 fights, and the ring before you married him ? Did he use to talk 
 the extraordinary slang and jargon which is printed in this book ? 
 He is very much changed. He seems a gentlemanly old boy 
 enough now.^ 
 
 In the above-named consulate, when we had grandfathers alive, 
 there would be in the old gentleman’s library in the country two or 
 three old mottled portfolios or great swollen scrap-books of blue 
 paper, full of the comic prints of grandpapa’s time, ere Plancus 
 ever had the fasces borne before him. These prints were signed 
 Gillray, Bunbury, Rowlandson, Woodward, and some actually 
 George Cruikshank — for George is a veteran now, and he took the 
 etching needle in hand as a child. He caricatured ‘ Boney,’ 
 borrowing not a little from Gillray in his first puerile efforts. He 
 drew Louis XVIII. trying on Boney’s boots. Before the century 
 was actually in its teens, we believe that George Cruikshank was 
 amusing the public. 
 
 In those great coloured prints in our grandfather’s portfolios in 
 the library, and in some other apartments of the house, where the 
 caricatures used to be pasted in those days, we found things quite 
 beyond our comprehension. Boney was represented as a fierce 
 dwarf, with goggle eyes, a huge laced hat and tricoloured plume, 
 a crooked sabre, reeking with blood ; a little demon revelling in 
 lust, murder, massacre. John Bull was shown kicking him a good 
 deal: indeed, he was prodigiously kicked all through that series of 
 pictures ; by Sydney Smith and our brave allies the gallant Turks ; 
 by the excellent and patriotic Spaniards ; by the amiable and 
 indignant Russians, — all nations had boots at the service of poor 
 Master Boney ! How Pitt used to defy him ! How good old 
 George, king of Brobdignag, laughed at Gulliver Boney, sailing 
 about in his tank to make sport for their Majesties ! This little 
 fiend, this beggar’s brat, cowardly, murderous, and atheistic as he 
 was (we remember in those old portfolios, pictures representing 
 Boney and his family in rags, gnawing raw bones in a Corsican hut; 
 Boney murdering the sick at Jaffa ; Boney with a hookah and a 
 large turban, having adopted the Turkish religion, etc.) — this 
 Corsican monster, nevertheless, had some devoted friends in 
 England, according to the Gillray chronicle — a set of villains who 
 
PICTURES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 279 
 
 loved atheism, tyranny, plunder and wickedness in general, like their 
 French friend. In the pictures these men were all represented as 
 dwarfs, like their ally. The miscreants got into power at one 
 time, and, if we remember right, were called the Broad-backed 
 Administration. One with shaggy eyebrows and a bristly beard, 
 the hirsute ringleader of the rascals, was, it appears, called Charles 
 James Fox; another miscreant, with a blotched countenance, was 
 a certain Sheridan; other imps were hight Erskine, Norfolk (Jockey 
 of), Moira, Henry Petty. As in our childish innocence we used to 
 look at these demons, now sprawling and tipsy in their cups, 
 now scaling Heaven, from which the angelic Pitt hurled them 
 down ; now cursing the light (their atrocious ringleader Fox was 
 represented with hairy cloven feet and a tail and horns) ; now 
 kissing Boney’s boot, but inevitably discomfited by Pitt and the 
 other good angels, we hated these vicious wretches, as good children 
 should ; we were on the side of Virtue and Pitt and Grandpapa. 
 But if our sisters wanted to look at the portfolios, the good old 
 grandfather used to hesitate. There were some prints among them 
 very odd indeed ; some that girls could not understand ; some that 
 boys, indeed, had best not see. We swiftly turn over those pro- 
 hibited pages. How many of them there were in the wild, coarse, 
 reckless, ribald, generous book of old English humour ! 
 
 How savage the satire was — how fierce the assault — what 
 garbage hurled at opponents — what foul blows were hit — what 
 language of Billingsgate flung ! Fancy a party in a country house 
 now looking over Woodward’s facetiae, or some of the Gillray 
 comicalities, or the slatternly Saturnalia of Bowlandson. Whilst 
 we live we must laugh and have folks to make us laugh. We 
 cannot afford to lose Satyr, with his pipe and dances and gambols. 
 But we have washed, combed, clothed, and taught the rogue good 
 manners ; or rather, let us say, he has learned them himself ; for 
 he is of nature soft and kindly, and he has put aside his mad 
 pranks and tipsy habits ; and, frolicsome always, has become gentle 
 and harmless, smitten into shame by the pure presence of our 
 women, and the sweet confiding smiles of our children. Among 
 the veterans, the old pictorial satirists, we have mentioned the 
 famous name of one humorous designer who is still alive and at 
 work. Did we not see, by his own hand, his own portrait of his 
 own famous face and whiskers in the Illustrated London News 
 the other day ? There was a print in that paper of an assemblage 
 of Teetotallers in Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and we straightway 
 recognised the old Roman hand — the old Roman’s of the time of 
 Plancus — George Cruikshank’s. There were the old bonnets and 
 droll faces and shoes and short trousers and figures of 1820 sure 
 
280 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 enough. And there was George (who has taken to the water 
 doctrine, as all the world knows) handing some teetotalleresses 
 over a plank to the table where the pledge was being administered. 
 How often has George drawn that picture of Cruikshank ! Where 
 haven’t we seen it? How fine it was, facing the effigy of Mr. 
 Ainsworth in Ainsworths Alagazine when George illustrated that 
 periodical ! How grand and severe he stands in that design in 
 G. C.’s ‘Omnibus,’ where he represents himself tonged like S. 
 Dunstan, and tweaking a wretch of a publisher by the nose ! The 
 collectors of George’s etchings — 0 the charming etchings ! 0, the 
 dear old German popular tales ! — the capital ‘ Points of Hnmour ’ 
 — the delightful Phrenology and scrap-books, of the good time, our 
 time, — Plancus’s, in fact ! — the collectors of the Georgian etchings, 
 we say, have at least a hundred pictures of the artist. Why, we 
 remember him in his favourite Hessian boots in ‘Tom and Jerry’ 
 itself ; and in wmodcuts as far back as the Queen’s trial. He has 
 rather deserted satire and comedy of late years, having turned his 
 attention to the serious, and war -like, and sublime. Having 
 confessed our age and prejudices, we prefer the comic and fanciful 
 to the historic, romantic, and at present didactic George. May 
 respect, and length of days, and comfortable repose, attend the 
 brave, honest, kindly, pure-minded artist, humourist, moralist ! It 
 was he first who brought English pictorial humour and children 
 acquainted. Our young people and their fathers and mothers owe 
 him many a pleasant hour and harmless laugh. Is there no way 
 in which the country could acknowledge the long services and 
 brave career of such a friend and benefactor ? 
 
 Since George’s time humour has been converted. Comus and 
 his wicked satyrs and leering fauns have disappeared, and fled into 
 the lowest haunts ; and Comus’s lady (if she had a taste for 
 humour, which may be doubted) might take up our funny picture- 
 books without the slightest precautionary squeamishness. What 
 can be purer than the charming fancies of Kichard Doyle ? In all 
 Mr. Punch’s huge galleries can’t we walk as safely as through Miss 
 Pinkerton’s school-rooms ? And as we look at Mr. Punch’s pictures, 
 at The Illustrated Neius pictures, at all the pictures in the book- 
 shop windows at this Christmas season, as oldsters, we feel a 
 certain pang of envy against the youngsters. — They are too well 
 off. Why hadn’t we picture-books I Why were w^e flogged so? 
 A plague on the lictors and their rods in the time of Plancus ! 
 
 And now, after this rambling preface, we are arrived at the 
 subject in hand — Mr, John Leech and his Pictures of Life and 
 Character in the collection of Mr. Punch. This book is better 
 than plum-cake at Christmas- It is an enduring plum-cake, which 
 
PICTURES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 281 
 
 you may eat and which you may slice and deliver to your friends ; 
 and to which, having cut it, you may come again and welcome, 
 from year’s end to year’s end. In the frontispiece you see Mr. 
 Punch examining the pictures in his Gallery — a portly, well-dressed, 
 middle-aged, respectable gentleman, in a white neck-cloth and a 
 polite evening costume — smiling in a very bland and agreeable 
 manner upon one of his pleasant drawings, taken out of one of his 
 handsome portfolios. Mr. Punch has very good reason to smile 
 at the work and be satisfied with the artist. Mr. Leech, his chief 
 contributor, and some kindred humourists, with pencil and pen 
 have served Mr. Punch admirably. Time was, if we remember 
 Mr. P.’s history rightly, that he did not wear silk stockings nor 
 well-made clothes (the little dorsal irregularity in his figure is 
 almost an ornament now, so excellent a tailor has he). He was 
 of humble beginnings. It is said he kept a ragged little booth, 
 which he put up at corners of streets; associated with beadles, 
 policemen, his own ugly wife (whom he treated most scandalously) 
 and persons in a low station of life ; earning a precarious livelihood 
 by the cracking of wild jokes, the singing of ribald songs, and half- 
 pence extracted from passers-by. He is the Satyric genius we 
 spoke of anon ; he cracks his jokes still, for Satire must live ; but 
 he is combed, washed, neatly clothed, and perfectly presentable. 
 He goes into the very best company ; he keeps a stud at Melton ; 
 he has a moor in Scotland ; he rides in the Park ; has his stall at 
 the Opera; is constantly dining out at clubs and in private society ; 
 and goes every night in the season to balls and parties, where you 
 see the most beautiful women possible. He is welcomed among 
 his new friends, the great ; though, like the good old English 
 gentleman of the song, he does not forget the small. He pats 
 the heads of street boys and girls; relishes the jokes of Jack the 
 costermonger and Bob the dustman; good-naturedly spies out 
 Molly the cook flirting with policeman X, or Mary the nursemaid 
 as she listens to the fascinating guardsman. He used rather to 
 laugh at guardsmen, ^ plungers ’ and other military men ; and was 
 until latter days very contemptuous in his behaviour towards 
 Frenchmen. He has a natural antipathy to pomp and swagger 
 and fierce demeanour. But now that the guardsmen are gone to 
 war, and the dandies of ‘ The Rag ’ — dandies no more — are battling 
 like heroes at Balaklava and Inkermann by the side of their heroic 
 allies, Mr. Punch’s laughter is changed to hearty respect and en- 
 thusiasm. It is not against courage and honour he wars : but 
 this great moralist — must it be owned ? — has some popular British 
 prejudices, and these led him in peace time to laugh at soldiers 
 and Frenchmen. If those hulking footmen who accompanied the 
 
282 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 carriages to the opening of Parliament the other day, would form 
 a plush brigade, wear only gun-powder in their hair, and strike 
 with their great canes on the enemy, Mr. Punch would leave off 
 laughing at ‘ Jeames,^ who meanwhile remains amongst us, to all 
 outward appearance regardless of satire, and calmly consuming his 
 five meals 'per die'm. Against lawyers, beadles, bishops and clergy, 
 and authorities, Mr. Punch is still rather bitter. At the time of 
 the Papal aggression he was prodigiously angry ; and one of the 
 chief misfortunes which happened to him at that period was that, 
 through the violent opinions which he expressed regarding the 
 Roman Catholic hierarchy, he lost the invaluable services, the 
 graceful pencil, the harmless wit, the charming fancy of Mr. Doyle. 
 Another member of Mr. Punch’s cabinet, the biographer of Jeames, 
 the author of the Snob papers, resigned his functions on account 
 of Mr. Punch’s assaults upon the present Emperor of the French 
 nation, whose anger Jeames thought it was unpatriotic to arouse. 
 Mr. Punch parted with these contributors : he filled their places 
 with others as good. The boys at the rail-road stations cried 
 Fu'ncli just as cheerily, and sold just as many numbers, after 
 these events, as before. 
 
 There is no blinking the fact that in Mr. Punch’s cabinet John 
 Leech is the right-hand man. Fancy a number of Fmich without 
 Leech’s pictures ! What would you give for it 1 The learned 
 gentlemen who write the work must feel that, without him, it 
 were as well left alone. Look at the rivals whom the popularity 
 of Fu'ncli has brought into the field ; the direct imitators of Mr. 
 Leech’s manner — the artists with a manner of their own — how 
 inferior their pencils are to his in humour, in depicting the public 
 manners, in arresting, amusing the nation. The truth, the 
 strength, the free vigour, the kind humour, the John Bull pluck 
 and spirit of that hand are approached by no competitor. With 
 what dexterity he draws a horse, a woman, a child ! He feels 
 them all, so to speak, like a man. What plump young beauties 
 are those with which Mr. Punch’s chief contributor supplies the 
 old gentleman’s pictorial harem ! What famous thews and sinews 
 Mr. Punch’s horses have, and how Briggs, on the back of them, 
 scampers across country ! You see youth, strength, enjoyment, 
 manliness in those drawings, and in none more so, to our thinking, 
 than in the hundred pictures of children which this artist loves to 
 design. Like a brave, hearty, good-natured Briton, he becomes 
 quite soft and tender with the little creatures, pats gently their 
 little golden heads and watches with unfailing pleasure their 
 ways, their sports, their jokes, laughter, caresses. Enfans 
 terrihles come home from Eton ; young Miss practising her first 
 
PICTURES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 283 
 
 flirtation ; poor little ragged Polly making dirt pies in the gutter, 
 or staggering under the weight of Jacky, her nurse-child, who is 
 as big as herself — all these little ones, patrician and plebeian, 
 meet with kindness from this kind heart, and are watched with 
 curious nicety by this amiable observer. 
 
 We remember, in one of those ancient Gillray portfolios, a 
 print which used to cause a sort of terror in us youthful spectators, 
 and in which the Prince of Wales (His Royal Highness was a 
 Foxite then) was represented as sitting alone in a magnificent hall 
 after a voluptuous meal, and using a great steel fork in the guise 
 of a toothpick. Fancy the first young gentleman living employing 
 such a weapon in such a way ! The most elegant Prince of Europe 
 engaged with a two-pronged iron fork — the heir of Britannia with 
 a hident I The man of genius who drew that picture saw little 
 of the society which he satirised and amused. Gillray watched 
 public characters as they walked by the shop in St. James’s Street, 
 or passed through the lobby of the House of Commons. His 
 studio was a garret, or little better; his place of amusement, a 
 tavern parlour where his club held its nightly sittings over their 
 pipes and sanded floor. You could not have society represented 
 by men to whom it was not familiar. When Gavarni came to 
 England a few years since — one of the wittiest of meu, one of the 
 most brilliant and dexterous of draughtsmen — he published a book 
 of Lc 8 Anglais^ and his Anglais were all Frenchmen. The eye, 
 so keen and so long practised to observe Parisian life, could not 
 perceive English character. A social painter must be of the world 
 which he depicts, and native to the manners which he portrays. 
 
 Now, any one who looks over Mr. Leech’s portfolio must see 
 that the social pictures which he gives us are authentic. What 
 comfortable little drawing-rooms and dining-rooms, what snug 
 libraries we enter, what fine young gentlemanly wags they are, 
 those beautiful little dandies who wake up gouty old grandpapa to 
 ring the bell ; who decline aunt’s pudding and custards, saying 
 that they will reserve themselves for an anchovy toast with the 
 claret ; who talk together in ball-room doors, where Fred whispers 
 Charley — pointing to a dear little partner seven years old — ‘ My 
 dear Charley, she has very much gone off ; you should have seen 
 that girl last season ! ’ Look well at everything appertaining to the 
 economy of the famous Mr. Briggs ; how snug, quiet, appropriate 
 all the appointments are ! What a comfortable, neat, clean, 
 middle-class house Briggs’ is (in the Bayswater suburb of London, 
 we should guess from the sketches of the surrounding scenery) ! 
 What a good stable he has, with a loose box for those celebrated 
 hunters which he rides ! How pleasant, clean, and warm his 
 
284 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 breakfast table looks ! What a trim little maid brings in the top- 
 boots which horrify Mrs. B. ! What a snug dressing-room he has, 
 complete in all its appointments, and in which he appears trying 
 on the delightful hunting-cap which Mrs. B. flings into the Are ! 
 How cosy all the Briggs party seem in their dining-room, Briggs 
 reading a Treatise on Dog -breaking by a lamp ; Mamma and 
 Grannie with their respective needlew’orks ; the children clustering 
 round a great book of prints — a great book of prints such as this 
 before us, which, at this season, must make thousands of children 
 happy by as many firesides ! The inner life of all these people is 
 represented ; Leech draws them as naturally as Teniers depicts 
 Dutch boors, or Morland pigs and stables. It is your house and 
 mine ; we are looking at everybody’s family circle. Our boys, 
 coming from school, give themselves such airs, the young scape- 
 graces ! our girls, going to parties, are so tricked out by fond 
 mammas — a social history of London in the middle of the nineteenth 
 century. As such future students — lucky they to have a book so 
 pleasant — will regard these pages ; even the mutations of fashion 
 they may follow here if they be so inclined. Mr. Leech has as fine 
 an eye for tailory and millinery as for horse-flesh. How they change 
 those cloaks and bonnets ! How we have to pay milliners’ bills 
 from year to year ! Where are those prodigious chatelaines of 
 1850 which no lady could be without'? Where are those charming 
 waistcoats, those ‘ stunning ’ waistcoats which our young girls used 
 to wear a few brief seasons back, and which cause Gus, in the sweet 
 little sketch of ‘ La Mode,’ to ask Ellen for her tailor’s address ! 
 Gus is a young warrior by this time, very likely facing the enemy 
 at Inkermann, and pretty Ellen, and that love of a sister of hers, 
 are married and happy, let us hope, superintending one of those 
 delightful nursery scenes which our artist depicts with such tender 
 humour. Fortunate artist, indeed ! You see he must have been 
 bred at a good public school ; that he has ridden many a good 
 horse in his day ; paid, no doubt, out of his own purse for the 
 originals of some of those lovely caps and bonnets ; and watched 
 paternally the ways, smiles, frolics, and slumbers of his favourite 
 little people. 
 
 As you look at the drawings, secrets come out of them — private 
 jokes, as it were, imparted to you by the author for your special 
 delectation. How remarkably for instance, has Mr. Leech observed 
 the hair-dresser of the present age ! Look at ^Mr. Tongs,’ whom 
 that hideous old bald woman, who ties on her bonnet at the glass, 
 informs that ‘ she has used the whole bottle of Balm of California, 
 but her hair comes off yet.’ You can see the bear’s grease, not 
 only on Tongs’ head but on his hands, which he is clapping 
 
PICTURES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER 
 
 285 
 
 clammily together. Remark him who is telling his client ‘ there 
 is cholera in the hair/ and that lucky rogue whom the young lady 
 bids to cut off ‘ a long thick piece ’ for somebody, doubtless. All 
 these men are different, and delightfully natural and absurd. Why 
 should hair-dressing be an absurd profession ? 
 
 The amateur will remark what an excellent part hands play in 
 Mr. Leech’s pictures ; his admirable actors use them with perfect 
 naturalness. Look at Betty, putting the urn down ; at cook, 
 laying her hands on the kitchen table whilst her policeman grumbles 
 at the cold meat. They are cook’s and housemaid’s hands without 
 mistake, and not without a certain beauty too. The bald old lady 
 who is tying her bonnet at Tongs’, has hands which you see are 
 trembling. Watch the fingers of the two old harridans who are 
 talking scandal ; for what long years past they have pointed out 
 holes in their neighbours’ dresses and mud on their flounces. 
 ‘ Here’s a go ! I’ve lost my diamond ring ! ’ As the dustman utters 
 this pathetic cry and looks at his hand, you burst out laughing. 
 These are among the little points of humour. One could indicate 
 hundreds of such as one turns over the pleasant pages. 
 
 There is a little snob or gent, whom we all of us know, who 
 wears little tufts on his little chin, outrageous pins and pantaloons, 
 smokes cigars on tobacconists’ counters, sucks his cane in the 
 streets, struts about with Mrs. Snob and the baby (the latter an 
 immense woman whom Snob nevertheless bullies), who is a favourite 
 abomination of Leech’s and pursued by that savage humourist into 
 a thousand of his haunts. There he is, choosing waistcoats at the 
 tailors— such waistcoats ! Yonder he is giving a shilling to the 
 sweeper who calls him ‘ capting ’ ; now he is offering a paletot to 
 a huge giant who is going out in the rain. They don’t know their 
 own pictures, very likely ; if they did, they would have a meeting, 
 and thirty or forty of them would be deputed to thrash Mr. Leech. 
 One feels a pity for the poor little bucks. In a minute or two, 
 when we close this discourse and walk the streets, we shall see a 
 dozen such. 
 
 Ere we shut the desk up, just one word to point out to the 
 unwary specially to note the backgrounds of landscapes in Leech’s 
 drawings — homely drawings of moor and wood and sea-shore and 
 London streets — the scenes of his little dramas. They are as 
 excellently true to nature as the actors themselves ; our respect for 
 the genius and humour which invented both increase as we look 
 again and again at the design. May we have more of them ; more 
 pleasant Christmas volumes, over which we and our children can 
 laugh together. Can we have too much of truth, and fun, and 
 beauty and kindness? 
 
CEUIKSHANK^S GALLEEY.^ 
 
 In a quiet little room in Exeter Hall a veteran lecturer is holding 
 forth all day upon a subject which moves his heart very strongly. 
 His text, on which he has preached before in many places, is still 
 ‘ The Bottle.^ He divides his sermon into many hundreds of 
 heads, and preaches with the most prodigious emphasis and 
 grotesque variety. He is for no half measures. He will have 
 no compromise with the odious god Bacchus ; the wicked idol is 
 smashed like Bel and Dagon. He will empty into the gutter all 
 Master Bacchus’s pipes, his barrels, quarter -casks, demijohns, 
 gallons, quarts, pints, gills, down to your very smallest liqueur 
 glasses of spirits or wine. He will show you how the church, 
 the bar, the army, the universities, the genteel world, the country 
 gentleman in his polite circle, the humble artisan in his, the rustic 
 ploughman in the fields, the misguided washerwoman over her 
 suds and tubs — how all ranks and conditions of men are deteriorated 
 and corrupted by the use of that abominable strong liquor : he 
 will have patience with it no longer. For upwards of half-a- 
 century, he says, he has employed pencil and pen against the vice 
 of drunkenness, and in the wain attempt to shut up drinking shops 
 and to establish moderate drinking as a universal rule; but for 
 seventeen years he has discovered that teetotalism, or the total 
 abstaining from all intoxicating liquors, was the only real remedy 
 for the entire abolition of intemperance. His thoughts working 
 in this direction, one day this subject ‘The Worship of Bacchus’ 
 flashed across his mind, and hence the origin of a work of art 
 measuring 13 ft. 4 in. by 7 ft. 8 in., which has occupied the author 
 no less than a year and a half. 
 
 This sermon has the advantage over others that you can take a 
 chapter at a time, as it were, and return and resume the good 
 homilist’s discourse at your leisure. What is your calling in life ? 
 In some part of this vast tableau you will find it is de te fahida. 
 In this compartment the soldiers are drinking and fighting ; in 
 
 ^ \^The Times, Friday, May 15th, 1863.] 
 
 286 
 
CRUIKSHANK’S GALLERY 
 
 287 
 
 the next the parsons are drinking ‘Healths to the young Christian.’ 
 Here are the publicans, filthily intoxicated with their own horrible 
 liquors ; yonder is a masquerade supper, ‘ where drunken mas- 
 querade fiends drag down columbines to drunkenness and ruin.’ 
 Near them are ‘the public singers chanting forth the praises of 
 the “ God of Wine.” ’ ‘ Is it not marvellous to think,’ says Mr. 
 
 Cruikshank in a little pamphlet, containing a speech by him 
 which is quite as original as the picture on which it comments, 
 — ‘Is it not marvellous what highly talented poetry and what 
 harmonious musical compositions have been produced from time 
 to time in praise of this imaginative, slippery, deceitful, dangerous 
 myth ? ’ This ‘ myth ’ the spectator may follow all through this 
 most wonderful and labyrinthine picture. In the nursery the 
 Doctor is handing a pot of beer to mamma ; the nurse is drinking 
 beer ; the little boy is crying for beer ; and the papa is drawing a 
 cork so that ‘he and the doctor may have a drop.’ Here you 
 have a group of women, victims of intemperance, ‘ tearing, biting, 
 and mutilating one another.’ Yonder are two of the police 
 carrying away a drunken 'policeman. Does not the mind reel and 
 stagger at the idea of this cumulated horror ? And what is the 
 wine which yonder clergyman holds in his hand but the same 
 kind of stuff which has made the mother in the christening scene 
 above ‘ so tipsy that she has let her child fall out of her lap, while 
 her idiotic husband points to his helpless wife, and exclaims, “Ha, 
 ha ; she’s dr — unk ” ’ ? 
 
 As with paujoerihus so with locupletihus. If they drink, rich 
 and poor are all bad together. A friend of Mr. Cruikshank’s 
 (a physician) assured him that he knew ‘ a young gentleman of 
 fortune who got so drunk on his coming of age that he died the 
 next day ! ’ Fancy the maddened feelings of the next heir to the 
 property ! It is on some dismal occasion of this sort that our 
 stern moralist draws a son consoling his mother ‘ with a glass of 
 wine, the daughter being also consoled with a glass, and the 
 granddaughter likewise.’ 
 
 This is indeed horror on horror’s head. ¥/e have an excited 
 daughter, an intoxicated mother, a vinous grandmother — a ghastly 
 picture of three generations in liquor ! From another part of the 
 picture the tutors and young gentlemen of the universities may 
 take a hint which may do them good. Ten or a dozen of them in 
 their caps and gowns (and it is to be feared those caps only fit 
 too well) are represented at ‘ one of their wine-parties, ruining 
 themselves for life with the strong ale sold at the Colleges.’ Mr. 
 Cruikshank remarks that ‘the ale brewed at Jesus College, 
 Cambridge, commonly called Jesus ale, used to be thought most 
 
288 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 excellent, but the Trinity ale — aye, that’s the stuff — is the strongest 
 ale brewed in the whole country.’ We may all see there is no 
 mincing the matter here. Wine, beer, gin, the lady’s liqueur, the 
 midwife’s dram, the divine’s festive libation, the policeman’s 
 lawless excess — all are depicted with features not, perhaps, un- 
 exaggerated, in colours too dismally true. Have you ever drunk 
 a glass of wine ? It is one too many. Half-a-dozen glasses make 
 a pint (nay, two at some taverns). Two pints make a quart, four 
 quarts a gallon ; and so on. Fling away pint pots, quart pots, 
 pottle pots, and the rest. Let tea, coffee, cocoa, and ginger-beer, 
 which possibly cheers, but certainly not inebriates, be your tipple. 
 This is the moral of Mr. Cruikshank’s great sermon at Exeter Hall, 
 where preachers of all sorts and sects are accustomed to hold 
 forth. 
 
 Forty years ago, in Sweetings Alley, near the Royal Exchange, 
 and in a court leading from Ludgate Hill, there used to be two 
 delightful exhibitions of Cruikshank’s works which London hoys 
 could enjoy gratis at the shop window. The ‘ monstrosities ’ of 
 the fashion were here ridiculed by the satirical George, who 
 depicted bagging Petersham trousers, the tall collars, the high 
 waists of bygone bucks, the grandfathers of the present youth. 
 You may see here ladies with high waists and very slight upper 
 garments, and young fellows in wondrous pantaloons and pumps, 
 grinning and capering through that newly-invented and elegant 
 dance the quadrille. Do these ‘monstrosities’ of 1816, 1819, 
 and 1820 actually resemble the garments which we or our ancestors 
 wore? In 1816 the hoops represented in Hogarth’s pictures 
 were considered as monstrous and barbarous, and yet they 
 covered no more ground than the trains and dresses with which 
 our ladies in 1863 think fit to sweep the floors of the Exhibition. 
 The intelligent guardian of the Cruikshank Gallery walks round 
 with the visitors and gives comments upon the great temperance 
 tableau, and afterwards on the smaller etchings in detail. 
 
 Why, a professor might lecture his class for hours upon these 
 droll pages of bygone manners and social history. When did high 
 waists descend ? When did gigot sleeves come in and go out ? 
 When was the last of the ‘ Charleys ’ knocked down ? When did 
 the Prince Regent leave off hair-powder ? Recount a few of the 
 adventures of Corinthian Tom, Jeremiah Hawthorn, and Robert 
 Logic, Esquires ; and, if alive, state what is their present age ? 
 Corinthian Tom must be seventy-five, if he is a day old. No 
 doubt, he has lived to laugh over the adventures of Mr. Briggs, 
 of Messrs. Brown, Jones, and Robinson, and of those athletic young 
 Volunteers whose boots, beards, pipes, and tunics Mr. Keene 
 
CRUIKSHANK S GALLERY 
 
 289 
 
 depicts so amusingly. With what vigour, courage, good-humour, 
 honesty, cheerfulness, have this busy hand and needle plied for 
 more than fifty years ! 
 
 From 1799, ‘when about eight or nine years of age,^ until 
 yesterday the artist has never taken rest. When you think he 
 might desire quiet, behold he starts up lively as ever, and arms 
 himself to do battle with the demon drunkenness. 
 
 With voice and paint-brush, with steel-plate and wood-block, 
 he assails ‘ that deceitful, slippery, dangerous myth ! ^ To wage 
 war against some wrong has been his chief calling ; and in lighter 
 moments to waken laughter, wonder, or sympathy. To elderly 
 lovers of fun, who can remember this century in its teens and its 
 twenties, the benefactions of this great humourist are as pleasant 
 and well remembered as Papa^s or Undoes ‘tips’ when they came 
 to see the boys at school. The sovereign then administered bought 
 delights not to be purchased by sovereigns of later coinage, tarts 
 of incomparable sweetness which are never to be equalled in these 
 times, sausages whose savour is still fragrant in the memory, books 
 containing beautiful prints (sometimes ravishingly coloured) signed 
 with the magic initials of the incomparable ‘ G. Ck.’ ]Yo doubt, 
 the young people of the present day have younger artists to 
 charm them, and many hundred thousand boys and girls are 
 admiring Mr. Leech, and will be grateful to him forty years hence, 
 when their heads are grey. These will not care for the Cruik- 
 shank drawings and etchings as men do whose boyhood was 
 delighted by them ; but the moderns can study the manners of 
 the early century in the Cruikshank etchings, as of the French 
 Revolution period in Gillray, Woodward, Bunbury. Imitations of 
 the manner of the first -named master one can see in George 
 Cruikshank’s early works. Very soon he adopted a manner of 
 his own, which lovers of the art can admire and study from its 
 commencement to its development in the admirable Points of 
 Humour^ the charming vignettes for the German Pojpular Tales^ 
 and Peter Schlemihl^ in ‘ Scrap Books,’ ‘ Sketch Books,’ ‘ Omni- 
 buses,’ innumerable, in the Boz illustrations, in the brilliant 
 etchings of The Comic Almanac^ and in the plates for the famous 
 Ainsworth’s romances, the grim Toiver of London^ the awful Guy 
 Fawhes^ the much-persecuted, much-read Jack Sheppard ! Cruik- 
 shank found comic art free and unscrupulous, and made it modest 
 and pure. It may be young people do not clamber round the 
 portfolios as they used in days gone by, and laugh and wonder 
 delighted over the fun, the fancy, the naivete of the artist himself. 
 Now is the time for all aquae potorih^is to rally round their 
 champion. 
 
 u 
 
290 
 
 CRITICAL PAPERS IN ART 
 
 Is not the sect numbered by millions? Now is the time for 
 elderly persons to review the amusements, the scenes, the dresses, 
 the boxing-matches, the coaches, the short waists, tall neck-cloths, 
 narrow skirts which in good old days seemed so killing ; and now 
 youth pursuing the study of history may see how their fathers 
 were habited, amused, occupied — their fathers ? — their grand- 
 fathers, who have been depicted by the indefatigable veteran who 
 still cheerfully labours in the public service. 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAE 
 
 OR 
 
 THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 291 
 
•THE BIHTH OF THE YEAE, 
 
JANUARY— THE BIRTH OF THE YEAR 
 
 Some poet has observed that if any man would write down what 
 has really happened to him in this mortal life he would be sure 
 to make a good book, though he never had met with a single 
 adventure from his birth to his burial. How much more, then, 
 must I, who have had adventures most singular, pathetic, and 
 unparalleled, be able to compile an instructive and entertaining 
 volume for the use of the public. 
 
 I donT mean to say that I have killed lions, or seen the 
 wonders of travel in the deserts of Arabia or Persia ; or that I 
 have been a very fashionable character, living with dukes and 
 peeresses, and writing my recollections of them, as the way now 
 is. I never left this my native isle, nor spoke to a lord (except 
 an Irish one, who had rooms in our house, and forgot to pay 
 three weeks’ lodging and extras) ; but, as our immortal bard 
 observes, I have in the course of my existence been so eaten up 
 by the slugs and harrow^s of outrageous fortune, and have been 
 the object of such continual and extraordinary ill-luck, that I 
 believe it would melt the heart of a milestone to read of it — that 
 is, if a milestone had a heart of anything but stone. 
 
 Twelve of my adventures (one for every month in the calendar) 
 are here presented to the public. They contain a part of the 
 history of a great and, confidently I may say, a good man. I 
 was not a spendthrift like other men. I never wronged any man 
 of a shilling, though I am as sharp a fellow at a bargain as any 
 in Europe. I never injured a fellow- creature ; on the contrary, 
 on several occasions, when injured myself, have shown the most 
 wonderful forbearance. I come of a tolerably good family, and 
 yet — born to wealth, of an inoffensive disposition, careful of the 
 
 293 
 
294 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 raojiey that I had, and eager to get more — I have been going 
 down hill ever since my journey of life began, and have been 
 pursued by a complication of misfortunes such as surely never 
 happened to any man but the unhappy Bob Stubbs ! 
 
 Bob Stubbs is my name ; and I haven’t got a shilling. I 
 have borne the commission of lieutenant in the service of King 
 George, and am now— hut never mind what I am now, for the 
 public will know in a few pages more. My father was of the 
 Suffolk Stubbses — a well-to-do gentleman of Bungay. My grand- 
 
 father had been a respected attorney in that town, and left my 
 papa a pretty little fortune. I was thus the inheritor of com- 
 petence, and ought to be at this moment a gentleman. 
 
 My misfortunes may be said to have commenced about a year 
 before my birth, when my papa, a young fellow pretending to 
 study the law in London, fell madly in love with Miss Smith, the 
 daughter of a tradesman, who did not give her a sixpence, and 
 afterwards becaine bankrupt. My papa married this Miss Smith, 
 and carried her off to the country, where I was born in an evil 
 hour for me. 
 
 Were I to attempt to describe my early years, you would laugh 
 at me as an impostor ; but the following letter from mamma to a 
 friend, after her marriage, will pretty well show you what a poor, 
 foolish creature she was, and what a reckless, extravagant fellow 
 was my other unfortunate parent : — 
 
 ‘To Miss Eliza Hicks, in Guacechuech Steeet, London 
 
 ‘ Oh, Eliza ! your Susan is the happiest girl under heaven ! 
 My Thomas is an angel ! not a tall, grenadier-like looking fellow, 
 such as I always vowed I would marry. On the contrary, he is 
 what the world would call dumpy, and I hesitate not to confess 
 that his eyes have a cast in them. But what then ? when one of 
 his eyes is fixed on me and one on my babe, they are lighted up 
 with an affection which my pen cannot describe, and which 
 certainly was never bestowed upon any woman so strongly as 
 upon your happy Susan Stubbs. 
 
 ‘ When he comes home from shooting or the farm, if you could 
 see dear Thomas Avith me and our dear little Bob, as I sit on one 
 knee and baby on the other, and, as he dances us both about, I 
 often wish that we had Sir Joshua, or some great painter, to 
 depict the group ; for sure it is the prettiest picture in the whole 
 world to see three such loving, merry people. 
 
 ‘ Dear baby is the most lovely little creature that can possibly 
 he — the very image of papa. He is cutting his teeth, and the 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 295 
 
 delight of everybody. Nurse says that when he is older he will 
 get rid of his squint, and his hair will get a great deal less red. 
 Doctor Bates is as kind and skilful and attentive as w^e could 
 desire. Think what a blessing to have had him ! Ever since 
 poor baby^s birth it has never had a day of quiet, and he has been 
 obliged to give it from three to four doses every week. How 
 thankful ought we to be that the dear thing is as well as it is ! 
 It got through the measles wonderfully ; then it had a little rash, 
 and then a nasty whooping-cough, and then a fever, and continual 
 pains in its poor little stomach, crying, poor, dear child, from 
 morning till night. 
 
 ‘ But dear Tom is an excellent nurse, and many and many a 
 night has he had no sleep, dear man ! in consequence of the poor 
 little baby. He walks up and down with it for hours^ singing a 
 kind of song (dear fellow, he has no more voice than a tea-kettle), 
 and bobbing his head backwards and forwards, and looking, in his 
 night- cap and dressing-gown, so droll. Oh, Eliza ! how you 
 would laugh to see him. 
 
 ‘ We have one of the best nursemaids in the worlds an Irish- 
 woman, who is as fond of baby almost as his mother (but that 
 can never he). She takes it to walk in the park for hours together, 
 and I really don’t know why Thomas dislikes her. He says she 
 is tipsy very often, and slovenly, which I cannot conceive. To be 
 sure, the nurse is sadly dirty, and sometimes smells very strong 
 of gin. 
 
 ‘ But what of that ? These little drawbacks only make home 
 more pleasant. When one thinks how many mothers have no 
 nursemaids, how many poor, dear children have-?^o doctors, ought 
 we not to be thankful for Mary Malowney, and that Doctor 
 Bates’s bill is forty-seven pounds 1 How ill must dear baby have 
 been to require so much physic ! 
 
 ‘ But they are a sad expense, these dear babies, after all. 
 Fancy, Eliza, how much this Mary Malowney costs us. Ten 
 shillings every week; a glass of brandy or gin at dinner, three 
 pint-bottles of Mr. Thrale’s best porter every day — making twenty- 
 one in a week, and nine hundred and ninety in the eleven months 
 she has been with us. Then, for baby, there is Doctor Bates’s 
 bill of forty-five guineas, two guineas for christening, twenty for 
 a grand christening supper and ball (rich Uncle John mortally 
 offended because he was made godfather, and had to give baby a 
 silver cup : he has struck Thomas out of his will ; and old Mr. 
 Firkin quite as much hurt because he was not asked : he will not 
 speak to me or Thomas in consequence) ; twenty guineas for 
 flannels, laces, little gowns, caps, napkins, and such baby’s ware ; 
 
FEBRUAHY — CUTTING WEATHER. P. 296. 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 297 
 
 and all this out of three hundred pounds a year ! But Thomas 
 expects to make a great deal by his farm. 
 
 ‘We have got the most charming country-house you can 
 imagine ; it is quite shut in by trees, and so retired that, though 
 only thirty miles from London, the post comes to us but once a 
 week. The roads, it must be confessed, are execrable. It is 
 winter now, and we are up to our knees in mud and snow. But 
 oh, Eliza, how happy we are ! With Thomas (he has had a sad 
 attack of rheumatism, dear man !) and little Bobby, and our kind 
 friend Doctor Bates, who comes so far to see us, I leave you to 
 fancy that we have a charming, merry party, and do not care for 
 all the gaieties of Ranelah. 
 
 ‘ Adieu ! dear baby is crying for his mamma. A thousand 
 kisses from your affectionate Susan Stubbs.’ 
 
 There it is. Doctor’s bills, gentleman -farming, twenty-one 
 pints of porter a week ; in this way my unnatural parents were 
 already robbing me of my property. 
 
 FEBRUARY— CUTTING WEATHER 
 
 I HAVE called this chapter ‘cutting weather,’ partly in compli- 
 ment to the month of February, and partly in respect of my own 
 misfortunes, which you are going to read about. For I have often 
 thought that January (which is mostly twelfth-cake and holiday 
 time) is like the first four or five years of a little boy’s life ; then 
 comes dismal February, and the working days with it, when chaps 
 begin to look out for themselves, after the Christmas and the Nev/ 
 Year’s hey-day and merry-making are over, which our infancy 
 may well be said to be. Well can I recollect that bitter first of 
 February, when I first launched out into the world and appeared 
 at Doctor Swishtail’s academy. 
 
 I began at school that life of prudence and economy which I 
 have carried on ever since. My mother gave me eighteenpence on 
 setting out, poor soul ! I thought her heart would break as she 
 kissed me, and bade God bless me; and, besides, I had a small 
 capital of my own, which I had amassed for a year previous. I’ll 
 tell you what I used to do. Wherever I saw six halfpence I took 
 one. If it was asked for, I said I had taken it, and gave it back ; 
 — if it was not missed, I said nothing about it, as why should I ? — 
 those who don’t miss their money, don’t lose their money. So I 
 had a little private fortune of three shillings, besides mother’s 
 
298 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 eigliteeiipence. At school they called me the Copper Merchant, I 
 had such lots of it. 
 
 Now, even at a preparatory school, a well-regulated boy may 
 better himself ; and I can tell you I did. I never was in any 
 quarrels ; I never was very high in the class, or very low ; but 
 there was no chap so much respected — and why '? Td always 
 money. The other boys spent all theirs in the first day or two, 
 and they gave me plenty of cakes and barley-sugar then, I can tell 
 you. rd no need to spend my own money, for they would insist 
 upon treating me. Well, in a week, when theirs was gone, and 
 they had but their threepence a week to look to for the rest of the 
 half-year, what did I do'? Why, I am proud to say that three- 
 halfpence out of the threepence a week of almost all the young 
 gentlemen at Doctor SwishtaiTs came into my pocket. Suppose, 
 for instance, Tom Hicks wanted a slice of gingerbread, — who had 
 the money '? Little Bob Stubbs, to be sure. ‘ Hicks,^ I used to 
 say, ‘ Til buy you three-halfp’orth of gingerbread, if you’ll give me 
 threepence next Saturday ; ’ and he agreed ; and next Saturday 
 came, and he very often could not pay me more than three-halfpence, 
 then there was the threepence I was to have the next Saturday. 
 I’ll tell you what I did for a whole half-year : I lent a chap, by 
 the name of Dick Bunting, three-halfpence the first Saturday for 
 threepence the next ; he could not pay me more than half when 
 Saturday come, and I’m blest if I did not make him pay me three- 
 halfpence for three-and-twenty weeks running,^ making two shillings 
 and tenpence-halfpenny. But he was a sad dishonourable fellow, 
 Dick Bunting ; for, after I’d been so kind to him, and let him off 
 for three-and-twenty weeks the money he owed me, holidays came, 
 and threepence he owed me still. Well, according to the common 
 principles of practice, after six weeks’ holidays, he ought to have 
 paid me exactly sixteen shillings which was my due. For the 
 
 First week the 3d. would be . . 6d. 
 
 Second week . . . . .Is. 
 
 Third week . . . . .2s. 
 
 Fourth week ..... 4s. 
 
 Fifth week ..... 8s. 
 
 Sixth week . . . .16s. 
 
 Nothing could be more just; and yet, will it be believed? — when 
 Bunting came back he offered me three-halfpence I the mean, dis- 
 honest scoundrel. 
 
 However, I was even with him, I can tell you. He spent all 
 his money in a fortnight, and then I screwed him down ! I made 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 299 
 
 him, besides giving me a penny for a penny, pay me a quarter of 
 his bread-and-butter at breakfast, and a quarter of his cheese at 
 supper ; and before the half-year was out, I got from him a silver 
 fruit-knife, a box of compasses, and a very pretty silver-laced waist- 
 coat, in which I went home as proud as a king ; and, what’s more, 
 I had no less than three golden guineas in the pocket of it, besides 
 fifteen shillings, the knife, and a brass bottle-screw, which I got 
 from another chap. It wasn’t bad interest for twelve shillings, 
 which was all the money I’d had in the year, was it ? Heigho ! 
 I’ve often wished that I could get such a chance again in this 
 wicked world ; but men are more avaricious now than they used 
 to be in those dear early days. 
 
 Well, I went home in my new waistcoat as fine as a peacock ; 
 and when I gave the bottle-screw to my father, begging him to take 
 it as a token of my affection for him, my dear mother burst into 
 such a fit of tears as I never saw, and kissed and hugged me fit 
 to smother me. ‘ Bless him, bless him ! ’ says she, ‘ to think of 
 his old father. And where did you purchase it. Bob ? ’ — ‘ Why, 
 mother,’ says I, ‘ I purchased it out of my savings ’ (which was as 
 true as the gospel). When I said this, mother looked round to 
 father, smiling, although she had tears in her eyes, and she took 
 his hand, and with her other hand drew me to her. ‘ Is he not a 
 noble boy ? ’ says she to my father : ‘ and only nine years old ! ’ 
 ‘ Faith,’ says my father, ^ he is a good lad, Susan. Thank thee, 
 my boy ; and here is a crown piece in return for thy bottle-screw ; 
 it shall open us a bottle of the very best, too,’ says my father ; 
 and he kept his word. I always was fond of good wine (though 
 never, from a motive of proper self-denial, having any in my cellar) ; 
 and, by Jupiter ! on this night I had my little skinful, — for there 
 was no stinting, so pleased were my dear parents with the bottle- 
 screw. The best of it was it only cost me threepence originally, 
 which a chap could not pay me. 
 
 Seeing this game was such a good one, I became very generous 
 towards my parents ; and a capital way it is to encourage liberality 
 in children. I gave mamma a very neat brass thimble, and she 
 gave me a half-guinea piece. Then I gave her a very pretty needle- 
 book, which I made myself with an ace of spades from a new pack 
 of cards we had, and I got Sally, our maid, to cover it with a bit 
 of pink satin her mistress had given her ; and I made the leaves 
 of the book, which I vandyked very nicely, out of a piece of flannel 
 I had had round my neck for a sore throat. It smelt a little of 
 hartshorn, but it was a beautiful needlebook ; and mamma was so 
 delighted with it, that she went into town and bought me a gold- 
 laced hat. Then I bought papa a pretty china tobacco-stopper ; 
 
300 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 but I am sorry to say of my clear father that he was not so generous 
 as my mamma or myself, for he only burst out laughing, and did 
 not give me so much as a half-crown piece, which was the least I 
 expected from him. ‘ I shan’t give you anything. Bob, this time,’ 
 says he ; ‘ and I wish, my boy, you would not make any more such 
 presents — for, really, they are too expensive.’ Expensive, indeed ! 
 I hate meanness, — even in a father. 
 
 I must tell you about the silver-edged waistcoat which Bunting 
 gave me. Mamma asked me about it, and I told her the truth, — 
 that it was a present from one of the boys for my kindness to him. 
 Well, what does she do but writes back to Doctor Swishtail, when 
 I went to school, thanking him for his attention to her dear son, 
 and sending a shilling to the good and grateful little boy who had 
 given me the waistcoat ! 
 
 ^ What waistcoat is it,’ says the Doctor to me, ‘and who gave 
 it to you ? ’ 
 
 ‘Bunting gave it me. Sir,’ says I. 
 
 ‘ Call Bunting ! ’ And up the little ungrateful chap came. 
 Would you believe it ? — he burst into tears, told that the waistcoat 
 had been given him by his mother, and that he had been forced 
 to give it for a debt to Copper Merchant, as the nasty little black- 
 guard called me. He then said how, for three-halfpence, he had 
 been compelled to pay me three shillings (the sneak ! as if he had 
 been obliged to borrow the three-halfpence !) — how all the other 
 boys had been swindled (swindled !) by me in like manner, — and 
 how, with only twelve shillings, I had managed to scrape together 
 four guineas. . . . 
 
 My courage almost fails me as I describe the shameful scene 
 that followed. The boys were called in, my own little account- 
 book was dragged out of my cupboard, to prove how much I had 
 received from each, and every farthing of my money was paid back 
 to them. The tyrant took the thirty shillings that my dear parents 
 had given me, and said he should put them into the poor-box at 
 church ; and, after having made a long discourse to the boys about 
 meanness and usury, he said, ‘ Take off your coat, Mr. Stubbs, and 
 restore Bunting his waistcoat.’ I did, and stood without coat and 
 waistcoat in the midst of the nasty grinning boys. I was going to 
 put on my coat, — 
 
 ‘ Stop ! ’ says he. ‘ Take down his Beeeches ! ’ 
 
 Ruthless brutal villain ! Sam Hopkins, the biggest boy, took 
 them down — horsed me — and I was flogged, sir ; yes, flogged ! 
 Oh revenge ! I, Robert Stubbs, who had done nothing but what 
 was right, was brutally flogged at ten years of age ! — Though 
 February was the shortest month, I remembered it long. 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 301 
 
 MARCH— SHOWERY 
 
 When my mamma heard of the treatment of her darling she was 
 for bringing an action against the schoolmaster, or else for tearing 
 his eyes out (when, dear soul ! she would not have torn the eyes 
 out of a flea, had it been her own injury), and, at the very least, 
 for having me removed from the school where I had been so 
 shamefully treated. But papa was stern for once, and vowed that 
 I had been served quite right, declared that I should not be 
 removed from the school, and sent old Swishtail a brace of pheasants 
 for what he called his kindness to me. Of these the old gentleman 
 invited me to partake, and made a very queer speech at dinner, as 
 he was cutting them up, about the excellence of my parents, and 
 his own determination to be hinder still to me if ever I ventured 
 on such practices again. So I was obliged to give up my old 
 trade of lending : for the Doctor declared that any boy who 
 borrowed should be flogged, and any one who paid should be 
 flogged twice as much. There was no standing against such a 
 prohibition as this, and my little commerce was ruined. 
 
 I was not very high in the school : not having been able to 
 get farther than that dreadful Propria quce marihus in the Latin 
 grammar, of which, though I have it by heart even now, I never 
 could understand a syllable : but, on account of my size, my age, 
 and the prayers of my mother, was allowed to have the privilege 
 of the bigger boys, and on holidays to walk about in the town. 
 Great dandies we were, too, when we thus went out. I recollect 
 my costume very well : a thunder-and-lightning coat, a white 
 waistcoat embroidered neatly at the pockets, a lace frill, a pair of 
 knee-breeches, and elegant white cotton or silk stockings. This did 
 very well, but still I was dissatisfied. I wanted a pair of boots. 
 Three boys in the school had boots — I was mad to have them too. 
 
 But my papa, when I wrote to him, would not hear of it ; and 
 three pounds, the price of a pair, was too large a sum for my 
 mother to take from the housekeeping, or for me to pay, in the 
 present impoverished state of my exchequer; but the desire for 
 the boots was so strong, that have them I must at any rate. 
 
 There was a German bootmaker who had just set up in our 
 town in those days, who afterwards made his fortune in London. 
 I determined to have the boots from him, and did not despair, 
 before the end of a year or two, either to leave the school, when I 
 should not mind his dunning me, or to screw the money from 
 mamma, and so pay him. 
 
MARCH — SHOWERY. 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 303 
 
 So I called upon this man — StifFelkind was his name — and he 
 took my measure for a pair. 
 
 ‘ You are a vary yong gentleman to wear dop-boots/ said the 
 shoemaker. 
 
 ‘I suppose, fellow,’ says I, ‘that is my business and not 
 yours. Either make the boots or not — but when you speak to a 
 man of my rank, speak respectfully ! ’ And I poured out a 
 number of oaths, in order to impress him with a notion of my 
 respectability. 
 
 They had the desired effect. ‘ Stay, sir,’ says he. ‘ I have a 
 nice littel pair of dop-boots, dat I tink will jost do for you.’ And 
 he produced, sure enough, the most elegant things I ever saw. 
 ‘ Dey were made,’ said he, ‘ for de Honourable Mr. Stiffney, of de 
 Gards, but were too small.’ 
 
 ‘ Ah, indeed ! ’ said I. ‘ Stiffney is a relation of mine. And 
 what, you scoundrel, will you have the impudence to ask for these 
 things ? ’ He replied, ‘ Three pounds.’ 
 
 ‘Well,’ said I, ‘they are confoundedly dear; but, as you will 
 have a long time to wait for your money, why, I shall have my 
 revenge, you see.’ The man looked alarmed, and began a speech : 
 
 ‘Sare, — I cannot let dem go vidout ’ l3ut a bright thought 
 
 struck me, and I interrupted — ‘ Sir ! don’t sir me. Take off the 
 boots, fellow, and, hark ye, when you speak to a nobleman, don’t 
 say Sir.’ 
 
 ‘A hundert tousand pardons, my Lort,’ says he: ‘if I had 
 known you were a lort, I vood never have called you Sir. Yat 
 name shall I put down in my books ? ’ 
 
 ‘Name? — Oh ! why. Lord Cornwallis, to be sure,’ said I, as 
 I walked off in the boots. 
 
 ‘ And vat shall I do with my Lort’s shoes ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Keep them until I send for them,’ said I. And giving him a 
 patronising bow, I walked out of the shop, as the German tied up 
 my shoes in paper. 
 
 This story I would not have told, but that my whole life turned 
 upon these accursed boots. I walked back to school as proud as a 
 peacock, and easily succeeded in satisfying the boys as to the 
 manner in which I came by my new ornaments. 
 
 Well, one fatal Monday morning — the blackest of all black 
 Mondays that ever I knew — as we were all of us playing between 
 school-hours, I saw a posse of boys round a stranger, who seemed 
 to be looking out for one of us. A sudden trembling seized me 
 — I knew it was Stiffelkind. What had brought him here ? He 
 talked loud and seemed angry. So I rushed into the schoolroom, 
 
304 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 and, burying my head between by hands, began reading for dear 
 life. 
 
 ‘ I vant Lort Cornvallis,’ said the horrid bootmaker. ‘ His 
 Lortship belongs, I know, to dis honourable school, for I saw him 
 vid de boys at chorch yesterday.’ 
 
 ‘ Lord who ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Vy Lort Cornvaliis to be sure — a very fat young nobleman, 
 vid red hair : he squints a little, and svears dreadfully.’ 
 
 ‘ There’s no Lord Cornwallis here,’ said one ; and there was a 
 pause. 
 
 ‘ Stop ! I have it,’ says that odious Bunting. ‘ It must he 
 Stubbs ! ’ ‘ And Stubbs ! Stubbs ! ’ every one cried out, while I 
 
 was so busy at my book as not to hear a word. 
 
 At last, two of the biggest chaps rushed into the schoolroom, 
 and, seizing each an arm, ran me into the playground — bolt up 
 against the shoemaker. 
 
 ‘ Dis is my man. I beg your Lortship’s pardon,’ says he, ‘ I 
 have brought your Lortship’s shoes, vich you left. See dey have 
 been in dis parcel ever since you vent avay in my boots.’ 
 
 ‘ Shoes, fellow ! ’ says I ; ‘I never saw your face before ’ — for 
 I knew there was nothing for it but brazening it out. ^ Upon the 
 honour of a gentleman ! ’ said I, turning round to the boys. 
 They hesitated ; and if the trick had turned in my favour, fifty of 
 them would have seized hold of Stiffelkind and drubbed him 
 soundly. 
 
 ‘ Stop ! ’ says Bunting (hang him !). ‘ Let’s see the shoes. 
 
 If they fit him, why then the cobbler’s right.’ They did fit me ; 
 and not only that, but the name of Stubbs was written in them at 
 full length. 
 
 ‘ Vat ! ’ said Stiffelkind. ‘ Is he not a lort ? So help me 
 Himmel, I never did vonce tink of looking at de shoes, which 
 have been lying ever since in dis piece of brown paper.’ And 
 then, gathering anger as he went on, he thundered out so much of 
 his abuse of me, in his German-English, that the boys roared with 
 laughter. Swish tail came in in the midst of the disturbance, 
 and asked what the noise meant. 
 
 ‘ It’s only Lord Cornwallis, sir,’ said the boys, ‘ battling with 
 his shoemaker about the price of a pair of top-boots.’ 
 
 ‘ Oh, sir,’ said I, ^ it was only in fun that I called myself Lord 
 Cornwallis.’ 
 
 ‘ In fun ! — Where are the boots ? And you, sir, give me your 
 bill.’ My beautiful boots were brought ; and Stiffelkind produced 
 his bill. ‘ Lord Cornwallis to Samuel Stiffelkind, for a pair of 
 boots — four guineas.’ 
 
OK, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 305 
 
 ^ You have been fool enough, sir,’ says the Doctor, looking very 
 stern, ‘ to let this boy impose on you as a lord ; and knave enough 
 to charge him double the value of the article you sold him. Take 
 back the boots, sir ! I won’t pay a penny of your bill ; nor can 
 you get a penny. As for you, sir, you miserable swindler and 
 cheat, I shall not flog you as I did before, but I shall send you 
 home : you are not fit to be the companion of honest boys.’ 
 
 ^ Suppose we duck him before he goes 1 ’ piped out a very small 
 voice. The Doctor grinned significantly, and left the schoolroom ; 
 and the boys knew by this they might have their will. They 
 seized me and carried me to the playground pump : they pumped 
 upon me until I was half dead; and the monster, Stiflelkind, 
 stood looking on for the half-hour the operation lasted. 
 
 I suppose the Doctor, at last, thought I had had pumping 
 enough, for he rang the school-bell, and the boys were obliged to 
 leave me. As I got out of the trough, Stiffelkind was alone with 
 me. ‘Veil my Lort,’ says he, ‘you have paid something for dese 
 boots, but not all. By Jubider, you shall never hear de end of 
 dem' And I didn’t. 
 
 APRIL — FOOLING 
 
 Aftek this, as you may fancy, I left this disgusting establish- 
 ment, and lived for some time along wdth pa and mamma at 
 home. My education was finished, at least mamma and I agreed 
 that it was : and from boyhood until hobbadyhoyhood (which I 
 take to be about the sixteenth year of the life of a young man, 
 and may be likened to the month of April when spring begins to 
 bloom) from fourteen until seventeen, I say, I remained at home, 
 doing nothing, for which I ever since have had a great taste, 
 the idol of my mamma, who took part in all my quarrels with 
 father, and used regularly to rob the w^eekly expenses in order to 
 find me in pocket-money. Poor soul ! many and many is the 
 guinea I have had from her in that way ; and so she enabled me 
 to cut a very pretty figure. 
 
 Papa was for having me at this time articled to a merchant, 
 or put to some profession ; but mamma and I agreed that I was 
 born to be a gentleman, and not a tradesman, and the army was 
 the only place for me. Everybody was a soldier in those times, 
 for the French war had just begun, and the whole country was 
 swarming with militia regiments. ‘We’ll get him a commission 
 in a marching regiment,’ said my father ; ‘ as w^e have no money 
 
 X 
 

 -FOOLING. 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 307 
 
 to purchase him up, he’ll fight his way, I make no doubt ; ’ — and 
 papa looked at me with a kind of air of contempt, as much as to 
 say he doubted whether I should be very eager for such a 
 dangerous way of bettering myself 
 
 I wish you could have heard mamma’s screech, when he talked 
 so coolly of my going out to fight. ‘ What, send him abroad ! 
 across the horrid, horrid sea — to be wrecked, and, perhaps, 
 drowned, and only to land for the purpose of fighting the wicked 
 Frenchmen, — to be wounded, and perhaps kick — kick — killed! 
 Oh Thomas, Thomas I would you murder me and your boy ? ’ 
 There was a regular scene ; — however, it ended, as it always did, 
 in mother’s getting the better, and it was settled that I should 
 go into the militia. And why not ? The uniform is just as 
 handsome, and the danger not half so great. I don’t think in 
 the course of my whole military experience I ever fought any- 
 thing, except an old woman, who had the impudence to hollo out, 
 ‘Heads up, lobster!’ — Well, I joined the North Bungays, and 
 was fairly launched into the world. 
 
 I was not a handsome man, I know ; but there was something 
 about me — that’s very evident ; for the girls always laughed 
 when they talked to me, and the men, though they affected to 
 call me a poor little creature, squint-eyes, knock-knees, red-head, 
 and so on, were evidently annoyed by my success, for they hated 
 me so confoundedly. Even at the present time they go on, 
 though I have given up gallivanting, as I call it. But in the 
 April of my existence, — that is, in anno domini 1791, or so — 
 it was a different case ; and having nothing else to do, and being 
 bent upon bettering my condition, I did some very pretty things 
 in that way. But I was not hot-headed and imprudent, like most 
 young fellows. Don’t fancy I looked for beauty ! — Pish ! I 
 wasn’t such a fool. Nor for temper ; I don’t care about a bad 
 temper : I could break any woman’s heart in two years. What 
 I wanted was to get on in the world. Of course I didn’t prefer 
 an ugly woman, or a shrew ; and, when the choice offered, would 
 certainly put up with a handsome, good-humoured girl, with 
 plenty of money, as any honest man would. 
 
 Now there were two tolerably rich girls in our parts : Miss 
 Magdalen Orutty, with twelve thousand pounds (and, to do her 
 justice, as plain a girl as ever I saw) and Miss Mary Waters, a 
 fine, tall, plump, smiling, peach- cheeked, golden -haired, white- 
 skinned lass, with only ten. Mary Waters lived with her uncle, 
 the Doctor, who had helped me into the world, and who was 
 trusted with this little orphan charge very soon after. My mother, 
 as you have heard, was so fond of Bates, and Bates so fond of 
 
308 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 little Mary, that both, at first, were almost always in our house ; 
 and I used to call her my little wife, as soon as I could speak, 
 and before she could walk almost. It was beautiful to see us, 
 the neighbours said. 
 
 Well, when her brother, the lieutenant of an India ship, came 
 to be captain, and actually gave Mary five thousand pounds 
 when she was about ten years old, and promised her five 
 thousand more, there was a great talking, and bobbing, and 
 smiling between the Doctor and my parents, and Mary and I 
 were left together more than ever, and she was told to call me 
 her little husband ; and she did ; and it was considered a settled 
 thing from that day. She was really amazingly fond of me. 
 
 Can any one call me mercenary after that ? Though Miss 
 Crutty had twelve thousand, and Alary only ten (five in hand, 
 and five in the bush), I stuck faithfully to Mary. As a matter 
 of course, Aliss Crutty hated Aliss Waters. The fact w^as, Mary 
 had all the country dangling after her, and not a soul would come 
 to Magdalen, for all her twelve thousand pounds. I used to be 
 attentive to her, though (as iUs always useful to be) ; and Alary 
 would sometimes laugh and sometimes cry at my flirting with 
 Magdalen. This I thought proper very quickly to check. ‘ Mary,’ 
 said I, ‘you know that my love for you is disinterested, — for I 
 am faithful to you, though Miss Crutty is richer than you. 
 Don’t fly into a rage, then, because I pay her attentions, when 
 you know that my heart and my promise are engaged to you.’ 
 
 The fact is, to tell a little bit of a secret, there is nothing like 
 the having two strings to your bow. Who knows?’ thought I. 
 ‘Mary may die; and then where are my ten thousand pounds?’ 
 So I used to be very kind indeed to Miss Crutty ; and well it was 
 that I was so ; for when I was twenty and Alary eighteen, I’m 
 blest if news did not arrive that Captain Vv'aters, who was coming 
 home to England with all his money in rupees, had been taken — 
 ship, rupees, self and all — by a French privateer ! and Mary, 
 instead of ten thousand pounds, had only five thousand, making 
 a difference of no less than three hundred and fifty pounds per 
 annum betwixt her and Aliss Crutty. 
 
 I had just joined my regiment (the famous North Bungay 
 Fencibles, Colonel Craw commanding) when this news reached 
 me ; and you may fancy how a young man, in an expensive 
 regiment and mess, having uniforms and what not to pay for, 
 and a figure to cut in the world, felt at hearing such news ! ‘ Aly 
 
 dearest Robert,’ wrote Aliss AAhaters, ‘ will deplore my dear 
 brother’s loss ; but not, I am sure, the money which that kind 
 and generous soul had promised me. I have still five thousand 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 309 
 
 pounds, and with this and your own little fortune (I had one 
 thousand pounds in the five per cents.) we shall be as happy 
 and contented as possible.^ 
 
 Happy and contented indeed ! Didn’t I know how my father got 
 on with his three hundred pounds a year, and how it was all he 
 could do out of it to add a hundred a year to my narrow income, 
 and live himself? My mind was made up — I instantly mounted 
 the coach and flew to our village, — to Mr. Crutty’s, of course. 
 It was next door to Dr. Bates’s ; but I had no business there. 
 
 I found Magdalen in the garden. ‘ Heavens, Mr. Stubbs ! ’ 
 said she, as in my new uniform I appeared before her, ^ I really 
 did never — such a handsome officer — expect to see you;’ and 
 she made as if she would blush, and began to tremble violently. 
 I led her to a garden-seat. I seized her hand — it was not with- 
 drawn. I pressed it ; — I thought the pressure was returned. I 
 flung myself on my knees, and then I poured into her ear a little 
 speech which I had made on the top of the coach. ‘ Divine Miss 
 Crutty,’ said I ; ‘ idol of my soul ! It was but to catch one 
 glimpse of you that I passed through this garden. I never 
 intended to breathe the secret passion ’ (oh no ! of course not) 
 ‘ which was wearing my life away. You know my unfortunate 
 pre-engagement, — it is broken, and fo7^ ever ! I am free ; — free, 
 but to be your slave, — your humblest, fondest, truest slave ! ’ and 
 so on. . . . 
 
 ^ Oh, Mr. Stubbs,’ said she, as I imprinted a kiss upon her cheek, 
 ‘ I can’t refuse you ; but I fear you are a sad naughty man. . . . ’ 
 
 Absorbed in the delicious reverie which was caused by the 
 dear creature’s confusion, we were both silent for a while, and 
 should have remained so for hours, perhaps, so lost were we in 
 happiness, had I not been suddenly roused by a voice exclaiming 
 from behind us — 
 
 ‘ DonH cry, Mm^y ; he is a swindling, sneaking scoundrel, and 
 you are well rid of him I ’ 
 
 I turned round ! Oh, Heaven ! there stood Mary, weeping on 
 Doctor Bates’s arm, while that miserable apothecary was looking 
 at me with the utmost scorn. The gardener, who had let me in, 
 had told them of my arrival, and now stood grinning behind 
 them, ‘ Imperence ! ’ was my Magdalen’s only exclamation, as she 
 flounced by with the utmost self-possession, while I, glancing 
 daggers at the spies, followed her. We retired to the parlour, 
 where she repeated to me the strongest assurances of her love. 
 
 I thought I was a made man. Alas ! I was only an APRIL 
 FOOL! 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 311 
 
 may— RESTORATION DAY 
 
 As the month of May is considered, by poets and other philo- 
 sophers, to be devoted by nature to the great purpose of love- 
 making, I may as well take advantage of that season, and acquaint 
 you with the result of my amours. 
 
 Young, gay, fascinating, and an ensign — I had completely won 
 the heart of young Magdalen ; and as for Miss Waters and her 
 nasty uncle the Doctor, there was a complete split between us, as 
 you may fancy ; Miss pretending, forsooth, that she was glad I 
 had broken off the match, though she would have given her eyes, 
 the little minx, to have had it on again. But this was out of the 
 question. My father, who had all sorts of queer notions, said 
 I had acted like a rascal in the business ; my mother took my 
 part in course, and declared I acted rightly, as I always did ; 
 and I got leave of absence from the regiment in order to press 
 my beloved Magdalen to marry me out of hand — knowing, from 
 reading and experience, the extraordinary mutability of human 
 affairs. 
 
 Besides, as the dear girl was seventeen years older than myself, 
 and as bad in health as she was in temper, how was I to know 
 that the grim king of terrors might not carry her off before she 
 became mine % With the tenderest warmth, then, and most delicate 
 ardour, I continued to press my suit. The happy day was fixed — 
 the ever-memorable 10th of May 1792 ; the wedding-clothes were 
 ordered ; and, to make things secure, I penned a little paragraph 
 for the county paper to this effect : — ^ Marriage in High Life. We 
 understand that Ensign Stubbs, of the North Bungay Eencibles, 
 and son of Thomas Stubbs, of Sloffemsquiggle, Esquire, is about to 
 lead to the hymeneal altar the lovely and accomplished daughter of 
 Solomon Crutty, Esquire, of the same place. A fortune of twenty 
 thousand pounds is, we hear, the lady’s portion. “None but the 
 brave deserve the fair.” ’ 
 
 ‘ Have you informed your relatives, my beloved ? ’ said I to 
 Magdalen one day, after sending the above notice ; ‘ will any of 
 them attend at your marriage ?’ 
 
 ‘ Uncle Sam will, I dare say,’ said Miss Crutty, ‘ dear mamma’s 
 brother.’ 
 
 ‘ And who was your dear mamma ? ’ said I : for Miss Crutty’s re- 
 spected parent had been long since dead, and I never heard her 
 name mentioned in the family. 
 
312 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 Magdalen blushed, and cast down her eyes to the ground — 
 ‘ Mamma was a foreigner,^ at last she said. 
 
 ‘ And of what country ? ’ 
 
 ‘ A German ; papa married her when she was very young ; she 
 was not of a very good family,’ said Miss Crutty hesitating. 
 
 ‘ And what care I for family, my love ! ’ said I, tenderly kissing 
 the knuckles of the hand which I held. ‘ She must have been an 
 angel who gave birth to you.’ 
 
 ‘ She was a shoemaker’s daughter.’ 
 
 A German shoemaker I Hang ’em ! thought I, I have had 
 enough of them ; and so I broke up this conversation, which did 
 not somehow please me. 
 
 Well, the day was drawing near ; the clothes were ordered ; 
 the banns were read. My dear mamma had built a cake about the 
 size of a washing-tub ; and I was only waiting for a week to pass 
 to put me in possession of twelve thousand pounds in the five 
 per cents., as they were in those days. Heaven bless ’em ! Little 
 did I know the storm that was brewing, and the disappointment 
 which was to fall upon a young man who really did his best to get 
 a fortune. 
 
 ‘ Oh, Robert 1 ’ said my Magdalen to me, two days before the 
 match was to come off, ^ I have such a kind letter from Uncle Sam 
 in London. I wrote to him as you wished. He says that he is 
 coming down to-morrow ; that he has heard of you often, and knows 
 your character very well ; and that he has got a very handsome 
 present for us ! What can it be, I wonder ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Is he rich, my soul’s adored % ’ says I. 
 
 ‘ He is a bachelor, with a fine trade, and nobody to leave his 
 money to.’ 
 
 ‘ His present can’t be less than a thousand pounds ? ’ says I. 
 
 ‘ Or, perhaps, a silver tea-set, and some corner-dishes,’ says she. 
 
 But we could not agree to this, it was too little — too mean for 
 a man of her uncle’s wealth ; and we both determined it must be 
 the thousand pounds. 
 
 ‘ Dear good uncle ! he’s to be here by the coach,’ says Magdalen. 
 ‘ Let us ask a little party to meet him.’ And so we did, and so 
 they came. My father and mother, old Crutty in his best wig, and 
 the parson who was to marry us the next day. The coach was to 
 come in at six. And there was the tea-table, and there was the 
 punch-bowl, and everybody ready and smiling to receive our dear 
 uncle from London. 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 313 
 
 Six o’clock came, and the coach, and the man from the ‘ Green 
 Dragon’ with a portmanteau, and a fat old gentleman walking 
 behind, of whom I just caught a glimpse — a venerable old gentle- 
 man — I thought I’d seen him before. 
 
 Then there was a ring at the bell ; then a scuffling and bumping 
 at the passage ; then old Crutty rushed out, and a great laughing 
 and talking, and ^ How are you 1 ’ and so on, was heard at the 
 door ; and then the parlour-door was flung open, and Crutty cried 
 out with a loud voice — 
 
 ‘ Good people all ! my brother-in-law, Mr.. Stiffelkind ! ’ 
 
 Mr. Stiffelkind ! — I trembled as I heard the name ! 
 
 Miss Crutty kissed him, mamma made him a curtsey, and papa 
 made him a bow ; and Doctor Snorter, the parson, seized his hand 
 and shook it most warmly. Then came my turn ! 
 
 ‘Vat ! ’ says he. ‘It is my dear, goot yong frend from Doctor 
 Schvis’hentail’s ! Is dis the yong gentleman’s honorable moder ’ 
 (mamma smiled, and made a curtsey), ‘and dis his fader? Sare 
 and madam, you should be broud of soch a sonn. And you, my 
 niece, if you have him for a husband, you vil be locky, dat is all. 
 Vat dink you, broder Crotty, and Madame Stobbs, I ’ave made 
 your sonn’s boots ! Ha ! ha ! ’ 
 
 My mamma laughed, and said, ‘ I did not know it ; but I am 
 sure, sir, he has as pretty a leg for a boot as any in the whole 
 county.’ 
 
 Old Stiffelkind roared louder. ‘ A very nice leg, ma’am, and a 
 very slieap hoot^ too. Vat ! you did not know I make his boots ! 
 Perhaps you did not know something else too — p’raps you did not 
 know ’ (and here the monster clapped his hand on the table and 
 made the punch-ladle tremble in the bowl), ‘p’raps you did not 
 know as dat young man, dat Stobbs, dat sneaking, baltry, squinting 
 fellow, is as vicked as he is ogly. He bot a pair of boots from me 
 and never paid for dem. Dat is noting, — nobody never pays ; but 
 he bought a pair of boots, and called himself Lord Cornvallis j and 
 I was fool enough to believe him vonce. But look you, niece 
 Magdalen, I ’ave got five tousand pounds, — if you marry him I vil 
 not give you a benny; but look you, what I will gif you. I 
 promised you a bresent, and I will give you dese ! ’ 
 
 And the old monster produced those very boots which 
 Swishtail had made him take back. 
 
 I didrUt marry Miss Crutty : I am not sorry for it, though. 
 She was a nasty, ugly, ill-tempered wretch, and I’ve always said 
 so ever since. 
 
JUNE — MAKEOW BONES AND CLEAVEES. 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 315 
 
 And all this arose from those infernal boots, and that unlucky 
 paragraph in the county paper. ITl tell you how. 
 
 In the first place, it was taken up as a quiz by one of the 
 wicked, profligate, unprincipled organs of the London press, who 
 chose to be very facetious about the ‘ Marriage in High Life,’ and 
 made all sorts of jokes about me and my dear Miss C rutty. 
 
 Secondly, it was read in this London paper by my mortal 
 enemy. Bunting, who had been introduced to old Stitfelkind’s 
 acquaintance by my adventure with him, and had his shoes made 
 regularly by that foreign upstart. 
 
 Thirdly, he happened to want a pair of shoes made at this 
 particular period, and as he was measured by the disgusting old 
 High-Dutch cobbler, he told him his old friend Stubbs was going 
 to be married. 
 
 ‘ And to whom ? ’ said old Stiffelkind. ‘ To a woman wit gelt, 
 I vill take my oath.’ 
 
 ‘Yes,’ says Bunting, ‘a country girl — a Miss Magdalen Carotty 
 or Grotty, at a place called Sloffemsquiggle.’ 
 
 ^ Schloffemschwiegel ! ^ bursts out the dreadful bootmaker, 
 ‘ Mein Gott ! mein Gott ! das geht nicht ! I tell you, sare, it is 
 no go. Miss Grotty is my niece. I vill go down myself. I vill 
 never let her marry dat goot-for-noting sch windier and teif.’ Such 
 was the language that the scoundrel ventured to use regarding me ! 
 
 JUNE— MARROWBONES AND GLEAVERS 
 
 Was there ever such confounded ill-luck'? My whole life has 
 been a tissue of ill-luck ; although I have laboured, perhaps, 
 harder than any man to make a fortune, something always tumbled 
 it down. In love and in war I was not like others. In my 
 marriages, I had an eye to the main chance ; and you see how 
 some unlucky blow would come and throw them over. In the 
 army I was just as prudent, and just as unfortunate. What with 
 judicious betting, and horse-swapping, good luck at billiards, and 
 economy, I do believe I put by my pay every year, — and that is 
 what few can say who have but an allowance of a hundred a year. 
 
 I’ll tell you how it was, I used to be very kind to the young 
 men ; I chose their horses for them, and their wine, and showed 
 them how to play billiards or ecart^, of long mornings, when’ there 
 was nothing better to do. I didn’t cheat — I’d rather die than 
 cheat ; but if fellows will play, I wasn’t the man to say no, — why 
 
316 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 should I ? There was one young chap in our regiment of whom I 
 really think I cleared three hundred a year. 
 
 His name was Hobble. He was a tailor’s son, and wanted to 
 be a gentleman. A poor, weak, young creature ; easy to be made 
 tipsy, easy to be cheated, and easy to be frightened. It was a 
 blessing for him that I found him : for if anybody else had, they 
 would have plucked him of every shilling. 
 
 Ensign Dobble and I were sworn friends. I rode his horses for 
 him, and chose his champagne ; and did everything, in fact, that 
 a superior mind does for an inferior — when the inferior has got the 
 money. We were inseparables, hunting everywhere in couples. 
 We even managed to fall in love with two sisters, as young soldiers 
 will do, you know ; for the dogs fall in love with every change of 
 quarters. 
 
 Well, once, in the year 1793 (it was just when the French 
 had chopped j^oor Louis’s head off), Dobble and I, gay young chaps 
 as ever wore sword by side, had cast our eyes upon two young 
 ladies, by the name of Brisket, daughters of a butcher in the town 
 where we were quartered. The dear girls fell in love with us, of 
 course. And many a pleasant walk in the country, many a treat 
 to a tea-garden, many a smart ribband and brooch used Dobble and 
 I (for his father allowed him six hundred pounds, and our purses 
 were in common) present to these young ladies. One day, fancy 
 our pleasure at receiving a note couched thus : — 
 
 ‘ Deer Oapting Stubbs and Dobble, — Miss Briskets presents 
 their compliments, and it is probble that our papa will be till 
 twelve at the corprayshun dinner, we request the pleasure of their 
 company to tea.’ 
 
 Didn’t we go ! Punctually at six we were in the little back- 
 parlour ; we quaffed more Bohea, and made more love, than half-a- 
 dozen ordinary men could. At nine, a little punch-bowl succeeded 
 to the little tea-pot ; and, bless the girls 1 a nice fresh steak was 
 frizzling on the gridiron for our supper. Butchers were butchers 
 then, and their parlour was their kitchen, too ; at least old Brisket’s 
 was — one door leading into the shop, and one into the yard, on 
 the other side of which was the slaughter-house. 
 
 Fancy, then, our horror when, just at this critical time, we 
 heard the shop-door open, a heavy staggering step on the flags, 
 and a loud husky voice from the shop, shouting — ‘ Hallo, Susan ! 
 hallo, Betsy ! show a light ! ’ Dobble turned as white as a sheet ; 
 the two girls each as red as a lobster; I alone preserved my 
 presence of mind, ‘The back-door,’ says I. — ‘The dog’s in the 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 317 
 
 court/ say they. ‘ He’s not so bad as the man,’ says I. ‘ Stop 1 ’ 
 cries Susan, flinging open the door, and rushing to the fire ; ‘ take 
 this^ and perhaps it will quiet him.’ 
 
 What do you think this was? I’m blest if it was not the 
 steak ! 
 
 She pushed us out, patted and hushed the dog, and was in again 
 ill a minute. The moon was shining on the court, and on the 
 slaughter-house, where there hung a couple of white, ghastly-looking 
 carcasses of a couple of sheep ; a great gutter ran down the court 
 — a gutter of hlood I The dog was devouring his beef-steak {our 
 beef-steak) in silence : and we could see through the little window 
 the girls bustling about to pack up the supper-things, and presently 
 the shop-door opened, old Brisket entered, staggering, angry, 
 and drunk. What’s more, we could see, perched on a high stool, 
 and nodding politely, as if to salute old Brisket, the feather of 
 Dohhlds cocked hat / When Hobble saw it, he turned white, and 
 deadly sick; and the poor fellow, in an agony of fright, sank 
 shivering down upon one of the butcher’s cutting blocks, which 
 was in the yard. 
 
 We saw old Brisket look steadily (as steadily as he could) at 
 the confounded impudent, pert, waggling feather ; and then an idea 
 began to dawn upon his mind that there was a head to the hat ; 
 and then he slowly rose up, — he was a man of six feet, and fifteen 
 stone, — he rose up, put on his apron and sleeves, and took down 
 his cleaver, 
 
 ‘ Betsy,’ says he, open the yard door.’ But the poor girls 
 screamed, and flung on their knees, and begged, and wept, and 
 did their very best to prevent him. ‘ Open the yard door ! ’ 
 says he, with a thundering, loud voice ; and the great bulldog, 
 hearing it, started up, and uttered a yell which sent me flying to 
 the other end of the court. Hobble couldn’t move ; he was sitting 
 on the block blubbering like a baby. 
 
 The door opened, and out Mr. Brisket came. 
 
 ^ To him,, Jowler!^ says he. '‘Keep him,, Jowlerf’ — and the 
 horrid dog flew at me, and I flew back into the corner, and drew 
 my sword, determining to sell my life dearly. 
 
 ‘ That’s it,’ says Brisket. ‘ Keep him there — good dog — good 
 dog I And now, sir,’ says he, turning round to Hobble, ‘ is this 
 your hat ? 
 
 ‘Yes,’ says Hobble, fit to choke with fright. 
 
 ‘Well, then,’ says Brisket, ‘it’s my — (hick) — my painful duty 
 to — (hick) — to tell you, that as I’ve got your hat, I must have 
 your head ; — it’s painful, but it must be done. You’d better — 
 (hick) —settle yourself com — comfumarably against that — (hick) 
 
318 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 — that block, and ITl chop it off before you can say Jack — (hick) 
 — no, I mean Jack Kobinson/ 
 
 Dobble went down on his knees, and shrieked out, ‘I’m an 
 only son, Mr. Brisket ! I’ll marry her, sir ; I will, upon my 
 honour, sir. Consider my mother, sir ! consider my mother ! ’ 
 
 ‘ That’s it, sir,’ says Brisket ; ‘ that’s a good — (hick) — a good 
 boy. Just put your head down quietly — and I’ll have it off — 
 yes, off — as if you were Louis the Six — the Sixtix — the Sixtickle- 
 teenth. I’ll chop the other ckajp afterwards.^ 
 
 When I heard this, I made a sudden bound back, and gave 
 such a cry as any man might who was in such a way. The 
 ferocious Jowler, thinking I was going to escape, flew at my 
 throat ; screaming furious, I flung out my arms in a kind of 
 desperation, — and, to my wonder, down fell the dog, dead, and run 
 through the body ! 
 
 At this moment a posse of people rushed in upon old Brisket 
 — one of his daughters had had the sense to summon them — and 
 Dobble’s head was saved. And when they saw the dog lying 
 dead at my feet, my ghastly look, my bloody sword, they gave me 
 no small credit for my bravery. ‘ A terrible fellow that Stubbs,’ 
 said they ; and so the mess said the next day. 
 
 I didn’t tell them that the dog had committed suicide — why 
 should I ? And I didn’t say a word about Dobble’s cow^ardice. 
 I said he was a brave fellow, and fought like a tiger ; and this 
 prevented hiin from telling tales. I had the dogskin made into a 
 pair of pistol-holsters, and looked so fierce, and got such a name 
 for courage in our regiment that, when we had to meet the 
 regulars. Bob Stubbs was always the man put forward to support 
 the honour of the corps. The women, you know, adore courage; 
 and such was my reputation at this time that I might have had 
 my pick out of half-a-dozen, with three, four, or five thousand 
 pounds apiece, who were dying for love of me and my red coat. 
 
 But I wasn’t such a fool. I had been twice on the point of 
 
 marriage, and twice disappointed ; and I vowed by all the saints 
 to have a wife, and a rich one. Depend upon this, as an infallible 
 
 maxim to guide you through life — It^s as easy to get a rich ivife 
 
 as a poor one. The same bait that will hook a trout will hook a 
 salmon. 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 319 
 
 JULY— SUMMARY PROCEEDINGS 
 
 Dobble’s reputation for courage was not increased by the butcher’s- 
 dog adventure, but mine stood very high ; little Stubbs was voted 
 the boldest chap of all the bold North Bungays. And though I 
 must confess, what was proved by subsequent circumstances, that 
 nature has not endowed me with a large or even, I may say, an 
 average share of bravery, yet a man is very willing to flatter 
 himself of the contrary ; and after a little time I got to believe 
 that my killing the dog was an action of undaunted courage, and 
 that I was as gallant as any one of the hundred thousand heroes 
 of our army. I always had a military taste — it’s only the brutal 
 part of the profession, the horrid fighting and blood, that I 
 don’t like. 
 
 I suppose the regiment was not very brave itself, being only 
 militia; but certain it was that Stubbs was considered a most 
 terrible fellow, and I swore so much, and looked so fierce, that 
 you would have fancied I had made half a hundred campaigns. 
 I was second in several duels ; the umpire in all disputes ; and 
 suck a crack shot myself, that fellows were shy of insulting me. 
 As for Dobble, I took him under my protection, and he became 
 so attached to me that we ate, drank, and rode together every 
 day. His father didn’t care for money so long as his son was in 
 good company — and what so good as that of the celebrated Stubbs h 
 Heigho ! I was good company in those days, and a brave fellow 
 too, as I should have remained but for — what I shall tell the 
 public immediately. 
 
 It happened, in the fatal year ninety-six, that the brave North 
 Bungays were quartered at Portsmouth, a maritime place, which 
 I need not describe, and which I wish I had never seen. I 
 might have been a general now, or, at least, a rich man. 
 
 The red -coats carried everything before them in those days, 
 and I, such a crack character as I was in my regiment, was very 
 well received by the townspeople. Many dinners I had ; many 
 tea-parties ; many lovely young ladies did I lead down the pleasant 
 country dances. 
 
 Well, although I had had the two former rebuffs in love, which 
 I have described, my heart was still young ; and the fact was, 
 knowing that a girl with a fortune was my only chance, I made 
 love here as furiously as ever. I shan’t describe the lovely 
 creatures on whom I fixed whilst at Portsmouth. I tried more 
 than one — several ; and it is a singular fact, which I have never 
 
JULY — SUMMARY PROCEEDINGS. 
 
STUBBS S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 321 
 
 been able to account for, that, successful as I was with ladies of 
 maturer age, by the young ones I was refused regular. 
 
 But ‘ faint heart never won fair lady ; ^ and so I went on and 
 on, until I had really got a Miss Clopper, a tolerably rich navy- 
 contractor’s daughter, into such a way that I really don’t think she 
 could have refused me. Her brother. Captain Clopper, was in a 
 line regiment, and helped me as much as ever he could ; he swore 
 I was such a brave fellow. 
 
 As I had received a number of attentions from Clopper, I 
 determined to invite him to dinner, which I could do without any 
 sacrifice of my principle upon this point ; for the fact is, Dobble 
 lived at an inn, and as he sent all his bills to his father, I made 
 no scruple to use his table. We dined in the coffee-room, Dobble 
 bringing his friend ; and so we made a party carry ^ as the French 
 say. Some naval officers were occupied in a similar way at a 
 table next to ours. 
 
 Well — I didn’t spare the bottle either for myself or my friends, 
 and we grew very talkative and very affectionate as the drinking 
 went on. Each man told stories of his gallantry in the field, or 
 amongst the ladies, as officers will after dinner. Clopper confided 
 to the company his wish that I should marry his sister, and vowed 
 that he thought me the best fellow in Christendom. 
 
 Ensign Dobble assented to this. ‘ But let Miss Clopper 
 beware,’ says he, ‘ for Stubbs is a sad fellow ; he has had I don’t 
 know how many liaisons already, and he has been engaged to I 
 don’t know how many women.’ 
 
 ‘ Indeed ! ’ says Clopper ; ‘ come, Stubbs, tell us your ad- 
 ventures.’ 
 
 ‘ Psha ! ’ said I, modestly, ‘ there is nothing, indeed, to tell. 
 I have been in love, my dear boy — who has not ? — and I have 
 been jilted — who has not ? ’ 
 
 Clopper swore that he would blow his sister’s brains out if 
 ever she served me so. 
 
 ‘Tell him about Miss Crutty,’ said Dobble. ‘He! he! 
 Stubbs served that woman out, anyhow ; she didn’t jilt him. I’ll 
 be sworn.’ 
 
 ‘ Really, Dobble, you are too bad, and should not mention 
 names. The fact is, the girl was desperately in love with me, 
 and had money — sixty thousand pounds, upon my reputation. 
 Well, everything was arranged, when who should come down 
 from London but a relation.’ 
 
 ‘Well, did he prevent the match V 
 
 ‘ Prevent it — yes, sir, I believe you, he did ; though not in the 
 sense that you mean. He would have given his eyes — ay, and ten 
 
 Y 
 
322 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 thousand pounds more — if I would have accepted the girl, but I 
 would not.’ 
 
 ‘ Why, in the name of goodness 1 ’ 
 
 ‘ Sir, her uncle was a shoemaker, I never would debase myself 
 by marrying into such a family.’ 
 
 ‘Of course not,’ said Dobble ; ‘he couldn’t, you know. Well, 
 now — tell him about the other girl, Mary Waters, you know.’ 
 
 ‘ Hush, Dobble, hush ! don’t you see one of those naval officers 
 has turned round and heard you ? My dear Clopper, it was a mere 
 childish bagatelle.’ 
 
 ‘Well, but let’s have it,’ said Clopper — ‘let’s have it. I won’t 
 tell ‘my sister, you know.’ And he put his hand to his nose and 
 looked monstrous wise. 
 
 ‘Nothing of that sort, Clopper — no, no — ’pon honour — little 
 Bob Stubbs is no libertine; and the story is simple. You see 
 that my father has a small place, merely a few hundred acres, at 
 Sloffemsquiggle. Isn’t it a funny name? Hang it, there’s the 
 naval gentleman staring again,’ — I looked terribly fierce as I 
 returned this officer’s stare, and continued in a loud careless voice. 
 
 ‘ Well, at this Sloffemsquiggle there lived a girl, a Miss Waters, the 
 niece of some*blackguard apothecary in the neighbourhood ; but my 
 mother took a fancy to the girl, and had her up to the park and 
 petted her. We were both young — and — and — the girl fell in love 
 with me, that’s the fact. I was obliged to repel some rather warm 
 advances that she made me ; and here, upon my honour as a gentle- 
 man, you have all the story about which that silly Dobble makes 
 such a noise.’ 
 
 Just as I finished this sentence, I found myself suddenly taken 
 by the nose, and a voice shouting out — 
 
 ‘ Mr. Stubbs, you are a Liar and a Scoundrel ! Take this, 
 sir,— and this, for daring to meddle with the name of an innocent 
 lady.’ 
 
 I turned round as well as I could — for the ruffian had pulled 
 me out of my chair — and beheld a great marine monster, six feet 
 high, who was occupied in beating and kicking me, in the most 
 ungentlemanly manner, on my cheeks, my ribs, and between the 
 tails of my coat. ‘ He is a liar, gentlemen, and a scoundrel ! The 
 bootmaker had detected him in swindling, and so his niece refused 
 him. Miss Waters was engaged to him from childhood, and he 
 deserted her for the bootmaker’s niece, who was richer.’ — And then 
 sticking a card between my stock and my coat-collar, in what is 
 called the scrulf of my neck, the disgusting brute gave me another 
 blow behind my back, and left tlie coffee-room with his friends. 
 
 Dobble raised me up ; and taking the card from my neck, read. 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 323 
 
 Captain Waters. Clopper poured me out a glass of water, and 
 said in my ear, ‘If this is true, you are an infernal scoundrel, 
 Stubbs ; and must fight me, after Captain Waters ; ’ and he 
 flounced out of the room. 
 
 I had but one course to pursue. I sent the Captain a short and 
 contemptuous note, saying that he was beneath my anger. As for 
 Clopper, I did not condescend to notice his remark ; but in order 
 to get rid of the troublesome society of these low blackguards, I 
 determined to gratify an inclination I had long entertained, and 
 make a little tour. I applied for leave of absence, and set off l/ial 
 very night, I can fancy the disappointment of the brutal Waters, 
 on coming, as lie did, the next morning to my quarters and finding 
 me gone — ha ! ha ! 
 
 After this adventure I became sick of a military life — at least 
 the life of my own regiment, where the officers, such was their 
 unaccountable meanness and prejudice against me, absolutely refused 
 to see me at mess. Colonel Craw sent me a letter to this effect, 
 which I treated as it deserved. — I never once alluded to it in any 
 way, and have since never spoken a single word to any man in the 
 North Bungays. 
 
 AUGUST— DOGS HAVE THEIR DAYS 
 
 See, now, what life is ; I have had ill-luck on ill-luck from that 
 day to this. I have sunk in the world, and, instead of riding my 
 horse and drinking my wine, as a real gentleman should, have 
 hardly enough now to buy a pint of ale ; — ay, and am very glad 
 when anybody will treat me to one. Why, why was I born to 
 undergo such unmerited misfortunes ? 
 
 You must know that very soon after my adventure with Miss 
 Crutty, and that cowardly ruffian, Captain Waters — (he sailed the 
 day after his insult to me, or I should most certainly have blown 
 his brains out ; now he is living in England, and is my relation ; 
 but, of course, I cut the fellow) — very soon after these painful 
 events another happened, which ended, too, in a sad disappoint- 
 ment. My dear papa died, and, instead of leaving five thousand 
 pounds, as I expected, at the very least, left only his estate, which 
 was worth but two. The land and house were left to me ; to 
 mamma and my sisters he left, to be sure, a sum of two thousand 
 pounds in tlie hands of that eminent firm Messrs. Pump, Aldgate, 
 and Co., wliich failed within six months after his demise, and paid 
 
AUGUST — DOGS HAVE THEIR DAYS. 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 325 
 
 in five years about one shilling and ninepence in the pound ; which 
 really was all my dear mother and sisters had to live upon. 
 
 The poor creatures were quite unused to money matters ; and, 
 would you believe it*? — when the news came of Pump and Aldgate’s 
 failure, mamma only smiled, and threw her eyes up to heaven, and 
 said — ‘ Blessed be God, that we have still wherewithal to live ! 
 There are tens of thousands in this world, dear children, who 
 would count our poverty riches.’ And with this she kissed my two 
 sisters, who began to blubber, as girls always will do, and threw 
 their arms round her neck, and then round my neck, until I was 
 half stifled with their embraces, and slobbered all over with their 
 tears. 
 
 ‘Dearest mamma,’ said I, ‘I am very glad to see the noble 
 manner in which you bear your loss ; and more still to know that 
 you are so rich as to be able to put up with it.’ The fact was, I 
 really thought the old lady had got a private hoard of her own, as 
 many of them have — a thousand pounds or so in a stocking. Had 
 she put by thirty pounds a year, as well she might, for the thirty 
 years of her marriage, there would have been nine hundred pounds 
 clear, and no mistake. But still I was angry to think that any 
 such paltry concealment had been practised — concealment, too, of 
 my money ; so I turned on her pretty sharply, and continued my 
 speech — ‘ You say, ma’am, that you are rich, and that Pump and 
 Aldgate’s failure has no effect upon you. I am very happy to 
 hear you say so, ma’am — very happy that you are rich ; and I 
 should like to know where your property, my father’s property, for 
 you had none of your own, — I should like to know where this 
 money lies — where you have concealed it^ ma’am ; and, permit me 
 to say, that when I agreed to board you and my two sisters for 
 eighty pounds a year, I did not know that you had other resources 
 than those mentioned in my blessed father’s will.’ 
 
 This I said to her because I hated the meanness of concealment, 
 not because I lost by the bargain of boarding them, for the three 
 poor things did not eat much more than sparrows ; and Pve often 
 since calculated that I had a clear twenty pounds a year profit out 
 of them. 
 
 Mamma and the girls looked quite astonished when I made the 
 speech. ‘ What does he mean ’ said Lucy to Eliza. 
 
 Mamma repeated the question. ‘My beloved Robert, what 
 concealment are you talking ofV 
 
 ‘ I am talking of concealed property, ma’am,’ says I sternly. 
 
 ‘ And do you — what — can you — do you’ really suppose that I 
 have concealed — any of that blessed sa-a-a-aint’s prop-op-op-operty ?’ 
 screams out mamma. ‘ Robert,’ says she, ‘ Bob, my own darling 
 
326 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 boy — my fondest, best beloved, now he is gone ^ (meaning my late 
 governor — more tears), ‘you don't, you cannot fancy that your 
 own mother, who bore you, and nursed you, and wept for you, and 
 would give her all to save you from a moment’s harm — you don’t 
 suppose that she would che-e-e-eat you 1 ’ And here she gave a 
 louder screech than ever, and flung back on the sofa, and one of 
 my sisters went and tumbled into her arms, and t’other went 
 round, and the kissing and slobbering scene went on again, only I 
 was left out, thank goodness ; I hate such sentimentality. 
 
 ‘ Che-e-e-eat m^,’ says I, mocking her. ‘ What do you mean, 
 then, by saying you’re so rich. Say, have you got money, or have 
 you not?’ (And I rapped out a good number of oaths, too, which 
 I don’t put in here ; but I was in a dreadful fury, that’s the fact.) 
 
 ‘ So help me. Heaven,’ says mamma, in answer, going down on 
 her knees and smacking her two hands ; ‘ I have but a Queen 
 Anne’s guinea in the whole of this wicked world.’ 
 
 ‘ Then what, madam, induces you to tell these absurd stories to 
 me, and to talk about your riches, when you know that you and 
 your daughters are beggars, ma’am, beggars?^ 
 
 ‘ My dearest boy, have we not got the house, and the fui niture, 
 and a hundred a year still ; and have you not great talents, which 
 will make all our fortunes ? ’ says Mrs. Stubbs, getting up off her 
 knees, and making believe to smile as she clawed hold of my hand 
 and kissed it. 
 
 This was too cool. ‘ You have got a hundred a year, ma’am,’ 
 says I — ‘ you got a house ! Upon my soul and honour this is 
 the first I ever heard of it, and I’ll tell you what, ma’am,’ says 
 I (and it cut her pretty sharply too), ‘As you’ve got it, you'd 
 better go and live in it, I’ve got quite enough to do with my 
 own house, and every penny of my own income.’ 
 
 Upon this speech the old lady said nothing, but she gave a 
 screech loud enough to be heard from here to York, and down she 
 fell — kicking and struggling, in a regular fit. 
 
 I did not see Mrs. Stubbs for some days after this, and the 
 girls used to come down to meals, and never speak; going up 
 again and stopping with their mother. At last, one day, both of 
 them came in very solemn to my study, and Eliza, the eldest, 
 said, ‘Robert, mamma has paid you our board up to Michaelmas.’ 
 
 ‘ She has,’ says I ; for I always took precious good care to have 
 it in advance. 
 
 ‘She says, Robert, that on Michaelmas-day — we’ll — we’ll go 
 away, Robert.’ 
 
 ‘Oh, she’s going to her own house, is she, Lizzy? Very good; 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 327 
 
 she’ll want the furniture, I suppose, and that she may have too, 
 for I’m going to sell the place myself ; ’ and so that matter was 
 settled. 
 
 On Michaelinas-day, and during these two months I liadn’t, I 
 do believe, seen my mother twice (once, about two o’clock in the 
 morning, I woke and found her sobbing over my bed) — on Michael- 
 mas-day morning, Eliza comes to me and says, ‘ Robert^ they will 
 come and fetch us at six this evening.^ Well, as this was the last 
 day, I went and got the best goose I could find (I don’t think I 
 ever saw a primer, or ate more hearty myself), and had it roasted 
 at three, with a good pudding afterwards ; and a glorious bowl of 
 punch. ‘ Here’s a health to you, dear girls,’ says I, ‘ and you, 
 Ma, and good luck to all three ; and as you’ve not eaten a morsel, 
 I hope you won’t object to a glass of punch. It’s the old stuft* 
 you know, ma’am, that Waters sent to my father fifteen years ago.’ 
 
 Six o’clock came, and with it came a fine barouche. As I live I 
 Captain Waters was on the box (it was his coach) ; that old thief, 
 Bates, jumped out, entered my house, and before I could say Jack 
 Robinson, whipped off mamma to the carriage, and bowed her 
 into it as if she had been a countess. The girls followed, just 
 giving me a hasty shake of the hand ; and as mamma was helped 
 in, Mary Waters, wdio was sitting inside, flung her arms round 
 her, and then round the girls, and the Doctor, who acted footman, 
 jumped on the box, and oft* they went ; taking no more notice 
 of me than if I’d been a nonentity. 
 
 The whole business would make a picture. Fancy mamma 
 and Miss Waters sitting kissing each other in the carriage, with 
 the two girls in the back seat ; Waters is driving (a precious bad 
 driver he is too) ; and fancy me, standing at the garden door, and 
 whistling. You can’t see Mary Mai own ey — the old fool — is crying 
 behind the garden gate ; she went off next day along with the 
 furniture ; and I was left to get into that precious scrape which 
 I shall mention in the next chapter. 
 
 SEPTEMBER— PLUCKING A GOOSE 
 
 After my papa’s death, as he left me no money, and only a little 
 land, I put my estate into an auctioneer’s hands, and determined 
 to amuse my solitude with a trip to some of our fashionable 
 watering-places. My house was now a desert to me. I need not 
 say how the departure of my dear parent, and her children, left 
 me sad and lonely. 
 
SEPTEMBER — PLUCKING A GOOSE, 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 329 
 
 Well, I had a little ready money, and, for the estate, expected 
 a couple of thousand pounds. I had a good military-looking 
 person ; for though I had absolutely cut the old North Bungays 
 (indeed, after my affair with Waters, Colonel Craw hinted to me, 
 in the most friendly manner, that I had better resign) — though I 
 had left the army, I still retained the rank of Captain ; knowing 
 the advantages attendant upon that title in a watering-place tour. 
 
 Captain Stubbs became a great dandy at Cheltenham, Harro- 
 gate, Bath, Leamington, and other places. I was a good whist 
 and billiard player ; so much so, that in many of these towns, the 
 people used to refuse, at last, to play with me, knowing how far 
 I was their superior. Fancy my surprise, about five years after 
 the Portsmouth affair, when strolling one day up the High Street, 
 in Leamington, my eyes lighted upon a young man, whom I 
 remembered in a certain butcher’s yard, and elsewhere — no other, 
 in fact, than Hobble. He, too, was dressed en militaire^ with a 
 frogged coat and spurs ; and was walking with a showy-looking, 
 Jewish-faced, black-haired lady, glittering with chains and rings, 
 with a green bonnet and a bird of Paradise — a lilac shawl, a 
 yellow gown, pink silk stockings, and light-blue shoes. Three 
 children, and a handsome footman, were walking behind her, and 
 the party, not seeing me, entered the ‘ Koyal Hotel ’ together. 
 
 I was known myself at the ‘Royal,’ and calling one of the 
 waiters, learned the names of the lady and gentleman. He was 
 Captain Hobble, the son of the rich army-clothier, Hobble, Hobble 
 & Co., of Pall Mall; — the lady was a Mrs. Manasseh, widow of 
 an American Jew, living quietly at Leamington with her children, 
 but possessed of an immense property. There’s no use to give 
 one’s self out to be an absolute pauper ; so the fact is, that I 
 myself went everywhere with the character of a man of very large 
 means. My father had died leaving me immense sums of money 
 and landed estates. Ah ! I was the gentleman then, the real 
 gentleman, and everybody was too happy to have me at table. 
 
 Well, I came the next day and left a card for Hobble, with a 
 note. He neither returned my visit nor answered my note. The 
 day after, however, I met him with the widow, as before ; and 
 going up to him, very kindly seized him by the hand, and swore 
 I was — as really was the case — charmed to see him. Hobble 
 hung back, to my surprise, and I do believe the creature would 
 have cut me if he dared ; but I gave him a frown, and said — 
 
 ‘What, Hobble my boy, don’t you recollect old Stubbs, and 
 our adventure with the butcher’s daughters — ha 1 ’ 
 
 Hobble gave a sickly kind of grin, and said, ‘ Oh ! ah ! yes ! 
 It is — yes ! it is, I believe. Captain Stubbs.’ 
 
330 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 ‘All old comrade, madam, of Captain Dobble’s, and one who 
 has heard so much, and seen so much of your ladyship, that 
 he must take the liberty of begging his friend to introduce liim.’ 
 Dobble was obliged to take the hint ; and Captain Stubbs was 
 duly presented to Mrs. Manasseh. The lady was as gracious as 
 possible ; and when, at the end of the walk, we parted, she said 
 ‘she hoped Captain Dobble would bring me to her apartments 
 that evening, where she expected a few friends.’ Everybody, you 
 see, knows everybody at Leamington ; and I, for my part, was 
 well known as a retired officer of the army, who, on his father’s 
 death had come into seven thousand a year. Dobble’s arrival 
 had been subsequent to mine ; but putting up as he did at the 
 ‘ Eoyal Hotel,’ and dining at the ordinary there with the widow, 
 he had made her acquaintance before I had. I saw, however, 
 that if I allowed him to talk about me, as he could, I should be 
 compelled to give up all my hopes and pleasures at Leamington ; 
 and so I determined to be short with him. As soon as the lady 
 had gone into the hotel, my friend Dobble was for leaving me 
 likewise ; but I stopped him, and said, ‘ Mr. Dobble, I saw what 
 you meant just now : you wanted to cut me, because, forsooth, I 
 did not choose to fight a duel at Portsmouth. How look you, 
 Dobble, I am no hero, but I am not such a coward as you — and 
 you know it. You are a very different man to deal with from 
 Waters ; and / will fight this time.’ 
 
 Not perhaps that I would ; but after the business of the 
 butcher, I knew Dobble to be as great a coward as ever lived ; 
 and there never w^as any harm in threatening, for you know you 
 are not obliged to stick to it afterwards. My words had their 
 effect upon Dobble, who stuttered and looked red, and then 
 declared he never had the slightest intention of passing me by ; so 
 we became' friends, and his mouth was stopped. 
 
 He was very thick with the widow, but that lady had a very 
 capacious heart, and there w^ere a number of other gentlemen who 
 seemed equally smitten with her. ‘ Look at that Mrs. Manasseh,’ 
 said a gentleman (it was droll, he was a Jew, too) sitting at dinner 
 by me. ‘ She is old, and ugly, and yet, because she has money, all 
 the men are flinging themselves at her.’ 
 
 ‘ She has money, has she % ’ 
 
 ‘Eighty thousand pounds, and twenty thousand for each of her 
 children. I know it /hr a said the strange gentleman. ‘I 
 am in the law, and we of our faith, you know, know pretty well 
 what the great families amongst us are worth.’ 
 
 ‘ Who was Mr. Manasseh % ’ said I. 
 
 ‘A man of enormous wealth — a tobacco merchant — West 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 331 
 
 Indies ; a fellow of no birth, however ; and who, between ourselves, 
 married a woman that is not much better than she should be. My 
 dear sir,^ whispered he, ‘she is always in love. Now it is with 
 that Captain Dobble ; last week it was somebody else — and it 
 may be you next week, if — ha ! ha ! ha ! — if you are disposed to 
 enter the lists.^ 
 
 ‘ I wouldn’t, for my part, have the woman with twice her money.’ 
 
 What did it matter to me whether the woman was good or not, 
 provided she was rich % My course was quite clear. I told Dobble 
 all that this gentleman had informed me, and being a pretty good 
 hand at making a story, I made the widow appear so bad, that the 
 poor fellow was quite frightened, and fairly quitted the field. Ha ! 
 ha ! I’m dashed if I did not make him believe that Mrs. Manasseh 
 had murdered her last husband. 
 
 I played my game so well, thanks to the information that my 
 friend the lawyer had given me, that in a month I had got the 
 widow to show a most decided partiality for me. I sat by her at 
 dinner, I drank with her at the Wells — I rode with her, I 
 danced with her ; and at a picnic to Kenilworth, where we drank 
 a good deal of champagne, I actually popped the question, and 
 was accepted. In another month, Robert Stubbs, Esquire, led to 
 the altar, Leah, widow of the late Z. Manasseh, Esquire, of St. Kitts ! 
 
 We drove up to London in her comfortable chariot: the child- 
 ren and servants following in a post-chaise. I paid, of course, for 
 everything ; and until our house in Berkeley Square was painted, 
 we stopped at ‘Stevens’s Hotel.’ 
 
 My own estate had been sold, and the money was lying at a 
 bank in the City. About three days after our arrival, as we took 
 our breakfast in the hotel, previous to a visit to Mrs. Stubbs’s 
 banker, where certain little transfers were to be made, a gentleman 
 was introduced, who, I saw at a glance, was of my wife’s persuasion. 
 
 He looked at Mrs. Stubbs, and made a bow. ‘ Perhaps it will 
 be convenient to you to pay this little bill, one hundred and fifty- 
 two poundsh.’ 
 
 ‘My love,’ says she, ‘will you pay this?- — it is a trifie which I 
 had really forgotten.’ My soul ! ’ said I, I have really not the 
 money in the house.’ 
 
 ‘Veil, denn, Captain Shtubbsh,’ says he, ‘I must do my duty 
 — and arrest you — here is the writ ! Tom, keep the door ! ’ — My 
 wife fainted — the children screamed, and I — fancy my condition, as I 
 was obliged to march off to a spunging-house along with a horrid 
 sheriff’s officer ! 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 333 
 
 OCTOBER—MARS AND VENUS IN OPPOSITION 
 
 I SHALL not describe my feelings when I found myself in a cage 
 in Oursitor Street, instead of that fine house in Berkeley Square, 
 which was to have been mine as the husband of Mrs. Manasseh. 
 What a palace ! In an odious, dismal street leading from Chancery 
 Lane, a hideous Jew boy opened the second of three doors ; and 
 shut it when Mr. Nabb and I (almost fainting) had entered; then 
 he opened the third door, and then I was introduced to a filthy 
 place called a coffee-room, which I exchanged for the solitary 
 comfort of a little dingy back-parlour, where I was left for awhile 
 to brood over my miserable fate. Fancy the change between this 
 and Berkeley Square ! Was I, after all my pains, and cleverness, 
 and perseverance, cheated at last '? Had this Mrs. Manasseh been 
 imposing upon me ? and were the words of the wretch I met at the 
 table-d^hote at Leamington only meant to mislead me and take me 
 in ? I determined to send for my wife, and know the whole truth. 
 I saw at once that I had been the victim of an infernal plot, and 
 that the carriage, the house in town, the West India fortune, were 
 only so many lies which I had blindly believed. It was true the 
 debt was but a hundred and fifty pounds, and I had two thousand 
 at my bankers; but was the loss of her £80,000 nothing? Was 
 the destruction of my hopes nothing ? The accursed addition to 
 my family of a Jewish wife and three Jewish children, nothing? 
 And all these I was to support out of my two thousand pounds. 
 I had better have stopped at home with my mamma and sisters, 
 whom I really did love, and who produced me eighty pounds a 
 year. 
 
 I had a furious interview with Mrs, Stubbs ; and when I charged 
 her (the base wretch !) with cheating me, like a brazen serpent, as 
 she was, she flung back the cheat in my teeth, and swore I had 
 swindled her. Why did I marry her, when she might have had 
 twenty others ? She only took me, she said, because I had twenty 
 thousand pounds. I had said I possessed that sum ; but in love, 
 you know, and war, all’s fair. 
 
 We parted quite as angrily as we met ; and I cordially vowed 
 that when I had paid the debt into which I had been swindled by 
 her, I would take my £2000, and depart to some desert island ; 
 or, at the very least, to America, and never see her more, or any 
 of her Israelitish brood. There was no use in remaining in 
 the spunging - house ; for I knew there were such things as 
 detainers, and that where Mrs. Stubbs owed a hundred pounds. 
 
334 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; 
 
 she might owe a thousand, so I sent for Mr. Nabb, and tendering 
 him a cheque for £150, and his costs, requested to be let out 
 forthwith. ‘ Here, fellow,’ said I, ‘ is a cheque on Child’s for 
 your paltry sum.’ 
 
 ‘It may be a sheck on Shild’s,’ says Mr. Nabb, ‘but I should 
 be a baby to let you out on such a paper as dat.’ 
 
 ‘Well,’ said I, ‘Child’s is but a step from this; you may go 
 and get the cash, — ^just give me an acknowledgment.’ 
 
 Nabb drew out the acknowledgment with great punctuality, 
 and set off for the banker’s, whilst I prepared myself for departure 
 from this abominable prison. 
 
 He smiled as he came in. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you have touched 
 your money ! and now, I must tell you, that you are the most 
 infernal rogue and extortioner I ever met with.’ 
 
 ‘Oh no, Mishter Shtubbsh,’ says he, grinning still, ‘dere is som 
 greater roag dan me, — mosh greater.’ 
 
 ‘Fellow,’ says I, ‘don’t stand grinning before a gentleman; 
 but give me my hat and cloak, and let me leave your filthy 
 den.’ 
 
 ‘ Shtop, Shtubbsh,’ says he, not even Mistering me this time, 
 
 ‘ Here ish a letter, vich you had better read.’ 
 
 I opened the letter ; something fell to the ground. It was my 
 cheque. 
 
 The letter ran thus : — 
 
 ‘ Messrs. Child & Co. present their compliments to Captain 
 Stubbs, and regret that they have been obliged to refuse payment 
 of the enclosed, having been served this day with an attachment 
 by Messrs. Solomonson & Co., which compels them to retain 
 Captain Stubbs’s balance of £2010 11s. 6d. until the decision of 
 the suit of Solomonson v. Stubbs. 
 
 ‘ Fleet Street.’ 
 
 ‘You see,’ says Mr. Nabb, as I read this dreadful letter, ‘you 
 see, Shtubbsh, dere vas two debts,— a littel von and a big von. 
 So dey arrested you for de littel von, and attashed your money for 
 de big von.’ 
 
 Don’t laugh at me for telling this story. If you knew what 
 tears are blotting over the paper as I write it ; if you knew that 
 for weeks after, I was more like a madman than a sane man, — a 
 madman in the Fleet Prison, where I went instead of to the desert 
 island. What haxl I done to deserve it? Hadn’t I always kept 
 an eye to the main chance? Hadn’t I lived economically, and not 
 like other young men ? Had I ever been known to squander or 
 
OR, TPTE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 335 
 
 give away a single penny ? No ! I can lay rny hand on my heart, 
 and, thank Heaven, say, No ! Why, why was I punished so? 
 
 Let me conclude this miserable history. Seven months (my 
 wife saw me once or twice, and then dropped me altogether) I 
 remained in that fatal place. I wrote to my dear mamma, begging 
 her to sell her furniture, but got no answer. All my old friends 
 turned their backs upon me. My action went against me — I had 
 not a penny to defend it. Solomonson proved my wife’s debt, and 
 seized my two thousand pounds. As for the detainer against me, 
 I was obliged to go through the court for the relief of insolvent 
 debtors. I passed through it, and came out a beggar. • But fancy 
 the malice of that wicked Stiffelkiiid ; he appeared in court as my 
 creditor for <£3, with sixteen gears’ interest at five per cent,, for a 
 PAiE OF TOP-BOOTS. The old thief produced them in court, and 
 told the old story — Lord Cornwallis, the detection, the pumping, 
 and all. 
 
 Commissioner Dubobwig was very funny about it. ‘ So Doctor 
 Swishtail would not pay you for the boots — eh, Mr. Stiffel- 
 kind ? ’ 
 
 ‘ No ; he said, ven I asked him for payment, dey was ordered 
 by a yong boy, and I ought to have gone to his schoolmaster.’ 
 
 ‘What, then you came on a bootless errand, eh, sir?’ (A 
 laugh.) 
 
 ‘ Bootless ! no sare, I brought de boots back vid me ; how de 
 devil else could I show dem to you?’ (Another laugh.) 
 
 ‘ You’ve never soled ’em since, Mr. Tickleshins ? ’ 
 
 ‘ I never vood sell dem ; I svore I never vood, on porpus to be 
 revenged on dat Stobbs.’ 
 
 ‘ What, your wound has never been healed^ eh ? ’ 
 
 ‘Vat de you mean vid your bootless errants, and your soling 
 and healing? I tell you I have done vat I svore to do. I have 
 exposed him at school, I have break off a marriage for him, ven 
 he vould have had tventy tousand pound, and now I have showed 
 him up in a court of justice ; dat is vat I ’ave done, and dat’s 
 enough,’ And then the old wretch went down, whilst everybody 
 was giggling and staring at poor me, as if I was not miserable 
 enough already. 
 
 ‘ This seems the dearest pair of boots you ever had in your life, 
 Mr. Stubbs,’ said Commissioner Dubobwig, very archly, and then 
 he began to inquire about the rest of my misfortunes. 
 
 In the fulness of my heart I told him the whole of them ; how 
 Mr. Solomonson the attorney bad introduced me to the rich widow, 
 Mrs. Manasseb, who had fifty thousand pounds, and an estate in 
 the West Indies. How I was married, and arrested on coming to 
 
STUBBS'S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 337 
 
 town, and cast in an action for two thousand pounds, brought 
 against me by this very Solomonson for my wife’s debts. 
 
 ‘ Stop,’ says a lawyer in the court. ‘ Is this woman a showy, 
 black-haired woman with one eye ? with three children ? — Solomon- 
 son — short, with red hair ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Exactly so,’ says I, with tears in my eyes. 
 
 ‘ That woman has married three men within the last two years. 
 One in Ireland, and one at Bath. Solomonson is, I believe, her 
 husband, and they both are off for America ten days ago.’ 
 
 ‘ But why did you not keep your <£2000 ? ’ said the lawyer. 
 
 ‘ Sir, they attached it.’ 
 
 ^ Oh I well, we may pass you ; you have been unlucky, Mr. 
 Stubbs, but it seems as if the biter had been bit in this affair.’ 
 ‘No,’ said Mr. Dubobwig. ‘Mr. Stubbs is the victim of a 
 
 FATAL ATTACHMENT.’ 
 
 NOVEMBER— A GENERAL POST DELIVERY 
 
 I WAS a free man when I went out of the court ; but I was a 
 beggar. I, Captain Stubbs, of the bold North Bungays, did not 
 know where I could get a bed, or a dinner. 
 
 As I was marching sadly down Portugal Street, I felt a hand 
 on my shoulder and a rough voice which I knew well. 
 
 ‘Veil, Mr. Stobbs, have I not kept my bromise? I told you 
 dem boots would be your ruin.’ 
 
 I was much too miserable to reply ; and only cast my eyes 
 towards the roofs of the houses, which I could not see for the 
 tears. 
 
 ‘Vat! you begin to gry and blobber like ashild? you vood 
 marry, vood you, and noting vood do for you but a vife vid monny 
 — ha, ha — but you vere de pigeon, and she vas de grow. She 
 has plocked you, too, pretty veil — eh ? Ha ! ha ! ’ 
 
 ‘ Oh, Mr. Stiffelkind,’ said I, ‘ don’t laugh at my misery ; she 
 has not left me a single shilling under heaven. And I shall 
 starve, I do believe I shall starve.’ And I began to cry fit to 
 break my heart. 
 
 ‘Starf! stoff and nonsense! You vil never die of starfing — 
 you vil die of hanging^ I tink — ho ! ho ! — and it is modi easier 
 vay too.’ I didn’t say a word, but cried on, till everybody in the 
 street turned round and stared. 
 
 ‘Come, come,’ said Stiffelkind, ‘do not gry. Captain Stobbs — 
 
 z 
 
338 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR; 
 
 it is not goot for a Gaptain to gry — ha ! ha ! Dere — come vid me, 
 and you shall have a dinner, and a bregfast too — vich shall gost 
 you nothing, until you can bay vid your earnings.’ 
 
 And so this curious old man, who had persecuted me all 
 through my prosperity, grew compassionate towards me in my 
 ill-luck; and took me home with him as he promised. ‘I saw 
 your name among de Insolvents — and I vowed, you know, to make 
 you repent dem boots. Dere now, it is done, and forgotten, look 
 you. Here Betty, Bettchen ! make de spare bed, and put a clean 
 knife and fork ; Lort Cornvallis is come to dine vid me,’ 
 
 I lived with this strange old man for six weeks. I kept his 
 books, and did what little I could to make myself useful ; carrying 
 about boots and shoes, as if I had never borne His Majesty’s com- 
 mission. He gave me no money, but he fed and lodged me com- 
 fortably. The men and boys used to laugh and call me General, 
 and Lord Cornwallis, and all sorts of nicknames ; and old StifFel- 
 kind made a thousand new ones for me. 
 
 One day I can recollect — one miserable day, as I was polishing 
 on the trees a pair of boots of Mr. Stiffelkind’s manufacture — the 
 old gentleman came into the shop with a lady on his arm. 
 
 ‘ Vere is Gaptain Stobbs ?’ said he. ‘ Vere is dat ornament to 
 His Majesty’s service?’ 
 
 I came in from the back shop, where I was polishing the boots, 
 with one of them in my hand. 
 
 ‘ Look, my dear,’ says he, ‘ here is an old friend of yours. His 
 Excellency Lort Cornvallis ! — Who would have thought such a 
 nobleman vood turn shoeblack? Gaptain Stobbs, here is your 
 former flame, my dear niece. Miss Grotty. How could you, 
 Magdalen, ever leaf such a lof of a man ? Shake hands vid her, 
 Gaptain ; dere, never mind de blacking ! ’ But Miss drew back. 
 
 ‘ I never shake hands with a shoehlack^^ said she, mighty con- 
 temptuous. 
 
 ‘ Bah ; my lof, his fingers von’t soil you. Don’t you know he 
 has just been vitewashed ? ’ 
 
 M wish, uncle,’ says she, ‘you would not leave me with such 
 low people.’ 
 
 ‘ Low, because he cleans boots ? De Gaptain prefers pumps to 
 boots, I tink — ha ! ha ! ’ 
 
 ‘ Captain indeed ; a nice Captain,’ says Miss Crutty, snapping 
 her fingers in my face, and walking away. ‘A Captain who has 
 had his nose pulled ! ha ! ha ! ’ And how could I help it ? it 
 wasn’t by my own choice that that ruffian Waters took such 
 liberties with me. Didn’t I show how averse I was to all quarrels 
 by refusing altogether his challenge? — But such is the world. 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 339 
 
 And thus the people at Stiffelkind’s used to tease me, until they 
 drove me almost mad. 
 
 At last he came home one day more merry and abusive than 
 ever. ‘ Gaptain,’ says he, ‘I have goot news for you — a goot 
 place. Your lortship vil not be able to geep your garridge, but 
 you vil be gomfortable, and serve His Majesty.’ 
 
 ‘ Serve His Majesty ? ’ says I. ‘ Dearest Mr. Stiffelkind, have 
 you got me a place under Government ? ’ 
 
 ‘Yes, and somting better still — not only a place, but a 
 uniform : yes, Gaptain Stobbs, a red goat.^ 
 
 ‘ A red coat ! I hope you don’t think I would demean myself 
 by entering the ranks of the army ? I am a gentleman, Mr. 
 
 Stiffelkind — I can never — no, I never ’ 
 
 ‘No, I know you will never, you are too great a goward, ha ! 
 ha ! — though dis is a red goat, and a place where you must give 
 some hard knocks too, ha ! ha ! Do you gomprehend ? And you 
 shall be a general instead of a gabdain — ha ! ha ! ’ 
 
 ‘ A general in a red coat, Mr. Stiffelkind 1 ’ 
 
 ‘Yes, a Genekal Bostman ! ha ! ha ! I have been vid your 
 old friend Bunting, and he has an uncle in the Post-Office, and he 
 has got you de place — eighteen shillings a veek, you rogue, and 
 your goat. You must not oben any of de letters, you know.’ 
 
 And so it was — I, Robert Stubbs, Esquire, became the vile 
 thing he named — a general postman ! 
 
 I was so disgusted with Stiffelkind’s brutal jokes, which were 
 now more brutal than ever , that when I got my place in the Post- 
 Office, I never went near the fellow again ; for though he had done 
 me a favour in keeping me from starvation, he certainly had done it 
 in a very rude, disagreeable manner, and showed a low and mean 
 spirit in ^pushing me into such a degraded place as that of postman. 
 But what had I to do ? I submitted to fate, and for three years 
 
 or more, Robert Stubbs, of the North Bungay Fencibles, was 
 
 I wonder nobody recognised me. I lived in daily fear of the 
 first year ; but, afterwards, grew accustomed to my situation, as all 
 great men will do, and wore my red coat as naturally as if I had been 
 sent into the world only for the purpose of being a letter-carrier. 
 
 I wms first in the Whitechapel district, where I stayed for nearly 
 three years, when I was transferred to Jermyn Street and Duke 
 Street — famous places for lodgings. I suppose I left a hundred 
 letters at a house in the latter street, where lived some people who 
 must have recognised me had they but once chanced to look at me. 
 
 You see that when I left Sloffem, and set out in the gay wmrld, 
 my mamma had written to me a dozen times at least ; but I never 
 
DECEMBEK— THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT. 
 
STUBBS’S CALENDAR ; OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 341 
 
 answered her, for I knew she wanted money, and I detest writing. 
 Well, she stopped her letters, finding she could get none from me ; 
 but when I was in the Fleet, as I told you, I wrote repeatedly to 
 my dear mamma, and was not a little nettled at her refusing to 
 notice me in my distress, which is the very time one most wants 
 notice. 
 
 Stubbs is not an uncommon name ; and though I saw ‘ Mrs. 
 Stubbs ’ on a little bright brass plate in Duke Street, and delivered 
 so many letters to the lodgers in her house, I never thought of 
 asking who she was, or whether she was my relation or not. 
 
 One day the young woman who took in the letters had not got 
 change, and she called her mistress. An old lady in a poke bonnet 
 came out of the parlour, and put on her spectacles, and looked at 
 the letter, and fumbled in her pocket for eightpence, and apologised 
 to the postman for keeping him waiting ; and when I said, ‘ Never 
 mind, ma’am, it’s no trouble,’ the old lady gave a start, and then 
 she pulled off her spectacles, and staggered back; and then she 
 began muttering, as if about to choke ; and then she gave a great 
 screech, and flung herself into my arms, and roared out, ‘ My son ! 
 MY SON ! ’ 
 
 ‘Lor’, mamma,’ said I, ‘is that you?’ and I sat down on the 
 hall bench with her, and let her kiss me as much as ever she liked. 
 Hearing the whining and crying, down comes another lady from 
 upstairs — it was my sister Eliza; and down come the lodgers. 
 And the maid gets water and what not, and I was the regular hero 
 of the group. I could not stay long then, having my letters to 
 deliver. But, in the evening, after mail-time, I went back to my 
 mamma and sister; and over a bottle of prime old port, and a 
 precious good leg of boiled mutton and turnips, made myself pretty 
 comfortable, I can tell you. 
 
 DECEMBER— ‘ THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT’ 
 
 Mamma had kept the house in Duke Street for more than two 
 years. I recollected some of the chairs and tables from dear old 
 Squiggle, and the bowl in which I had made that famous rum- 
 punch, the evening she went away, which she and my sisters left 
 untouched, and I was obliged to drink after they were gone ; but 
 that’s not to the purpose. 
 
 Think of my sister Mary’s luck ! That chap. Waters, fell in 
 love with her, and married her ; and she now keeps her carriage. 
 
342 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR; 
 
 and lives in state near Squiggle. I offered to make it up with 
 Waters ; but he bears malice, and never will see or speak to me. 
 He had the impudence, too, to say, that he took in all letters for 
 mamma at Squiggle ; and that as mine were all begging letters, 
 he burned them, and never said a word to her concerning them. 
 He allowed mamma fifty pounds a year, and, if she were not such 
 a fool, she might have had three times as much; but the old lady 
 was high and mighty, forsooth, and would not be beholden, even 
 to her own daughter, for more than she actually wanted. Even 
 this fifty pounds she was going to refuse ; but when I came to live 
 with her, of course I wanted pocket-money as well as board and 
 lodging, and so I had the fifty pounds for my share, and eked out 
 with it as well as I could. 
 
 Old Bates and the Captain, between them, gave mamma a 
 hundred pounds when she left me (she had the deuce^s own luck, 
 to be sure — much more than ever fell to me^ I know) ; and as she 
 said she luould try and work for her living, it was thought best to 
 take a house and let lodgings, which she did. Our first and second 
 floor paid us four guineas a week on an average ; and the front 
 parlour and attic made forty pounds more. Mamma and Eliza 
 used to have the front attic ; but I took that, and they slept in 
 the servants’ bedroom. Lizzy had a pretty genius for work, and 
 earned a guinea a week that way ; so that we had got nearly two 
 hundred a year over the rent to keep house with, — and wx got on 
 pretty well. Besides, women eat nothing ; my women didn’t care 
 for meat for days together sometimes, — so that it was only necessary 
 to dress a good steak or so for me. 
 
 Mamma would not think of my continuing in the Post-Office. 
 She said her dear Robert, her husband’s son, her gallant soldier, 
 and all that, should remain at home, and be a gentleman — which 
 I was, certainly, though I didn’t find fifty pounds a year very much 
 to buy clothes and be a gentleman upon ; to be sure, mother found 
 me shirts and linen, so that that wasn’t in the fifty pounds. She 
 kicked a little at paying the washing too ; but she gave in at last, 
 for I was her dear Robert, you know ; and I’m blest if I could not 
 make her give me the gown off her back. Fancy ! once she cut up 
 a very nice rich black silk scarf, which my sister Waters sent her, 
 and made me a waistcoat and two stocks of it. She was so very 
 soft, the old lady ! 
 
 I’d lived in this way for five years or more, making myself 
 content with my fifty pounds a year {jperliaps I’d saved a little out 
 of it ; but that’s neither here nor there). From year’s end to year’s 
 end I remained faithful to my dear mamma, never leaving her 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 343 
 
 except for a month or so in summer, when a bachelor may take 
 a trip to Gravesend or Margate, which would be too expensive for 
 a family. I say a bachelor, for the fact is, I don’t know whether 
 I am married or not — never having heard a word since of the 
 scoundrelly Mrs. Stubbs. 
 
 I never went to the public-house before meals ; for, with my 
 beggarly fifty pounds, I could not afford to dine away from home ; 
 but there I had my regular seat, and used to come home 'pretty 
 glorious^ I can tell you. Then, bed till eleven ; then, breakfast 
 and the newspaper ; then, a stroll in Hyde Park or St. James’s ; 
 then, home at half-past three to dinner, when I jollied, as I called 
 it, for the rest of the day. I was my mother’s delight ; and thus, 
 with a clear conscience, I managed to live on. 
 
 How fond she was of me, to be sure. Being sociable myself, 
 and loving to have my friends about me, we often used to assemble 
 a company of as hearty fellows as you would wish to sit down with, 
 and keep the nights up royally. ‘ Never mind, my boys,’ I used 
 to say, ^ send the bottle round — mammy pays for all,’ as she did, 
 sure enough ; and sure enough we punished her cellar, too. The 
 good old lady used to wait upon us, as if for all the world she had 
 been my servant, instead of a lady and my mamma. Never used 
 she to repine, though I often, as I must confess, gave her occasion 
 (keeping her up till four o’clock in the morning, because she never 
 could sleep until she saw her ‘ dear Bob ’ in bed, and leading her a 
 sad, anxious life). She was of such a sweet temper, the old lady, 
 that I think in the course of five years I never knew her in a 
 passion, except twice ; and then with sister Lizzy, who declared I 
 was ruining the house, and driving the lodgers away one by one. 
 But mamma would not hear of such envious spite on my sister’s 
 part. ‘ Her Bob was always right,’ she said. At last Lizzy fairly 
 retreated, and went to the Waterses. I was glad of it, for her 
 temper was dreadful, and we used to be squabbling from morning 
 till night. 
 
 Ah, those were jolly times ! But ma was obliged to give up 
 the lodging-house at last — for, somehow, things went wrong after 
 my sister’s departure — the nasty uncharitable people said, on 
 account of me ; because I drove away the lodgers by smoking, and 
 drinking, and kicking up noises in the house ; and because ma 
 gave me so much of her money. So she did ; but if she would 
 give it, you know, how could I help it ? Heigho ! I wish I’d 
 Icept it. 
 
 No such luck. The business I thought was to last for ever; 
 but at the end of two years a smash came — shut up shop — sell 
 
344 
 
 STUBBS’S CALENDAR : 
 
 off everything. Mamma went to the Waterses; and, will you 
 believe it ? the ungrateful wretches would not receive me ! That 
 Mary, you see, was so disappointed at not marrying me. Twenty 
 pounds a year they allow, it is true ; but whaUs that for a gentle- 
 man ? For twenty years I have been struggling manfully to gain 
 an honest livelihood, and, in the course of them, have seen a deal 
 of life, to be sure. IVe sold cigars, and pocket-handkerchiefs at 
 the corners of streets ; IVe been a billiard-marker ; IVe been a 
 Director (in the panic year) of the Imperial British Consolidated 
 Mangle and Drying-Ground Company. IVe been on the stage (for 
 two years as an actor, and about a month as a cad, when I was 
 very low) ; IVe been the means of giving to the police of this 
 empire some very valuable information (about licensed victuallers, 
 gentlemeiUs carts, and pawnbrokers’ names) ; I’ve been very nearly 
 an officer again — that is, an assistant to an officer of the Sheriff of 
 Middlesex ; — it was my last place. 
 
 On the last day of the year 1837, even that game was up. 
 It’s a thing that has very seldom happened to a gentleman, to be 
 kicked out of a spunging-house ; but such was my case. Young 
 Nabbs (who succeeded his father) drove me ignominiously from 
 his door, because I had charged a gentleman in the coflee-rooms 
 seven-and-sixpence for a glass of ale and bread and cheese, the 
 charge of the house being only six shillings. He had the mean- 
 ness to deduct the eighteenpence from my wages, and, because I 
 blustered a bit, he took me by the shoulders and turned me out — 
 me a gentleman, and, what is more, a poor orphan ! 
 
 How I did rage and swear at him when I got out in the 
 street ! There stood he, the hideous Jew monster, at the double 
 door, writhing under the effect of my language. I had my 
 revenge ! Heads were thrust out of every bar of his windows, 
 laughing at him. A crowd gathered round me, as I stood pound- 
 ing him with my satire, and they evidently enjoyed his discom- 
 fiture. I think the mob would have pelted the ruffian to death 
 (one or two of their missiles hit me^ I can tell you), when a 
 policeman came up, and, in reply to a gentleman, who was asking 
 what was the disturbance, said, — ‘ Bless you, sir, it’s Lord 
 Cornwallis.’ ‘Move on Boots^^ said the fellow to me, for, the fact 
 is, my misfortunes and early life are pretty well known — and so 
 the crowd dispersed. 
 
 ‘ What could have made that policeman call you Lord Cornwallis 
 and Boots?’ said the gentleman, who seemed mightily amused, 
 and had followed me. ‘ Sir,’ says I, ‘ I am an unfortunate officer 
 of the North Bungay Fencibles, and I’ll tell you willingly for a 
 pint of beer.’ He told me to follow him to his chambers, at the 
 
OR, THE FATAL BOOTS 
 
 345 
 
 Temple, which I did (a five-pair back), and there, sure enough, I 
 had the beer ; and told him this very story you’ve been reading. 
 You see, he is what is called a literary man — and sold my 
 adventures for me to the booksellers. He’s a strange chap, and 
 says they’re moral. 
 
 I’m blest if / can see anything moral in them. I’m sure I 
 ought to have been more lucky through life, being so very wide 
 awake. And yet here I am, without a place, or even a friend, 
 starving upon a beggarly twenty pounds a year— not a single six- 
 pence more, upon my honour. 
 
1 
 
 
 ' - i 
 
 .1 
 
BAEBER COX, 
 
 AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 347 
 
JANUARY — THE ANNOUNCEMENT. P- 348. 
 
JANUARY — The Announcement. 
 
 On the first of January, 1838, I was the master of a lovely shop 
 in the neighbourhood of Oxford Market ; of a wife, Mrs. Cox ; of 
 a business, both in the shaving and cutting line, established three- 
 and- thirty years ; of a girl and boy, respectively of the ages of 
 eighteen and thirteen; of a three -windowed front, both to my 
 first and second pair ; of a young foreman, my present partner, 
 Mr. Orlando Crump ; and of that celebrated mixture for the 
 human hair, invented by my late uncle, and called Cox^s Bohemian 
 Balsam of Tokay, sold in pots at two-and-three, and three-and- 
 nine. The balsam, the lodgings, and the old-established cutting 
 and shaving business, brought me in a pretty genteel income. 
 I had had my girl, Jemimarann, at Hackney to school ; my dear 
 boy, Tuggeridge, plaited hair already beautifully ; my wife at the 
 counter (behind the tray of patent soaps, etc.) cut as handsome 
 a figure as possible ; and it was my hope that Orlando and my 
 girl, who were mighty soft upon one another, would, one day, be 
 joined together in Hyming : and, conjointly with my son Tug, 
 carry on the business of hairdressers, when their father was either 
 dead or a gentleman ; for a gentleman me and Mrs. C. determined 
 I should be. 
 
 Jemima was, you see, a lady herself, and of very high con- 
 nexions : though her own family had met with crosses, and was 
 rather low. Mr. Tuggeridge, her father, kept the famous tripe- 
 shop near the Pigtail and Sparrow, in the Whitechapel Road ; 
 from which place I married her ; being myself very fond of the 
 article, and especially when she served it to me — the dear 
 thing ! 
 
 Jemima’s father was not successful in business : and I married 
 her, I am proud to confess it, without a shilling. I had iny hands, 
 my house, and my Bohemian balsam to support her ! — and we had 
 hopes from her uncle, a mighty rich East India merchant, who, 
 having left this country sixty years ago, as a cabin-boy, had 
 arrived to be the head of a great house in India, and was worth 
 millions, we were told. 
 
 349 
 
350 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 Three years after J emimarann’s birth (and two after the death 
 of my lamented father-in-law), Tuggeridge (head of the great 
 house of Budgurow and Co.), retired from the management of it ; 
 handed over his shares to his son, Mr. John Tuggeridge, and came 
 to live in England, at Portland Place, and Tuggeridgeville, Surrey, 
 and enjoy himself. Soon after, my wife took her daughter in her 
 hand and went, as in duty bound, to visit her uncle ; but whether 
 it was that he was proud and surly, or she somewhat sharp in her 
 way (the dear girl fears nobody, let me have you to know), a 
 desperate quarrel took place between them ; and from that day, 
 to the day of his death, he never set eyes on her. All that he 
 would condescend to do, was to take a few dozen of lavender-water 
 from us in the course of the year, and to send his servants to be 
 cut and shaved by us. All the neighbours laughed at this poor 
 ending of our expectations, for Jemmy had bragged not a little ; 
 however, we did not care, for the connexion was always a good 
 one, and we served Mr. Hock, the valet ; Mr. Bar, the coachman ; 
 and Mrs. Breadbasket, the housekeeper, willingly enough. I used 
 to powder the footman, too, on great days, but never in my life 
 saw old Tuggeridge, except once ; when he said, ‘ 0, the barber ! ’ 
 tossed up his nose, and passed on. 
 
 One day — one famous day last January — all our Market was 
 thrown into a high state of excitement by the appearance of no 
 less than three vehicles at our establishment. As me. Jemmy, 
 my daughter, Tug, and Orlando, were sitting in the back-parlour 
 over our dinner (it being Christmas-time, Mr. Crump had treated 
 the ladies to a bottle of port, and was longing that there should 
 be a mistletoe bough ; at which proposal my little Jemimarann 
 looked as red as a glass of negus) : we had just, I say, finished 
 the port, when, all of a sudden. Tug bellows out, ‘ Law, Pa, here’s 
 uncle Tuggeridge’s housekeeper in a cab ! ’ 
 
 And Mrs. Breadbasket it was, sure enough — Mrs. Breadbasket 
 in deep mourning, who made her way, bowing and looking very 
 sad, into the back shop. My wife, who respected Mrs. B. more 
 than anything else in the world, set her a chair, oftered her a glass 
 of wine, and vowed it was very kind of her to come. ‘ Law, mem,’ 
 says Mrs. B., ‘ I’m sure I’d do anything to serve your family, for 
 the sake of that poor dear Tuck -Tuck- tug -guggeridge, that’s 
 gone.’ 
 
 ‘ That’s what ? ’ cries my wife. 
 
 ‘ What, gone ? ’ cried Jemimarann, bursting out crying (as little 
 girls will about anything or nothing) ; and Orlando looking very 
 rueful, and ready to cry too. 
 
 ‘Yes, gaw .’ Just as she was at this very ‘gaw,’ 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 351 
 
 Tug roars out, ‘ Law, pa ! here’s Mr. Bar, uncle Tug’s coach- 
 man ! ’ 
 
 It was Mr. Bar. When she saw him, Mrs. Breadbasket stepped 
 suddenly back into the parlour with my ladies. ‘ What is it, Mr. 
 Bar 1 ’ says I ; and, as quick as thought, I had the towel under 
 his chin, Mr. Bar in the chair, and the whole of his face in a 
 beautiful foam of lather. Mr. Bar made some resistance. — ‘ Don’t 
 think of it, Mr. Cox,’ says he ; ‘ don’t trouble yourself, sir.’ But 
 I lathered away, and never minded. ‘ And what’s this melancholy 
 event, sir,’ says I, ‘that has spread desolation in your family’s 
 bosoms? I can feel for your loss, sir — I can feel for your 
 loss.’ 
 
 I said so out of politeness, because I served the family, not 
 because Tuggeridge was my uncle — no, as such I disown him. 
 
 Mr. Bar was just about to speak. ‘ Yes, sir,’ says he, ‘ my 
 
 master’s gaw ’ : when at the ‘ gaw,’ in walks Mr. Hock, the 
 
 own man ! — the finest gentleman I ever saw. 
 
 ‘ What, you here, Mr. Bar ? ’ says he. 
 
 ‘Yes, I am, sir ; and haven’t I a right, sir ? ’ 
 
 ‘ A mighty wet day, sir,’ says I to Mr. Hock — stepping up and 
 making my bow. ‘ A sad circumstance too, sir ! — and is it a turn 
 of the tongs that you want to-day, sir ? Ho, there, Mr. Crump ! ’ 
 
 ‘ Turn, Mr. Crump if you please, sir,’ said Mr. Hock, making 
 a bow ; ‘ but from you, sir, never, no never, split me ! — and I 
 wonder how some fellows can have the insolence to allow their 
 MASTEES to shave them ! ’ With this, Mr. Hock flung himself 
 down to be curled : Mr. Bar suddenly opened his mouth in order 
 to reply ; but, seeing there was a tiff between the gentlemen, and 
 wanting to prevent a quarrel, I rammed the Advertiser into Mr. 
 Hock’s hands, and just popped my shaving-brush into Mr. Bar’s 
 mouth — a capital way to stop angry answers. 
 
 Mr. Bar had hardly been in the chair one second, when whirr 
 comes a hackney-coach to the door, from which springs a gentle- 
 man in a black coat with a bag. 
 
 ‘ What, you here ? ’ says the gentleman. I could not help 
 smiling, for it seemed that everybody was to begin by saying, 
 ‘What, you here?’ ‘Your name is Cox, sir,’ says he; smiling, 
 too, as the very pattern of mine. ‘ My name, sir, is Sharpus, — 
 Blunt, Hone, and Sharpus, Middle Temple Lane, — and I am proud 
 to salute you, sir ; happy, — that is to say, sorry to say, that Mr. 
 Tuggeridge, of Portland Place, is dead, and your lady is heiress, 
 in consequence, to one of the handsomest properties in the 
 kingdom.’ 
 
 At this I started, and might have sunk to the ground, but for 
 
352 BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 my hold of Mr. Bar’s nose ; Orlando seemed putrified to stone, 
 with his irons fixed to Mr. Hock’s head ; our respective patients 
 gave a wince out : — Mrs. 0., Jemimarann, and Tug, rushed from 
 the back shop, and we formed a splendid tableau which the great 
 Cruikshank has here depicted ! 
 
 ‘And Mr. John Tuggeridge, sir?’ says I. 
 
 ‘ Why— hee, hee, hee ! ’ says Mr. Sharpus ; ‘ surely you know 
 that he was only the — hee, hee, hee ! — the natural son ! ’ 
 
 You now can understand why the servants from Portland Place 
 had been so eager to come to us. One of the housemaids heard 
 Mr. Sharpus say there was no will, and that my wife was heir to 
 the property, and not Mr. John Tuggeridge : this she told in the 
 housekeeper’s room ; and off, as soon as they heard it, the whole 
 party set, in order to be the first to bear the news. 
 
 We kept them, every one, in their old places ; for, though 
 my wife would have sent them about their business, my dear 
 Jemimarann just hinted, ‘ Mamma, you know they have been used 
 to great houses, and we have not ; had we not better keep them 
 for a little ? ’ — Keep them, then, we did, to show us how to be 
 gentlefolks. 
 
 I handed over the business to Mr. Crump without a single 
 farthing of premium, though Jemmy would have made me take 
 four hundred pounds for it ; but this I was above ; Crump had 
 served me faithfully, and have the shop he should. 
 
 FEBRUARY — Fiest Rout. 
 
 We were speedily installed in our fine house : but what’s a house 
 without friends? Jemmy made me cut all my old acquaintances 
 in the Market, and I was a solitary being, when, luckily, an old 
 acquaintance of ours. Captain Tagrag, was so kind as to promise 
 to introduce us into distinguished society. Tagrag was the son of 
 a baronet, and had done us the honour of lodging with us for two 
 years ; when we lost sight of him, and of his little account, too, 
 by the way. A fortnight after, hearing of our good fortune, he 
 was among us again, however ; and Jemmy was not a little glad 
 to see him, knowing him to be a baronet’s son, and very fond of 
 our Jemimarann. Indeed, Orlando (who is as brave as a lion) 
 had, on one occasion, absolutely beaten Mr. Tagrag for being rude 
 to the poor girl ; a clear proof, as Tagrag said afterwards, that he 
 was always fond of her. 
 
2a 
 
 FEBRIJAIIY — FIKST ROUT. P. 353. 
 
354 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 Mr. Crump, poor fellow, was not very much pleased by our 
 good fortune, though he did all he could to try, at first ; and 
 I told him to come and take his dinner regular, as if nothing 
 had happened. But to this Jemima very soon put a stop, for 
 she came very justly to know her stature, and to look down on 
 Crump, which she bid her daughter to do ; and, after a great 
 scene, in which Orlando shewed himself very rude and angry, he 
 was forbidden the house — for ever ! 
 
 So much for poor Crump. The Captain was now all in all 
 with us. ‘You see, sir,’ our Jemmy would say, ‘we shall have 
 our town and country mansion, and a hundred and thirty thousand 
 pounds in the funds, to leave between our two children ; and, 
 with such prospects, they ought surely to have the first society of 
 England.’ To this Tagrag agreed, and promised to bring us 
 acquainted with the very pink of the fashion ; ay, and what’s 
 more, did. 
 
 First, he made my wife get an opera-box, and give suppers on 
 Tuesdays and Saturdays. As for me, he made me ride in the 
 park : me and Jemimarann, with two grooms behind us, who used 
 to laugh all the way, and whose very beards I had shaved. As 
 for little Tug, he was sent straight off to the most fashionable school 
 in the kingdom, the Reverend Doctor Pigney’s, at Richmond. 
 
 Well, the horses, the suppers, the opera-box, the paragraphs 
 in the papers about Mr. Coxe Coxe (that’s the way, double your 
 name, and stick an ‘ e ’ to the end of it, and you are a gentleman 
 at once), had an effect in a wonderfully short space of time, and 
 we began to get a very pretty society about us. Some of old 
 Tug’s friends swore they would do anything for the family, and 
 brought their wives and daughters to see dear Mrs. Coxe and her 
 charming girl ; and when, about the first week in February, we 
 announced a grand dinner and ball, for the evening of the twenty- 
 eighth, I assure you there was no want of company ; no, nor of 
 titles neither ; and it always does my heart good even to hear one 
 mentioned. 
 
 Let me see. There was, first, my Lord Dimboozle, an Irish peer, 
 and his seven sons, the Honourable Messieurs Trumper (two only 
 to dinner) ; there was Count Mace, the celebrated French noble- 
 man, and his Excellency Baron von Punter, from Baden ; there 
 was Lady Blanche Bluenose, the eminent literati, author of ‘ The 
 Distrusted,’ ‘ The Distorted,’ ‘ The Disgusted,’ ‘ The Disreputable 
 One,’ and other poems ; there was the Dowager Lady Max, 
 and her daughter, the Honourable Miss Adelaide Blueruin ; Sir 
 Charles Codshead, from the city ; and Field-Marshal Sir Gorman 
 O’Gallagher, K.A., K.B., K.C., K.\Y., K.X., in the service of the 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 355 
 
 republic of Guatemala : my friend Tagrag, and bis fashionable 
 acquaintance, little Tom Tufthunt, made up the party ; and when 
 the doors were flung open, and Mr. Hock, in black, with a white 
 napkin, three footmen, coachman, and a lad, whom Mrs. C. had 
 dressed in sugar-loaf buttons, and called a page, were seen round 
 the dinner-table, all in white gloves, I promise you I felt a thrill 
 of elation, and thought to myself — Sam Cox, Sam Cox, who ever 
 would have expected to see you here ? 
 
 After dinner, there was to be, as I said, an evening party ; and 
 to this Messieurs Tagrag and Tufthunt had invited many of the 
 principal nobility that our metropolis had produced. When I 
 mention, among the company to tea, her Grace the Duchess of 
 Zero, her son the Marquis of Fitzurse, and the Ladies North 
 Pole, her daughters ; when I say that there were yet others^ whose 
 names may be found in the Blue Book, but shahiT, out of modesty, 
 be mentioned here, I think IVe said enough to show that, in our 
 time. No. 96 Portland Place, was the resort of the best of 
 company. 
 
 It was our first dinner, and dressed by our new cook, Munseer 
 Cordongblew. I bore it very well, eating, for my share, filly dysol 
 allamater dotell^ a cutlet souheast^ a pully hashymall^ and other 
 French dishes ; and, for the frisky sweet wine, with tin tops to 
 the bottles, called Champang, I must say that me and Mrs. Coxe- 
 Tuggeridge Coxe drank a very good share of it (but the Claret 
 and Jonnysberger being sour, we did not much relish); — however, 
 the feed, as I say, went off very well. Lady Blanche Bluenose 
 sitting next to me, and being so good as to put me down for six 
 copies of all her poems ; the Count and Baron von Punter 
 engaging Jemimarann for several waltzes, and the Field-Marshal 
 plying my dear J emmy with Champang until, bless her ! her dear 
 nose became as red as her new crimson satin gown, which, with a 
 blue turban and bird-of-paradise feathers, made her look like an 
 Empress, I warrant. 
 
 Well, dinner past, Mrs. C. and the ladies went oft' : — thunder- 
 under-under came the knocks at the door ; squeedle-eedle-eedle, 
 Mr. WipperUs fiddlers began to strike up ; and, about half-past 
 eleven, me and the gents thought it high time to make our 
 appearance. I felt a little squeamish at the thought of meeting 
 a couple of hundred great people ; but Count Mace and Sir 
 Gorman O’Gallagher taking each an arm, we reached, at last, 
 the drawing-room. 
 
 The young ones in company were dancing, and the Duchess 
 and the great ladies were all seated, talking to themselves very 
 stately, and working away at the ices and macaroons. I looked 
 
356 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 out for my pretty Jemimarann amongst the dancers, and saw her 
 tearing round the room along Avith Baron Punter, in what they 
 call a gallypard ; then I peeped into the circle of the Duchesses, 
 where, in course, I expected to find Mrs. C. ; but she wasn't 
 there ! She Avas seated at the further end of the room, looking 
 very sulky ; and I went up, and took her arm, and brought her 
 down to the place Avhere the Duchesses were. ‘ 0, not there ! ' 
 said Jemmy, trying to break away. ‘Nonsense, my dear,' says I, 
 ‘ you are Missis, and this is your place ' : — then, going up to her 
 Ladyship the Duchess, says I, ‘ Me and my Missis are most proud 
 of the honour of seeing of you.' 
 
 The Duchess (a tall red-haired grenadier of a woman) did not 
 speak. 
 
 I went on. ‘ The young ones are all at it, ma'am, you see : 
 and so we thought we would come and sit down among the old 
 ones. You and I, ma'am, I think, are too stiff to dance.' 
 
 ‘ Sir ! ' says her Grace. 
 
 ‘Ma'am,' says I, ‘don't you know me? My name's Cox — 
 nobody's introduced me ; but, dash it, it's my own house, and I 
 may present myself — so give us your hand, ma'am.' 
 
 And I shook hers in the kindest way in the world : but, would 
 you believe it ? the old cat screamed as if my hand had been a 
 hot 'tater. ‘ Fitzurse ! Fitzurse ! ' shouted she ; ‘ help ! help ! ' 
 Up scuffled all the other Dowagers — in rushed the dancers. 
 ‘ Mamma ! mamma ! ' squeaked Lady Julia North Pole. ‘ Lead 
 me to my mother ! ' howled Lady Aurorer ; and both came up and 
 ffung themselves into her arms. ‘ Wawt's the raw?' said Lord 
 Fitzurse, sauntering up quite stately. 
 
 ‘ Protect me from the insults of this man,' says her Grace. 
 ‘ Where's Tufthunt ? he promised that not a soul in this house 
 should speak to me. 
 
 ‘ My dear Duchess,' said Tufthunt, very meek. 
 
 ‘ Don't Duchess me, sir. Did you not promise they should not 
 speak ; and hasn't that horrid tipsy wretch offered to embrace 
 me? Didn't his monstrous wife sicken me with her odious 
 familiarities? Call my people, Tufthunt! Follow me, my 
 children 1 ' 
 
 ‘And my carriage,' ‘And mine,' ‘And mine !' shouted twenty 
 more voices ; and down they all trooped to the hall : Lady 
 Blanche Bluenose and Lady Max among the very first ; leaving 
 only the Field-Marshal and one or two men, Avho roared Avith 
 laughter ready to split. 
 
 ‘ 0 Sam,' said my wife, sobbing, ‘ why would you take me 
 back to them ? they had sent me away before ! I only asked the 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 357 
 
 Duchess whether she didn’t like rum-shrub better than all your 
 Maxarinos and Curasosos : and, would you believe it ? all the 
 company burst out laughing ; and the Duchess told me just to 
 keep off, and not to speak till I was spoken to. Imperence ! I’d 
 like to tear her eyes out.’ 
 
 And so I do believe my dearest Jemmy would ! 
 
 MARCH — A Day with the Suerey Hounds. 
 
 Our ball had failed so completely, that Jemmy, who was bent 
 still upon fashion, caught eagerly at Tagrag’s suggestion, and went 
 down to Tuggeridgeville. If we had a difficulty to find friends in 
 town, here there was none ; for the whole county came about us, 
 ate our dinners and suppers, danced at our balls — ay, and spoke 
 to us too. We were great people, in fact ; I a regular country 
 gentleman ; and, as such. Jemmy insisted that I should be a 
 sportsman, and join the county hunt. ‘But,’ says I, ‘my love, I 
 can’t ride.’ ‘ Pooh ! Mr. C.,’ said she, ‘ you’re always making 
 difficulties ; you thought you couldn’t dance a quadrille ; you 
 thought you couldn’t dine at seven o’clock ; you thought you 
 couldn’t lie in bed after six ; and haven’t you done every one of 
 these things ? You must and you shall ride ! ’ And when my 
 Jemmy said ‘must and shall,’ I knew very well there was nothing 
 for it : so I sent down fifty guineas to the hunt, and, out of 
 compliment to me, the very next week, I received notice that the 
 meet of the hounds would take place at Squashtail Common, just 
 outside of my lodge gates. 
 
 I didn’t know what a meet was ; and me and Mrs. C. agreed 
 that it was most probable the dogs were to be fed there : however, 
 Tagrag explained this matter to us, and very kindly promised to 
 sell me a horse, a delightful animal of his own ; which, being 
 desperately pressed for money, he would let me have for a hundred 
 guineas, he himself having given a hundred and fifty for it. 
 
 Well, the Thursday came ; the hounds met on Squashtail 
 Common ; Mrs. C. turned out in her barouche to see us throw off ; 
 and, being helped up on my chestnut horse. Trumpeter, by Tagrag 
 and my head groom, I came presently round to join them. 
 
 Tag mounted his own horse ; and, as we walked down the 
 avenue, ‘ I thought,’ he said, ‘ you told me you knew how to ride ; 
 and that you had ridden once fifty miles on a stretch ! ’ 
 
 ‘ And so I did,’ says I, ‘ to Cambridge, and on the box 
 too.’ 
 
358 BARBER COX, 
 
 ‘ On the box ! ^ says he ; ‘ but did you ever mount a horse 
 before ? ' 
 
 ‘ Never, ^ says I, ‘ but I find it mighty easy/ 
 
 ‘ WelV says he, ‘you’re mighty bold for a barber; and I like 
 you, Coxe, for your spirit ’ ; and so we came out of the gate. 
 
 As for describing the hunt, I own, fairly, I can’t. I’ve been 
 at a hunt, but what a hunt is — why the horses will go among the 
 dogs and ride them down — why the men cry out ‘yooooic’ — why 
 the dogs go snuffing about in threes and fours, and the huntsman 
 says, ‘ Good Towler — good Betsy ’ ; and we all of us, after him, 
 say, ‘ Good Towler — good Betsy ’ in course : then, after hearing a 
 yelp here, and a howl there, tow, row, yow, yow, yow ! bursts 
 out, all of a sudden, from three or four of them, and the chap in 
 the velvet cap screeches out (with a number of oaths I sha’n’t 
 repeat here), ‘ Hark, to Ringwood ! ’ and then, ‘ There he goes ! ’ 
 says some one ; and, all of a sudden, helter skelter, skurry hurry, 
 slap bang, hooping, screeching and hurraing, blue coats and red 
 coats, bays and greys, horses, dogs, donkeys, butchers, baro- 
 knights, dustmen, and blackguard boys, go tearing, all together, 
 over the common after two or three of the pack that yowl loudest. 
 Why all this is, I can’t say, but it all took place the second 
 Thursday of last March, in my presence. 
 
 Up to this, I’d kept my seat as well as the best, for we’d only 
 been trotting gently about the field until the dogs found ; and I 
 managed to stick on very well ; but directly the tow-rowing began, 
 off went Trumpeter like a thunderbolt, and I found myself playing 
 among the dogs like the donkey among the chickens. ‘ Back, Mr. 
 Coxe,’ holloas the huntsman ; and so I pulled very hard, and cried 
 out, ‘ Wo ! ’ but he wouldn’t ; and on I went galloping for the dear 
 life. How I kept on is a wonder ; but I squeezed my knees in 
 very tight, and shoved my feet very hard into the stirrups, and 
 kept stiff hold of the scruff of Trumpeter’s neck, and looked 
 betwixt his ears as well as ever I could, and trusted to luck, for I 
 was in a mortal fright, sure enough, as many a better man would 
 be in such a case, let alone a poor hairdresser. 
 
 As for the hounds, after my first riding in among them, I tell 
 you, honestly, I never saw so much as the tip of one of their tails ; 
 nothing in this world did I see except Trumpeter’s dun-coloured 
 mane, and that I gripped firm : riding, by the blessing of luck, 
 safe through the walking, the trotting, the galloping, and never 
 so much as getting a tumble. 
 
 There was a chap at Croydon, very well known as the ‘ Spicy 
 Dustman,’ who, when he could get no horse to ride to the hounds, 
 turned regularly out on his donkey ; and on this occasion made 
 
AND THE GUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 359 
 
 one of us. He generally managed to keep up with the dogs, by 
 trotting quietly through the cross-roads, and knowing the country 
 well. Well, having a good guess where the hounds would find, 
 and the line that sly Reynolds (as they call the fox) would take, 
 the Spicy Dustman turned his animal down the lane from 
 Squashtail to Cutshins Common, across which, sure enough, came 
 the whole hunt. There’s a small hedge and a remarkably fine 
 ditch here ; some of the leading chaps took both, in gallant style ; 
 others went round by a gate, and so would I, only I couldn’t ; for 
 Trumpeter would have the hedge, and be — hanged to him, and 
 went right for it. 
 
 Hoop ! if ever you did try a leap ! Out go your legs, out fling 
 your arms, off goes your hat ; and the next thing you feel — that is, 
 I did — is a most tremendous thwack across the chest, and my feet 
 jerked out of the stirrups ; me left in the branches of a tree ; 
 Trumpeter gone clean from under me, and walloping and flounder- 
 ing in the ditch underneath. One of the stirrup-leathers had 
 caught in a stake, and the horse couldn’t get away ; and neither 
 of us, I thought, ever woidd have got away ; but, all of a sudden, 
 who should come up the lane but the Spicy Dustman ! 
 
 ‘ Holloa ! ’ says I, ‘ you gent, just let us down from this here 
 tree ! ’ 
 
 ‘ Lor ! ’ says he, ‘ I’m blest if I didn’t take you for a 
 robin.’ 
 
 ‘ Let’s down,’ says I ; but he was all the time employed in dis- 
 engaging Trumpeter, whom he got out of the ditch, trembling and 
 as quiet as possible. ^ Let’s down,’ says I. ‘ Presently,’ says he ; 
 and taking off his coat, he begins whistling and swishing down 
 Trumpeter’s sides and saddle ; and when he had finished, what do 
 you think the rascal did % — he just quietly mounted on Trumpeter’s 
 back, and shouts out, ‘ Git down yourself, old Bearsgrease ; you’ve 
 only to drop ! Til give your oss a hairing arter them ’ounds ; 
 and you, vy, you may ride back my pony to Tuggeridgeweal ! ’ 
 And with this, I’m blest if he didn’t ride away, leaving me holding, 
 as for the dear life, and expecting, every minute, the branch 
 would break. 
 
 It did break too, and down I came into the slush ; and when 
 I got out of it, I can tell you I didn’t look much like the Yenuses 
 or the Apollor Belvidearis what I used to dress and titivate up 
 for my shop window, when I was in the hairdressing line, or 
 smell quite so elegant as our rose-oil. Faugh ! what a figure I 
 was ! Look on the other page and you will see. 
 
 I had nothing for it but to mount the dustman’s donkey (which 
 was very quietly cropping grass in the hedge), and to make my 
 
MARCH— A DAY WITH THE SURREY HOUNDS. P. 360. 
 
BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 361 
 
 way home ; and after a weary, weary journey, I arrived at my 
 own gate. 
 
 A whole party was assembled there. Tagrag, who had come 
 back ; their Excellencies Mace and Punter, who were on a visit ; 
 and a number of horses walking up and down before the whole of 
 the gentlemen of the hunt, who had come in after losing their 
 fox ! ‘ Here’s Squire Coxe ! ’ shouted the grooms. Out rushed 
 
 the servants, out poured the gents of the hunt, and on trotted 
 poor me, digging into the donkey, and everybody dying with 
 laughter at me. 
 
 Just as I got up to the door, a horse came galloping up, and 
 passed me ; a man jumped down, and, taking off a fantail hat, 
 came up, very gravely, to help me down. 
 
 ‘ Squire,’ says he, ‘ how came you by that there hanimal ? Jist 
 git down, will you, and give it to its howner.’ 
 
 ‘ Rascal ! ’ says I, ‘ didn’t you ride off on my horse ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Was there ever sich ingratitude ? ’ says the Spicy. ‘ I found 
 this year oss in a pond, I saves him from drowning, I brings him 
 back to his master, and he calls me a rascal ! ’ 
 
 The grooms, the gents, the ladies in the balcony, my own 
 servants, all set up a roar at this ; and so would I, only I was so 
 deucedly ashamed, as not to be able to laugh just then. 
 
 And so my first day’s hunting ended. Tagrag and the rest 
 declared I showed great pluck, and wanted me to try again ; but 
 ‘No,’ says I, ‘ I have been.’ 
 
 APRIL — The Finishing Touch. 
 
 I was always fond of billiards : and, in former days, at Program’s, 
 in Greek Street, where a few jolly lads of my acquaintance used 
 to meet twice a week for a game, and a snug pipe and beer, I 
 was generally voted the first man of the club ; and could take 
 five from John, the marker, himself. I had a genius, in fact, for 
 the game ; and now that I was placed in that station of life where 
 I could cultivate my talents, I gave them full play, and improved 
 amazingly. I do say that I think myself as good a hand as any 
 chap in England. 
 
 The Count, and his Excellency Baron von Punter, were, I can 
 tell you, astonished by the. smartness of my play ; the first two or 
 three rubbers Punter beat me, but when I came to know his 
 game, I used to knock him all to sticks ; or, at least, win six 
 games to his four ; and such was the betting upon me ; his 
 
APRIL — THE FINISHING TOUCH. P. 362. 
 
BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 363 
 
 Excellency losing large sums to the Count, who knew what play 
 was, and used to back me. I did not play except for shillings, 
 so my skill was of no great service to me. 
 
 One day I entered the billiard-room where these three gentlemen 
 were high in words. ‘The thing shall not be done,^ I heard 
 Captain Tagrag say, ‘ I won’t stand it.^ 
 
 ‘ Yat, begause you would have de bird all to yourzelf, hey?’ 
 said the Baron. 
 
 ‘You sail not have a single fezare of him, begar,’ said the 
 Count, ‘ ve vill blow you, M. de Taguerague ; 'parole d]honneui\ 
 ve vill.’ 
 
 ‘ What’s all this, gents,’ says I, stepping in, ‘ about birds and 
 feathers ? ’ 
 
 ‘0,’ says Tagrag, ‘we were talking about — about — pigeon- 
 shooting ; the Count, here, says he will blow a bird all to pieces 
 at twenty yards, and I said I wouldn’t stand it, because it was 
 regular murder.’ 
 
 ‘Oh, yase, it was bidgeon-shooting,’ cries the Baron: ‘and I 
 know no better short. Have you been bidgeon-shooting, my dear 
 Squire ? De fon is gabidal.’ 
 
 ‘ No doubt,’ says I, ‘ for the shooters, but mighty bad sport 
 for the pigeon;^ and this joke set them all a-laughing ready to 
 die. I didn’t know then what a good joke it teas, neither ; but 
 I gave Master Baron, that day, a precious good beating, and 
 walked off with no less than fifteen shillings of his money. 
 
 As a sporting man, and a man of fashion, I need not say that 
 I took in The Flare-up^ regularly ; ay, and wrote one or two 
 trifles in that celebrated publication (one of my papers, which 
 Tagrag subscribed for me, Philo - pestitiaeamicus, on the proper 
 sauce for teal and widgeon ; and the other, signed Scru-tatos, on 
 the best means of cultivating the kidney species of that vegetable, 
 made no small noise at the time, and got me in the paper a 
 compliment from the editor). I was a constant reader of the 
 ‘ Notices to Correspondents,’ and, my early education having been 
 rayther neglected, (for I was taken from my studies and set, as is 
 the custom in our trade, to practise on a sheep’s-head at the 
 tender age of nine years, before I was allowed to venture on the 
 humane countenance,) — I say, being thus curtailed and cut off in my 
 classical learning, I must confess I managed to pick up a pretty 
 smattering of genteel information from that treasury of all sorts 
 of knowledge ; at least sufficient to make me a match in learning 
 for all the noblemen and gentlemen who came to our house. Well, 
 on looking over The Flare-up notices to correspondents, I read, 
 one day last April, among the notices, as follows : — 
 
364 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 ‘ “ Automodon/’ We do not know the precise age of Mr. 
 Baker of Covent Garden Theatre ; nor are we aware if that 
 celebrated son of Thespis is a married man. 
 
 ‘ Ducks and Green-peas is informed, that when A plays his 
 rook to B’s second Knight's square, and B, moving two squares 
 with his Queen's pawn, gives check to his adversary's Queen, 
 there is no reason why B's Queen should not take A's pawn, if 
 B be so inclined. 
 
 ‘ ‘‘ F. L. S." We have repeatedly answered the question 
 about Madame Yestris : her maiden name was Bartolozzi, and she 
 married the son of Charles Matthews, the celebrated comedian. 
 
 ‘ ‘‘ Fair Play." The best amateur billiard and ecarte player 
 in England is Coxe Tuggeridge Coxe, Esq., of Portland Place, 
 and Tuggeridgeville : Jonathan, who knows his play, can only 
 give him two in a game of a hundred : and, at the cards, no man 
 is his superior. Verhum sap. 
 
 ‘ “ Scipio Americanus " is a blockhead.' 
 
 I read this out to the Count and Tagrag, and both of them 
 wondered how the Editor of that tremendous Flare-up should get 
 such information ; and both agreed that the Baron, who still 
 piqued himself absurdly on his play, would be vastly annoyed 
 by seeing me preferred thus to himself. We read him the 
 paragraph, and preciously angry he was. ‘Id is,' he cried, ‘the 
 tables (or “ de dabels^^'’ as he called them), de horrid dabels ; gorn 
 viz me to London, and dry a slate-table, and I vill beat you.' 
 We all roared at this ; and the end of the dispute was, that, just 
 to satisfy the fellow, I agreed to play his Excellency at slate- 
 tables, or any tables he chose. 
 
 ‘Gut,' says he, ‘gut; I lif, you know, at Abednego's, in de 
 Quadrant ; his dabels is goot ; ve vill play dere, if you vill ; ' 
 and I said, I would : and it was agreed that, one Saturday night, 
 when Jemmy was at the Opera, we should go to the Baron's 
 rooms, and give him a chance. 
 
 We went, and the little Baron had as fine a supper as ever I 
 saw ; lots of champagne (and I didn't mind drinking it), and 
 plenty of laughing and fun. Afterwards, down w^e went to 
 billiards. ‘ Is dish Misther Coxsh, de shelebrated j^layer ? ' says 
 Mr. Abednego, who was in the room, with one or two gentlemen 
 of his own persuasion, and several foreign noblemen, dirty, snuffy, 
 and hairy, as them foreigners are. ‘ Is dish Misther Coxsh ? 
 blesh ma hart, it is a honor to see you, I have heard so much of 
 your play.' 
 
 ‘ Come, come,' says I, ‘ sir ; ' for I'm pretty wide awake ; ‘ none 
 of your gammon ; you're not going to hook me.^ 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 365 
 
 ‘No, begar, dis fish you not catch, ^ says Count Mace. 
 
 ‘ Dat is gut ! haw ! haw ! ^ snorted the Baron ; ‘ hook him ! 
 Lieher Himmel^ you might dry and hook me as well. Haw ! 
 haw ! ’ 
 
 Well, we went to play. ‘Five to four on Coxe,’ screams out 
 the Count. — ‘ Done and done,^ says another nobleman. ‘ Ponays,^ 
 says the Count. — ‘ Done,’ says the nobleman. ‘ I vill take your 
 six crowns to four,’ says the Baron. — ‘ Done,’ says I ; and, in 
 the twinkling of an eye, I beat him ; — once making thirteen off 
 the balls without stopping. 
 
 We had some more wine after this ; and if you could have 
 seen the long faces of the other noblemen, as they pulled out 
 their pencils and wrote I.O.U.’s for the Count. ‘ Ya toujour 
 mon cherj says he to me, ‘ you have von for me tree hundred 
 pounds.’ 
 
 ‘ I’ll blay you guinease dis time,’ says the Baron. ‘Zeven to 
 four you must give me though ; ’ and so I did : and in ten 
 minutes that game was won, and the Baron handed over his 
 pounds. ‘ Two hundred and sixty more, my dear, dear Coxe,’ 
 says the Count; ‘you are mon ange gardien T ‘Wot a flat 
 Misther Coxsh is, not to back his luck,’ I heard Abednego 
 whisper to one of the foreign noblemen. 
 
 ‘ I’ll take your seven to four, in tens,’ said I to the Baron. 
 
 ‘ Give me three,’ says he, ‘ and done.’ I gave him three, and 
 lost the game by one. ‘ Dobbel, or quits,’ says he. ‘ Go it,’ 
 says I, up to my mettle ; ‘ Sam Coxe never says no ; ’ — and to 
 it we went. I went in, and scored eighteen to his five. ‘ Holy 
 Moshesh ! ’ says Abednego, ‘ dat little Coxsh is a vonder ! who’ll 
 take odds ? ’ 
 
 ‘ I’ll give twenty to one,’ says I, ‘in guineas.’ 
 
 ‘ Ponays, yase, done ; ’ screams out the Count. 
 
 ‘ Bonies^ done,’ roars out the Baron : and, before I could 
 speak, went in, and, would you believe iti — in two minutes he 
 somehow made the game ! 
 
 0, what a figure I cut when my dear Jemmy heard of this 
 afterwards ! — In vain I swore it was guineas: the Count and 
 the Baron swore to poneys ; and when I refused, they both said 
 their honour was concerned, and they must have my life, or their 
 money. So when the Count showed me actually that, in spite 
 of this bet (which had been too good to resist) won from me, he 
 had been a very heavy loser by the night ; and brought me the 
 word of honour of Abednego, his Jewish friend, and the foreign 
 noblemen, that ponies had been betted : — why, I paid them one 
 
366 BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 thousand pounds sterling of good and lawful money ; — but IVe 
 not played for money since : no, no ; catch me at that again if 
 you can. 
 
 MAY — A New Drop Scene at the Opera. 
 
 No lady is a lady without having a box at the Opera : so my 
 Jemmy, Avho knew as much about music, — bless her ! — as I do 
 about Sanscrit, algebra, or any other foreign language, took a 
 prime box on the second tier. It was what they called a double 
 box ; it really could hold two, that is, very comfortably ; and we 
 got it a great bargain — for five hundred a year ! Here, Tuesdays 
 and Saturdays, we used regularly to take our places. Jemmy and 
 Jemimarann sitting in front ; me, behind : but as my dear wife 
 used to wear a large fantail gauze hat, with ostrich feathers, birds 
 of paradise, artificial flowers, and tags of muslin or satin, scattered 
 all over it, I^m blest if she didn't fill the whole of the front of the 
 box ; and it was only by jumping and dodging, three or four times 
 in the course of the night, that I could manage to get a sight of 
 the actors. By kneeling down, and looking steady under my 
 darling Jemmy's sleeve, I did contrive, every now and then, to 
 have a peep of Senior Lablash's boots, in the Puritanny, and 
 once actually saw Madame Greasi's crown and head-dress in 
 Annybalony. 
 
 What a place that Opera is, to be sure ! and what enjoyments 
 us aristocracy used to have ! Just as you have swallowed down 
 your three courses (three curses I used to call them ; — for so, 
 indeed, they are, causing a deal of heartburns, headaches, doctor's 
 bills, pills, want of sleep, and such like) — ^just, I say, as you get 
 down your three courses, which I defy any man to enjoy properly 
 unless he has two hours of drink and quiet afterwards, up comes 
 the carriage, in bursts my Jemmy, as fine as a duchess, and scented 
 like our shop. ‘Come, my dear,' says she, ‘it's Normy to-night' 
 (or Annybalony, or the Nosey di Figaro, or the Gazzylarder, as 
 the case may be) ; Mr. Coster strikes off punctually at eight, and 
 you know it's the fashion to be always present at the very first 
 bar of the aperture ; ' and so off we are obliged to budge, to be 
 miserable for five hours, and to have a headache for the next 
 twelve, and all because it's the fashion. 
 
 After the aperture, as they call it, comes the opera, which, as 
 I am given to understand, is the Italian for singing. Why they 
 should sing in Italian, I can't conceive ; or why they should do 
 
368 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 nothing hut sing : bless us ! how I used to long for the wooden 
 magpie, in the Gazzylarder, to fly up to the top of the church- 
 steeple, with the silver spoons, and see the chaps with the 
 pitchforks come in and carry off that wicked Don June. Not 
 that I don’t admire Lablash, and Rubini, and his brother, 
 Tomrubini, him who has that fine bass voice, I mean, and acts the 
 Corporal in the first piece, and Don June in the second ; but three 
 hours is a little too much, for you can’t sleep on those little rickety 
 seats in the boxes. 
 
 The opera is bad enough ; but what is that to the bally ? You 
 should have seen my Jemmy the first night when she stopped to 
 see it ; and when Madamsalls Fanny and Theresa Hustler came 
 forward, along with a gentleman, to dance, you should have seen 
 how Jemmy stared, and our girl blushed, w^hen Madamsall Fanny, 
 coming forward, stood on the tips of only five of her toes, and 
 raising up the other five, and the foot belonging to them, almost 
 to her shoulder, twirled round, and round, and round, like a 
 teetotum, for a couple of minutes or more ; and as she settled 
 down, at last, on both feet, in a natural decent posture, you should 
 have heard how the house roared with applause, the boxes clapping 
 with all their might, and waving their handkerchiefs ; the pit 
 shouting, ‘ Bravo ! ’ Some people, who, I suppose, were rather 
 angry at such an exhibition, threw bunches of flowers at her ; and 
 what do you think she did ? why, hang me, if she did not come 
 forward, as though nothing had happened, gather up the things 
 they had thrown at her, smile, press them to her heart, and begin 
 whirling round again, faster than ever ! — Talk about coolness, / 
 never saw such in all my born days. 
 
 ‘ Nasty thing ! ’ says Jemmy, starting up in a fury ; ‘ if women 
 loill act so, it serves them right to be treated so.’ 
 
 ‘ Oh, yes ! she acts beautifully,’ says our friend, his Excellency, 
 who, along with Baron von Punter, and Tagrag, used very seldom 
 to miss coming to our box. 
 
 ‘ She may act very beautifully, Munseer, but she don’t dress so ; 
 and I am very glad they threw that orange-peel and all those 
 things at her, and that the people waved to her to get oft*.’ 
 
 Here his Excellency, and the Baron, and Tag, set up a roar of 
 laughter. 
 
 ‘My dear Mrs. Coxe,’ says Tag, ‘those are the most famous 
 dancers in the world ; and we throw myrtle, geraniums, and lilies, 
 and roses, at them, in token of our immense admiration ! ’ 
 
 ‘Well, I never!’ said my wife; and poor Jemimarann slunk 
 behind the curtain, and looked as red as it almost. After the one 
 had done, the next begun ; but when, all of a sudden, a somebody 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 369 
 
 came skipping and bounding in, like an India-rubber ball, flinging 
 itself up, at least six feet trom the stage, and there shaking about 
 its legs like mad, we were more astonished than ever ! 
 
 ‘ ThaUs Anatole,’ says one of the gentlemen. 
 
 ‘ Anna who ? ^ says my wife, and she might well be mistaken ; 
 for this person had a hat and feathers, a bare neck and arms, 
 great black ringlets, and a little calico frock, which came down to 
 the knees. 
 
 ‘ Anatole ; you would not think he was sixty-three y-ears old, 
 he’s as active as a man of twenty.’ 
 
 ‘ He I ’ shrieked out my wife ; ^ what, is that there a man ? 
 For shame ! Munseer. Jemimarann, dear, get your cloak, and 
 come along ; and I’ll thank you, my dear, to call our people, and 
 let us go home.’ 
 
 You wouldn’t think, after this, that my Jemmy, who had 
 shown such a horror at the bally, as they call it, should ever grow 
 accustomed to it ; but she liked to hear her name shouted out in 
 the crush-room, and so would stop till the end of everything ; and, 
 law bless you ! in three weeks from that time, she could look at 
 the ballet, as she would at a dancing- dog in the streets, and 
 would bring her double-barrelled opera-glass up to her eyes as 
 coolly as if she had been a born duchess. As for me, I did, at 
 Rome, as Rome does, and precious fun it used to be, sometimes. 
 
 My friend, the Baron, insisted, one night, on my going behind 
 the scenes ; where, being a subscriber, he said I had, what they 
 call, my ontray. Behind, then, I went ; and such a place you 
 never saw nor heard of ! Fancy lots of young and old gents, of 
 the fashion, crowding round and staring at the actresses practising 
 their steps. Fancy yellow, snufly foreigners, chattering always, and 
 smelling fearfully of tobacco. Fancy scores of Jews, with hooked 
 noses and black muzzles, covered with rings, chains, sham diamonds, 
 and gold waistcoats. Fancy old men, dressed in old night-gowns, 
 with knock-knees, and dirty flesh-coloured cotton stockings, and 
 dabs of brick dust on their wrinkled old chops, and tow- wigs 
 (such wigs !) for the bald ones, and great tin spears in their hands 
 mayhap, or else shepherds’ crooks, and fusty garlands of flowers, 
 made of red and green baize. Fancy troops of girls, giggling, 
 chattering, pushing to and fro, amidst old black canvas. Gothic 
 halls, thrones, pasteboard Cupids, dragons, and such like ; such 
 dirt, darkness, crowd, confusion, and gabble of all conceivable 
 languages, was never known ! 
 
 If you could but have seen Munseer Anatole ! Instead of 
 looking twenty, he looked a thousand. The old man’s wig was 
 off‘, and a barber was giving it a touch with the tongs ; Munseer 
 
S70 BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 was taking snuff himself, and a boy was standing by, with a pint 
 of beer, from the public - house at the corner of Charles 
 Street. 
 
 I met with a little accident during the three-quarters of an 
 hour which they allow for the entertainment of us men of fashion 
 on the stage, before the curtain draws up for the bally, while the 
 ladies in the boxes are gaping, and the people in the pit are 
 drumming with their feet and canes in the rudest manner possible, 
 as though they couldn’t wait. 
 
 Just at the moment before the little bell rings, and the curtain 
 flies up, and we scuffle off to the sides (for we always stay till the 
 very last moment), I was in the middle of the stage, making 
 myself very affable to the fair figgerantys which was spinning and 
 twirling about me, and asking them if they wasn’t cold, and such 
 like politeness, in the most condescending way possible, when a 
 bolt was suddenly withdrawn, and down I popped, through a trap 
 in the stage, into the place below. Luckily, I was stopped by 
 a piece of machinery, consisting of a heap of green blankets and 
 a young lady coming up as Venus rising from the sea. If I had 
 not fallen so soft, I don’t know what might have been the con- 
 sequence of the collusion. I never told Mrs. Coxe, for she can’t 
 bear to hear of my paying the least attention to the fair sex. 
 
 JUNE — Striking a Balance. 
 
 Next door to us, in Portland Place, lived the Eight Honourable 
 the Earl of Kilblazes, of Kilmacrasy Castle, county Kildare, and 
 his mother, the Dowager Countess. Lady Kilblazes had a 
 daughter. Lady Juliana Matilda Mac Turk, of the exact age of 
 our dear Jemimarann ; and a son, The Honourable Arthur 
 Wellington Anglesea Blucher Bulow Mac Turk, only ten months 
 older than our boy Tug. 
 
 My darling Jemmy is a woman of spirit, and, as became her 
 station, made every possible attempt to become acquainted with 
 the Dowager Countess of Kilblazes, which her ladyship (because, 
 forsooth, she was the daughter of the Minister, and Prince of 
 Wales’s great friend, the Earl of Portansherry) thought fit to 
 reject. I don’t wonder at my Jemmy growing so angry with her, 
 and determining, in every way, to put her ladyship down. The 
 Kilblazes’ estate is not so large as the Tuggeridge property, by 
 two thousand a year at least ; and so my wife, when our neighbours 
 kept only two footmen, was quite authorised in having three : 
 
JUNE— STRIKING A BALANCE. P. 371 . 
 
372 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 and she made it a point, as soon as ever the Kilblazes’ carriage-and- 
 pair came round, to have out her own carriage-and-four. 
 
 Well, our box was next to theirs at the Opera ; only twice as 
 big. Whatever masters went to lady Juliana, came to my 
 Jemimarann; and what do you think Jemmy did? she got her 
 celebrated governess, Madame de Flicflac, away from the Countess, 
 by offering a double salary. It was quite a treasure, they said, to 
 have Madame Flicflac, she had been (to support her father, the 
 Count, when he emigrated) a French dancer at the Italian Opera. 
 French dancing, and Italian, therefore, we had at once, and in the 
 best style : it is astonishing how quick and well she used to speak 
 — the French especially. 
 
 Master Arthur Mac Turk was at the famous school of the 
 Reverend Clement Coddler, along with a hundred and ten other 
 young fashionables, from the age of three to fifteen ; and to this 
 establishment Jemmy sent our Tug, adding forty guineas to the 
 hundred and twenty paid every year for the boarders. I think I 
 found out the dear souFs reason, for, one day, speaking about the 
 school to a mutual acquaintance of ours and the Kilblazes, she 
 whispered to him, that ^ she never would have thought of sending 
 her darling boy at the rate which her next-door neighbours paid ; 
 their lad, she was sure, must be starved ! however, poor people : 
 they did the best they could on their income.’ 
 
 Coddler’s, in fact, was the tip-top school, near London; he 
 had been tutor to the Duke of Buckminster, who had set him up 
 in the school, and, as I tell you, all the peerage and respectable 
 commoners came to it. You read in the bill, (the snopsis, I think 
 Coddler called it), after the account of the charges for board, 
 masters, extras, etc. — Every young nobleman (or gentleman) is 
 expected to bring a knife, fork, spoon, and goblet, of silver (to 
 prevent breakage), which will not be returned ; a dressing-gown 
 and slippers ; toilet-box, pomatum, curling-irons, etc., etc. The 
 pupil must, on no account, be allowed to have more than ten 
 guineas of pocket-money, unless his parents particularly desire it, 
 or he be above fifteen years of age. Wine will be an extra 
 charge ; as are warm, vapour, and douche baths ; carriage exercise 
 will be provided at the rate of fifteen guineas per quarter. It is 
 earnestly requested that no young nobleman (or gentleman) be 
 allowed to smoke. In a place devoted to the cidtivation of polite 
 literature^ such an ignoble enjoyment were profane. 
 
 ^ Clement Coddlek, M.A., 
 
 ‘ Chaplain and late tutor to his Grace the 
 Duke of Buckminster.’ 
 
 ^ Mount Parnassus, Richmond, Surrey. ’ 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 373 
 
 To this establishment our Tug was sent. ‘ Kecollect, my dear/ 
 said his mamma, ‘ that you are a Tuggeridge by birth, and that I 
 expect you to beat all the boys in the school, especially that 
 Wellington Mac Turk, who, though he is a lord’s son, is nothing 
 to you, who are the heir of Tuggeridgeville.’ 
 
 Tug was a smart young fellow enough, and could cut and curl 
 as well as any young chap of his age ; he was not a bad hand at 
 a wig either, and could shave, too, very prettily ; but that was in 
 the old time, when we were not great people : when he came to 
 be a gentleman, he had to learn Latin and Greek, and had a deal 
 of lost time to make up for, on going to school. 
 
 However, we had no fear ; for the Keverend Mr. Coddler used 
 to send monthly accounts of his pupils’ progress, and if Tug was 
 not a wonder of the world, I don’t know who was. It was 
 
 General behaviour . 
 English . 
 
 French . 
 
 Latin 
 
 excellent, 
 very good. 
 tres Men. 
 optime. 
 
 And so on : — he possessed all the virtues, and wrote to us every 
 month for money. My dear Jemmy and I determined to go and 
 see him, after he had been at school a quarter ; we went, and were 
 shown by Mr. Coddler, one of the meekest, smilingest little men 
 I ever saw, into the bed-rooms and eating-rooms (the dromitaries 
 and refractories he called them), which were all as comfortable as 
 comfortable might be. ‘ It is a holiday to-day,’ said Mr. Coddler; 
 and a holiday it seemed to be : — in the dining-room were half a 
 dozen young gentlemen playing at cards (^All tip-top nobility,’ 
 observed Mr. Coddler) ; — in the bed-rooms there was only one 
 gent ; he was lying on his bed, reading novels and smoking cigars. 
 ‘ Extraordinary genius ! ’ whispered Coddler ; ‘ Honourable Tom 
 Fitz-Warter, cousin of Lord Byron’s ; smokes all day ; and has 
 written the sweetest poems you can imagine. Genius, my dear 
 madam, you know, genius must have its way.’ ‘Well, upon my 
 word,’ says Jemmy, ‘if that’s genius, I had rather that Master 
 Tuggeridge Coxe Tuggeridge remained a dull fellow.’ 
 
 ‘ Impossible, my dear madam,’ said Coddler. ‘ Mr. Tuggeridge 
 Coxe couldnH be stupid if he tried. ^ 
 
 Just then up comes Lord Claude Lollypop, third son of the 
 Marquis of Allycompane. We were introduced instantly. ‘ Lord 
 Claude Lollypop, Mr. and Mrs. Coxe : ’ the little lord wagged his 
 head, my wife bowed very low, and so did Mr. Coddler, who, as 
 he saw my lord making for the playground, begged him to show 
 us the way, — ‘Come along,’ says my lord; and as he walked 
 
374 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 before us, whistling, we had leisure to remark the beautiful holes 
 in his jacket, and elsewhere. 
 
 About twenty young noblemen (and gentlemen) were gathered 
 round a pastrycook^s shop, at the end of the green. ‘ That’s the 
 grub-shop,’ said my lord, ‘ where we young gentlemen wot has 
 money buys our wit ties, and them young gentlemen wot has none, 
 goes tick.’ 
 
 Then we passed a poor red-haired usher, sitting on a bench 
 alone. ‘ That’s Mr. Hicks, the Husher, ma’am,’ says my lord. 
 ‘ We keep him, for he’s very useful to throw stones at, and he 
 keeps the chaps’ coats when there’s a fight, or a game at cricket. 
 — Well, Hicks, how’s your mother? what’s the row now?’ ‘I 
 believe, my lord,’ said the usher, very meekly, ‘ there is a pugilistic 
 encounter somewhere on the premises — the Honourable Mr. 
 Mac ’ 
 
 ‘ 0 ! come along,’ said Lord Lollypop, ‘ come along, this way, 
 ma’am ! Go it, ye cripples ! ’ and my lord pulled my dear 
 Jemmy’s gown in the kindest and most familiar way, she trotting 
 on after him, mightily pleased to be so taken notice of, and I 
 after her. A little boy went running across the green. ‘ Who is 
 it, Petitoes ? ’ screams my lord. ‘Turk and the barber,’ pipes 
 Petitoes, and runs to the pastrycook’s like mad. ‘ Turk and the 
 
 ba ,’ laughs out my lord, looking at us : ‘ hurra ! this way, 
 
 ma’am ; ’ and, turning round a corner, he opened a door into a 
 court-yard, where a number of boys were collected, and a great 
 noise of shrill voices might be heard. ‘ Go it, Turk ! ’ says one. 
 ‘ Go it, barber ! ’ says another. ‘ Punch kith life out^^ roars 
 another, whose voice was just cracked, and his clothes half a yard 
 too short for him ! 
 
 Fancy our horror, when, on the crowd making way, we saw 
 Tug pummelling away at the Honourable Master Mac Turk ! My 
 dear Jemmy, who don’t understand such things, pounced upon the 
 two at once, and, with one hand tearing away Tug, sent him 
 spinning back into the arms of his seconds, while, with the other, 
 she clawed hold of Master Mac Turk’s red hair, and, as soon as 
 she got her second hand free, banged it about his face and ears 
 like a good one. 
 
 ‘ You nasty — wicked — quarrelsome — aristocratic (each word 
 was a bang) — aristocratic, oh! oh! oh!’ Here the words 
 stopped ; for what with the agitation, maternal solicitude, and a 
 dreadful kick on the shins which, 1 am ashamed to say. Master 
 Mac Turk administered, my dear Jemmy could bear it no longer, 
 and sunk, fainting away, in my arms. 
 
375 
 
 AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 JULY — Down at Beulah. 
 
 Although there was a regular cut between the next-door people 
 and us, yet Tug and the Honourable Master Mac Turk kept up 
 their acquaintance over the back-garden wall, and in the stables, 
 where they were fighting, making friends, and playing tricks from 
 morning to night, during the holidays. Indeed, it was from young 
 Mac that we first heard of Madame de Flicflac, of whom my 
 Jemmy robbed Lady Kilblazes, as I before have related. When 
 our friend, the Baron, first saw Madame, a very tender greeting 
 passed between them, for they had, as it appeared, been old 
 friends abroad. ^ Sapristie^^ said the Baron, in his lingo, ^ quefais- 
 tu ici^ Amendide V ^ Et toi^ mon pauvre Chicot says she \ ‘ e§>t-ce 
 qiCon fa mis a la retraite ? II parait que tu Ees plus General 
 chez Franco — ’ ^Chut!^ says the Baron, putting his finger to 
 his lips. 
 
 ‘ What are they saying, my dear ? ^ says my wife to Jemimarann, 
 who had a pretty knowledge of the language by this time. 
 
 ‘ I don’t know what “ Sapristie ” means, mamma ; but the 
 Baron asked Madame what she was doing here? and Madame 
 said, And you, Chicot, you are no more a general at Franco.” — 
 Have I not translated rightly, Madame ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Oui^ mon chon, mon ange ; yase, my angel, my cabbage, quite 
 right. Figure yourself, I have known my dear Chicot dis twenty 
 years.’ 
 
 ‘ Chicot is my name of baptism,’ says the Baron ; ‘ Baron Chicot 
 de Punter is my name.’ 
 
 ‘And being a General at Franco,’ says Jemmy, ‘means, I 
 suppose, being a French General ? ’ 
 
 ‘Yes, I was,’ said he, ‘General Baron de Punter, n’est-ce pas, 
 Amdnaide ? ’ 
 
 ‘ 0, yes ! ’ said Madame Flicflac, and laughed ; and I and 
 Jemmy laughed out of politeness : and a pretty laughing matter 
 it was, as you shall hear. 
 
 About this time my Jemmy became one of the Ladies-Patronesses 
 of that admirable Institution, ‘ The Washerwoman’s - Orphans’ 
 Home ; ’ Lady de Sudley was the great projector of it ; and the 
 manager and chaplain, the excellent and Reverend Sidney Slopper. 
 His salary, as chaplain, and that of Doctor Leitch, the physician 
 (both cousins of her Ladyship’s), drew away five hundred pounds 
 from the six subscribed to the Charity : and Lady de Sudley 
 thought 2 ifete at Beulah Spa, with the aid of some of the foreign 
 Princes who were in town last year, might bring a little more 
 
BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 377 
 
 money into its treasury. A tender appeal was accordingly drawn 
 up, and published in all the papers : — 
 
 ‘ APPEAL. 
 
 ‘ BRITISH WASHERWOMAN’s-ORPHANS’ HOME. 
 
 ‘ The Washerwoman’s-Orphans’ Home has now been estab- 
 lished seven years : and the good which it has effected is, it may be 
 confidently stated, incalculable. Ninety-eight orphan children of 
 washerwomen have been lodged within its walls. One hundred 
 and two British washerwomen have been relieved when in the last 
 stage of decay. One hundred and ninety-eight thousand 
 articles of male and female dress have been washed, mended, 
 buttoned, ironed, and mangled in the Establishment. And, by 
 an arrangement with the governors of the Foundling, it is hoped 
 that THE Baby-linen of that Hospital wdll be confided to the 
 British Washerwoman’s Home ! 
 
 ‘ With such prospects before it, is it not sad, is it not lamentable 
 to think, that the Patronesses of the Society have been compelled 
 to reject the applications of no less than three thousand eight 
 HUNDRED AND ONE BRITISH WASHERWOMEN, from lack of mcailS 
 for their support ? Ladies of England ! Mothers of England ! to 
 you we appeal. Is there one of you that will not respond to the 
 cry in behalf of these deserving members of our sex ? 
 
 ‘ It has been determined by the Ladies-Patronesses to give a fHe 
 at Beulah Spa, on Thursday, July 25 ; which will be graced with 
 the first foreign and native talent, by the first foreign and native 
 RANK ; and where they beg for the attendance of every washer- 
 woman’s FRIEND.’ 
 
 Her Highness the Princess of Schloppenzollernschwigmaringen, 
 the Duke of Sacks-Tubbingen, His Excellency Baron Strumpff, 
 His Excellency Lootf-Allee-Koolee-Bismillah-Mohamed-Busheed- 
 Allah, the Persian Ambassador, Prince Futtee-Jaw, Envoy from 
 the King of Oude, His Excellency Don Alonzo Di Cachachero-y- 
 Fandango-y-Castanete, the Spanish Ambassador, Count Kavioli, 
 from Milan, the Envoy of the Republic of Topinambo, and a host 
 of other fashionables, promised to honour the festival : and their 
 names made a famous show in the bills. Besides these, we had 
 the celebrated band of Moscow-musiks, the seventy-seven Transyl- 
 vanian trumpeters, and the famous Bohemian Minnesingers ; with 
 all the leading artists of London, Paris, the Continent, and the 
 rest of Europe. 
 
 I leave you to fancy what a splendid triumph for the British 
 
378 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 Washerwoman’s Home was to come off on that day, A beautiful 
 tent was erected, in which the Ladies-Patronesses were to meet ; 
 it was hung round with specimens of the skill of the washer- 
 women’s orphans : ninety-six of whom were to be feasted in the 
 gardens, and waited on by the Ladies-Patronesses. 
 
 Well, Jemmy and my daughter, Madame de Flicilac, myself, 
 the Count, Baron Punter, Tug, and Tagrag, all went down in the 
 chariot and barouche-and four, quite eclipsing poor Lady Kilblazes 
 and her carriage-and-two. 
 
 There was a fine cold collation, to which the friends of the 
 Ladies -Patronesses were admitted ; after which, my ladies and 
 their heaux went strolling through the walks ; Tagrag and the 
 Count having each an arm of Jemmy ; the Baron giving an arm 
 apiece to Madame and Jemimarann. Whilst they were walking, 
 whom should they light upon but poor Orlando Crump, my 
 successor in the perfumery and hair-cutting. 
 
 ‘ Orlando ! ' says Jemimarann, blushing as red as a label, and 
 holding out her hand. 
 
 ‘ Jemimar ! ’ says he, holding out his, and turning as white as 
 pomatum. 
 
 ‘ Sir I ^ says Jemmy, as stately as a duchess. 
 
 ‘ What ! madam,’ says poor Crump, ‘ don’t you remember your 
 shopboy ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Dearest mamma, don’t you recollect Orlando ? ’ whimpers 
 Jemimarann, whose hand he had got hold of. 
 
 ^Miss Tuggeridge Coxe,’ says Jemmy, ‘I’m surprised at you. 
 Remember, sir, that our position is altered, and oblige me by no 
 more familiarity.’ 
 
 ‘ Insolent fellow ! ’ says the Baron, ‘ vat is dis canaille ? ^ 
 
 ‘ Canal yourself, Mounseer,’ says Orlando, now grown quite 
 furious ; he broke away, quite indignant, and was soon lost in 
 the crowd. Jemimarann, as soon as he was gone, began to look 
 very pale and ill ; and her mamma, therefore, took her to a tent, 
 Avhere she left her along with Madame Flicflac and the Baron ; 
 going off herself with the other gentlemen, in order to join us. 
 
 It appears they had not been seated very long, when Madame 
 Flicflac suddenly sprung up, with an exclamation of joy, and 
 rushed forward to a friend whom she saw pass. 
 
 The Baron was left alone with Jemimarann ; and, whether it 
 was the champagne, or that my dear girl looked more than 
 commonly pretty, I don’t know ; but Madame Flicflac had not 
 been gone a minute, when the Baron dropped on his knees, and 
 made her a regular declaration. 
 
 Poor Orlando Crump had found me out by this time, and was 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 379 
 
 standing by my side, listening, as. melancholy as possible, to the 
 famous Bohemian Minnesingers, who were singing the celebrated 
 words of the poet Gothy : 
 
 Ich bin ya hupp lily lee, du hist ya hupp lily lee, 
 
 Wir sindj doch hupp lily lee, hupp la lily lee. 
 
 Chorus — Yodle-odle-odle-odle-odle-odle hupp ! yodle-odle-aw-o-o-o ! 
 
 They were standing with their hands in their waistcoats, as usual, 
 and had just come to the ‘ o-o-o,^ at the end of the chorus of the 
 forty-seventh stanza, when Orlando started : ‘ That's a scream ! ' 
 says he. ‘Indeed iUis,' says I; ‘and, but for the fashion of the 
 thing, a very ugly scream too : ' when I heard another shrill, ‘ 0 ! ’ 
 as I thought ; and Orlando bolted off, crying, ‘ By heavens, it’s 
 her voice!’ ‘Whose voice?’ says I. ‘Come and see the row,’ 
 says Tag ; and off we went, with a considerable number of people, 
 who saw this strange move on his part. 
 
 We came to the tent, and there we found my poor Jemimarann 
 fainting ; her mamma holding a smelling-bottle ; the Baron, on 
 the ground, holding a handkerchief to his bleeding nose ; and 
 Orlando squaring at him, and calling on him to fight if he dared. 
 
 My Jemmy looked at Crump very fierce. ‘Take that feller 
 away,’ says she, ‘ he has insulted a French nobleman, and deserves 
 transportation, at the least.’ 
 
 Poor Orlando was carried off. ‘ I’ve no patience with the little 
 minx,’ says Jemmy, giving Jemimarann a pinch: ‘she might be 
 a Baron’s lady ; and she screams out because his Excellency did 
 but squeeze her hand.’ 
 
 ‘0, mamma! mamma!’ sobs poor Jemimarann, ‘but he was 
 t-t -tipsy.’ 
 
 ‘ T-t-tipsy ! and the more shame for you, you hussy, to be 
 offended with a nobleman who does not know what he is doing.’ 
 
 AUGUST — A Tournament. 
 
 ‘ I say. Tug,’ said Mac Turk, one day, soon after our fiare-up at 
 Beulah, ‘ Kilblazes comes of age in October, and then we’ll cut 
 you out, as I told you : the old barberess will die of spite when 
 she hears what v/e are going to do. What do you think ? we’re 
 going to have a tournament ! ’ ‘ What’s a tournament ? ’ says 
 
 Tug, and so said his mamma when she heard the news ; and 
 when she knew what a tournam^ent was, I think, really, she was 
 as angry as Mac Turk said she would be, and gave us no peace 
 for days together. ‘ What ! ’ says she, ‘ dress up in armour, like 
 
AUGUST— A TOURNAMENT. P. 380. 
 
BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 381 
 
 play-actors, and run at each other with spears ? the Kilblazes 
 must be mad ! ’ And so I thought, but I didiiT think the 
 Tuggeridges would be mad too, as they were ; for, when Jemmy 
 heard that the Kilblazes festival was to be, as yet, a profound 
 secret, what does she do, but send down to The Morning Post a 
 flaming account of 
 
 ‘ The Passage of Arms at Tuggeridgeville ! 
 
 ‘ The days of chivalry are not past. The fair Castellane of 
 T-gg-r-dgeville, whose splendid entertainments have so often been 
 alluded to in this paper, has determined to give one, which shall 
 exceed, in splendour, even the magnificence of the middle ages. We 
 are not at liberty to say more ; but a tournament, at which His 
 Ex-l-ncy B-r-n de P-nt-r, and Thomas T-gr-g, Esq., eldest son 
 of Sir Th — s T-gr-g, are to be the knights-defendants against all 
 comers ; a Queen of Beauty^ of whose loveliness every frequenter 
 of fashion has felt the power ; a banquet, unexampled in the 
 annals of Gunter ; and a ball, in which the recollections of ancient 
 chivalry will blend sweetly with the soft tones of W^eippert and 
 Collinet, are among the entertainments which the Ladye of T-gg- 
 ridgeville has prepared for her distinguished guests.’ 
 
 The Baron was the life of the scheme : he longed to be on 
 horseback, and in the field at Tuggeridgeville, where he, Tagrag, 
 and a number of our friends practised ; he was the very best tilter 
 present ; he vaulted over his horse, and played such wonderful 
 antics, as never were done except at Ducrow’s. 
 
 And now — 0 that I had twenty pages, instead of these miser- 
 able two, to describe the wonders of the day ! — Twenty -four 
 knights came from Ashley’s, at two guineas a head. We were in 
 hopes to have had Miss Woolford, in the character of Joan of 
 Arc, but that lady did not appear. We had a tent for the 
 challengers, at each side of which hung what they called escoachings 
 (like hatchments, which they put up when people die), and under- 
 neath sat their pages, holding their helmets for the tournament. 
 Tagrag was in brass armour (my city connexions got him that 
 famous suit) ; his Excellency in polished steel. My wife wore a 
 coronet, modelled exactly after that of Queen Katharine, in Henry 
 V. ; a tight gilt jacket, which set off dear Jemmy’s figure wonder- 
 fully, and a train of at least forty feet. Dear Jemimarann was 
 in white, her hair braided with pearls. Madame de Flicflac 
 appeared as Queen Elizabeth ] and Lady Blanche Bluenose as a 
 
382 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 Turkish princess. An alderman of London, and his lady; two 
 magistrates of the county, and the very pink of Croydon ; several 
 Polish noblemen ; two Italian Counts (besides our Count) ; one 
 hundred and ten young officers, from Addiscombe College, in full 
 uniform, commanded by Major-General Sir Miles Mulligatawney, 
 K.C.B., and his lady ; the Misses Pimminy’s Finishing Establish- 
 ment, and fourteen young ladies, all in white ; the Reverend 
 Doctor Wapshot, and forty -nine young gentlemen, of the first 
 families, under his charge ; were some only of the company. I 
 leave you to fancy that, if my J emmy did seek for fashion, she 
 had enough of it on this occasion. They wanted me to have 
 mounted again, but my hunting-day had been sufficient ; besides 
 I ain’t big enough for a real knight : so, as Mrs. Coxe insisted on 
 my opening the Tournament — and I knew it was in vain to resist 
 — the Baron and Tagrag had undertaken to arrange so that I 
 might come off with safety, if I came off at all. They had 
 procured, from the Strand Theatre, a famous stud of hobby-horses, 
 which they told me had been trained for the use of the great Lord 
 Bateman. I did not know exactly what they were till they 
 arrived ; but as they had belonged to a Lord, I thought it was all 
 right, and consented ; and I found it the best sort of riding, after 
 all, to appear to be on horseback and walk safely a-foot at the 
 same time, and it was impossible to come down as long as I kept 
 on my own legs ; besides, I could cuff and pull my steed about as 
 much as I liked, without fear of his biting or kicking in return. 
 As Lord of the Tournament, they placed in my hands a lance, 
 ornamented spirally, in blue and gold ; I thought of the pole over 
 my old shop -door, and almost wished myself there again, as I 
 capered up to the battle in my helmet and breast-plate, with all 
 the trumpets blowing and drums beating at the time. Captain 
 Tagrag was my opponent, and preciously we poked each other, 
 till, prancing about, I put my foot on my horse’s petticoat behind, 
 and down I came, getting a thrust from the Captain, at the same 
 time, that almost broke my shoulder-bone. ^ This was sufficient,’ 
 they said, ‘ for the laws of chivalry ; ’ and I was glad to get off so. 
 
 After that, the gentlemen riders, of whom there were no less 
 than seven, in complete armour, and the professionals, now ran at 
 the ring ; and the Baron was far, far the most skilful. 
 
 ‘ How sweetly the dear Baron rides,’ said my wife, who was 
 always ogling at him, smirking, smiling, and waving her hand- 
 kerchief to him. ‘ I say, Sam,’ says a professional to one of his 
 friends, as, after their course, they came cantering up, and ranged 
 under Jemmy’s bower, as she called it ; — ‘I say, Sam, I’m blowed 
 if that chap in harmer mustn’t have been one of bus.’ And this 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 383 
 
 only made Jemmy the more pleased; for the fact is, the Baron 
 had chosen the best way of winning Jeminiarann by courting her 
 mother. 
 
 The Baron was declared conqueror at the ring; and Jemmy 
 awarded him the prize, a wreath of white roses, which she 
 placed on his lance ; he receiving it gracefully, and bowing, until 
 the plumes of his helmet mingled with the mane of his charger, 
 which backed to the other end of the lists, and then, galloping back 
 to the place where Jemimarann was seated, he begged her to place 
 it on his helmet : the poor girl blushed very much, and did so. 
 As all the people were applauding, Tagrag rushed up, and, laying 
 his hand on the Baron’s shoulder, whispered something in his ear, 
 which made the other very angry, I suppose, for he shook him 
 off violently. ‘ Chacun pour so?’,’ says he, ‘Monsieur de 
 Taguerague ; ’ — which means, I am told, ‘ every man for himself ; ’ 
 and then he rode away, throwing his lance in the air, catching it, 
 and making his horse caper and prance, to the admiration of all 
 beholders. 
 
 After this came the ‘ Passage of Arms ; ’ Tagrag and the 
 Baron ran courses against the other champions ; ay, and unhorsed 
 two apiece ; whereupon the other three refused to turn out ; and 
 preciously we laughed at them, to be sure ! 
 
 ‘ Now, it’s our turn, Mr. Chicot says Tagrag, shaking his 
 fist at the Baron : ‘ look to yourself, you infernal mountebank, for, 
 by Jupiter, I’ll do my best ; ’ and before Jemmy and the rest of 
 us, who were quite bewildered, could say a word, these two 
 friends were charging away, spears in hand, ready to kill each 
 other. In vain Jemmy screamed ; in vain I threw down my 
 truncheon : they had broken two poles before I could say ‘ Jack 
 Robinson,’ and were driving at each other with the two new 
 ones. The Baron had the worst of the first course, for he had 
 almost been carried out of his saddle. ‘ Hark you, Chicot ! ’ 
 screamed out Tagrag, ‘ next time look to your head : ’ and, next 
 time, sure enough, each aimed at the head of the other. 
 
 Tagrag’s spear hit the right place ; for it carried off the 
 Baron’s helmet, plume, rose-wreath and all ; but his Excellency 
 hit truer still — his lance took Tagrag on the neck, and sent him 
 to the ground like a stone. 
 
 ‘ He’s won ! he’s won ! ’ says Jemmy, waving her handkerchief ; 
 Jemimarann fainted. Lady Blanche screamed, and I felt so sick 
 that I thought I should drop. All the company were in an 
 uproar : only the Baron looked calm, and bowed very gracefully, 
 and kissed his hand to Jemmy ; when, all of a sudden, a Jewish- 
 looking man, springing over the barrier, and followed by three 
 
384 BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 more, rushed towards the Baron. ‘ Keep the gate, Bob ! ’ he 
 holloas out. ‘ Baron, I arrest you, at the suit of Samuel 
 Levison, for ^ 
 
 But he never said for what ; shouting out, ‘ Aha ! ^ and 
 ‘ Sapprrrristie I ’ and I doiiT know what, his Excellency drew 
 his sword, dug his spurs into his horse, and was over the 
 poor bailiff, and off before another word. He had threatened 
 to run through one of the bailiff^s followers, Mr. Stubbs, only 
 that gentleman made way for him ; and when we took up the 
 bailiff, and brought him round by the aid of a little brandy-and- 
 water, *he told us all. ‘ I had a writ againsht him, Mishter 
 Coxsh, but I didn’t vant to shpoil shport ; and, beshidesh, I 
 didn’t know him until dey knocked off his shteel cap ! ’ 
 
 Here was a pretty business ! 
 
 SEPTEMBER— OvEK-BOAEDED AND Undee-lodged. 
 
 We had no great reason to brag of our tournament at Tuggeridge- 
 ville : but, after all, it was better than the turn-out at Kilblazes, 
 where poor Lord Heydownderry went about in a black velvet 
 dressing-gown, and the Emperor Napoleon Bonypart appeared 
 in a suit of armour, and silk stockings, like Mr. Pell’s friend in 
 Pickwick; we, having employed the gentlemen from Astley’s 
 Antitheatre, had some decent sport for our money. 
 
 We never heard a word from the Baron, who had so dis- 
 tinguished himself by his horsemanship, and had knocked 
 down (and very justly) Air. Nabb, the bailiff, and Air. Stubbs his 
 man, who came to lay hands upon him. Aly sweet Jemmy 
 seemed to be very low in spirits after his departure, and a sad 
 thing it is to see her in low spirits : on days of illness she no 
 more minds giving Jemimarann a box on the ear, or sending a 
 plate of muffins across a table at poor me, than she does taking 
 her tea. 
 
 Jemmy, I say, was very low in spirits ; but, one day (I 
 remember it was the day after Captain Higgins called, and said 
 he had seen the Baron at Boulogne), she vowed that nothing but 
 change of air would do her good, and declared that she should die 
 unless she went to the sea-side in France. I knew what this 
 meant, and that I might as well attempt to resist her, as to 
 resist Pier Gracious Alajesty in Parliament assembled ; so I told 
 
2 c 
 
 SEPrEMBER — OVER-BOARDED AND UNDER-LODGED, p. 385. 
 
386 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 the people to pack up the things, and took four places on board 
 the Grand Turk steamer for Boulogne. 
 
 The travelling carriage, which, with Jemmy’s thirty-seven 
 boxes and my carpet-bag, was pretty well loaded, was sent on 
 board, the night before ; and we, after breakfasting in Portland 
 Place (little did I think it was the — but, poh ! never mind), 
 went down to the Custom House in the other carriage, followed 
 by a hackney-coach and a cab, with the servants, and fourteen 
 band-boxes and trunks more, which were to be wanted by my 
 dear girl in the journey. 
 
 The road down Cheapside and Thames Street need not be 
 described ; we saw the Monument, a memento of the wicked 
 Popish massacre of Saint Bartholomew ; — why erected here I can’t 
 think, as Saint Bartholomew’s is in Smithfield ; — we had a 
 glimpse of Billingsgate, and of the Mansion House, where we 
 saw the two-and-twenty shilling coal-smoke coming out of the 
 chimneys, and were landed at the Custom House in safety. I 
 felt melancholy, for we were going among a people of swindlers, 
 as all Frenchmen are acknowledged to be ; and, besides not being 
 able to speak the language, leaving our own dear country, and 
 honest countrymen. 
 
 Fourteen porters came out, and each took a package with the 
 greatest civility ; calling Jemmy her ladyship, and me your 
 honour ; ay, and your -honouring and my-ladyshipping even my 
 man and the maid in the cab. 
 
 I somehow felt all over quite melancholy at going away ; 
 ‘ Here, my fine fellow,’ says I to the coachman, who was standing 
 very respectful, holding his hat in one hand and Jemmy’s jewel- 
 case in the other ; ‘here, my fine chap,’ says I, ‘here’s six shillings 
 for you ; ’ for I did not care for the money. 
 
 ‘ Six what ? ’ says he. 
 
 ‘Six shillings, fellow,’ shrieks Jemmy, ‘and twice as much as 
 your fare.’ 
 
 ‘ Feller, marm ! ’ says this insolent coachman, ‘ feller yourself, 
 marm ; do you think I’m a-going to kill my horses, and break my 
 precious back, and bust my carriage, and carry you, and your kids, 
 and your traps, for six hog ? ’ And with this the monster dropped 
 his hat, with my money in it, and doubling his fist, put it so very 
 near my nose that I really thought he would have made it bleed. 
 
 ‘ My fare’s h eighteen shillings,’ says he, ‘ hain’t it ? — hask hany of 
 these gentlemen.’ 
 
 ‘ Why, it ain’t more than seventeen and six,’ says one of the 
 fourteen porters ; ‘ but, if the gen’l’man is a gen’l’man, he can’t 
 give no less than a suffering anyhow.’ 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 387 
 
 I wanted to resist, and Jemmy screamed like a Turk ; but, 
 
 ‘ Holloa ! ’ says one : ‘ WhaUs the row ? ’ says another : ‘ Come, 
 dub up ! ’ roars a third ; and I doiiT mind telling you, in 
 confidence, that I was so frightened that I took out the sovereign 
 and gave it. My man and Jemmy’s maid had disappeared by 
 this time ; they always do when there’s a robbery or row 
 going on. 
 
 I was going after them. ‘ Stop, Mr. Ferguson,’ pipes a young 
 gentleman of about thirteen, with a red livery waistcoat that 
 reached to his ankles, and every variety of button, pin, string to 
 keep it together : ‘ Stop, Mr. Heff,’ says he, taking a small pipe 
 out of his mouth, ‘ and don’t forgit the cabman.’ 
 
 ‘ What’s your fare, my lad 1 ’ says I. 
 
 ‘Why, let’s see — yes — ^ho ! — my fare’s seven-and-thirty and 
 eightpence eggs — acly.’ 
 
 The fourteen gentlemen, holding the luggage, here burst out 
 and laughed very rudely indeed ; and the only person who seemed 
 disappointed was, I thought, the hackney-coachman. ‘ Why, you 
 rascal ! ’ says Jemmy, laying hold of the boy, ‘do you want more 
 than the coachman ? ’ 
 
 ‘ Don’t rascal me^ marm ! ’ shrieks the little chap in return. 
 ‘ What’s the coach to me ? Vy, you may go in an omlibus for six- 
 pence if you like ; vy don’t you go and buss it, marm ? Yy did you 
 call my cab, m_arm ? Yy am I to come forty mile, from Scarlot 
 Street, Po’tl’nd Street, and not git my fare, marm ? Come, give 
 me a suffering and a half, and don’t keep my hoss a-vaiting 
 all day.’ 
 
 This speech, which takes some time to write down, was made 
 in about the fifth part of a second ; and, at the end of it, the 
 young gentleman hurled down his pipe, and, advancing towards 
 Jemmy, doubled his fist, and seemed to challenge her to fight. 
 My dearest girl now turned from red to be as pale as white 
 Windsor, and fell into my arms : what was I to do ? I called, 
 ‘ Policeman ! ’ but a policeman won’t interfere in Thames Street ; 
 robbery is licensed there. What was I to do ? Oh ! my heart 
 beats with paternal gratitude when I think of what my Tug did ! 
 
 As soon as this young cab -chap put himself into a fighting 
 attitude. Master Tuggeridge Coxe — who had been standing by, 
 laughing very rudely, I thought — Master Tuggeridge Coxe, I say, 
 flung his jacket suddenly into his mamma’s face (the brass buttons 
 made her start, and recovered her a little), and, before we could say 
 a word, was in the ring in which we stood (formed by the porters, 
 nine Orangemen and women, I don’t know how many newspaper 
 boys, hotel cads, and old clothesmen), and, whirling about two 
 
388 
 
 BARBER COX, 
 
 little white fists in the face of the gentleman in the red waistcoat, 
 who brought a great pair of black ones to bear on the enemy, was 
 engaged in an instant. 
 
 But, law bless you ! Tug hadn't been at Richmond School for 
 nothing ; and milled away — one, two, right and left — like a little 
 hero as he is, with all his dear mother's spirit in him : first came 
 a crack which sent a long dusky white hat — that looked damp and 
 deep like a well, and had a long black crape rag twisted round it 
 — first came a crack which sent this white hat spinning over the 
 gentleman's cab, and scattered among the crowd a vast number of 
 things which the cabman kept in it, — such as a ball of string, a 
 piece of candle, a comb, a whip -lash, a little warbler, a slice of 
 bacon, etc. etc. 
 
 The cabman seemed sadly ashamed of this display, but Tug 
 gave him no time ; another blow was planted on his cheek-bone ; 
 and a third, which hit him straight on the nose, sent this rude 
 cabman straight down to the ground. 
 
 ‘ Brayvo, my lord ! ' shouted all the people around. 
 
 ‘I won't have no more, thank yer,' said the little cabman, 
 gathering himself up, “give us over my fare, vil yer, and let me 
 git away.' 
 
 ‘What's your fare now^ you cowardly little thief?' says 
 Tug. 
 
 ‘ Vy, then, two and eightpence,' says he. ‘ Go along — you knov) 
 it is.' And two and eightpence he had; and everybody applauded 
 Tug, and hissed the cab-boy, and asked Tug for something to 
 drink. We heard the packet-bell ringing, and all run down the 
 stairs to be in time. 
 
 I now thought our troubles would soon be over ; mine were, 
 very nearly so, in one sense at least ; for after Mrs. Coxe, and 
 Jemimarann, and Tug, and the maid, and valet, and valuables 
 had been handed across, it came to my turn. I had often heard 
 of people being taken up by a Planl\ but seldom of their being 
 set down by one. Just as I was going over, the vessel rode off a 
 little, the board slipped, and down I soused into the water. You 
 might have heard Mrs. Coxe's shriek as far as Gravesend ; it rung 
 in my ears as I went down, all grieved at the thought of leaving 
 her a disconsolate widder. Well, up I came again, and caught 
 the brim of my beaver hat — though I have heard that drowning 
 men catch at straws : — I floated, and hoped to escape by hook or 
 by crook ; and, luckily, just then, I felt myself suddenly jerked by 
 the waist-band of my whites, and found myself hauled up in air 
 at the end of a boat-hook, to the sound of ‘ Yeho ! yeho ! yehoi ! 
 yehoi ! ' and so I was dragged aboard. I was put to bed, and had 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 389 
 
 swallowed so much water that it took a very considerable quantity 
 of brandy to bring it to a proper mixture in my inside ; in fact, 
 for some hours I was in a very deplorable state. 
 
 OCTOBER — Notice To Quit. 
 
 Well, we arrived at Boulogne ; and Jemmy, after making 
 inquiries, right and left, about the Baron, found no such person 
 was known there ; and being bent, I suppose, at all events, on 
 marrying her daughter to a lord, she determined to set off for 
 Paris, where, as he had often said, he possessed a magnificent 
 
 , hotel he called it and I remember Jemmy being mightily 
 
 indignant at the idea ; but hotel, we found afterwards, means only 
 a house in French, and this reconciled her. Need I describe the 
 road from Boulogne to Paris ? or need I describe that Capitol 
 itself? Suffice it to say, that we made our appearance there, at 
 Murisse’s Hotel, as became the family of Coxe Tuggeridge ; and 
 saw everything worth seeing in the metropolis in a week. It 
 nearly killed me, to be sure ; but, when you’re on a pleasure 
 party, in a foreign country, you must not mind a little incon- 
 venience of this sort. 
 
 Well, there is, near the city of Paris, a splendid road and row 
 of trees, which, I don’t know why, is called the Shandeleezy, or 
 Elysian Fields, in French : others, I have heard, call it the 
 Shandeleery ; but mine I know to be the correct pronunciation. 
 In the middle of this Shandeleezy is an open space of ground, and 
 a tent, where,' during the summer, Mr. Franconi, the French 
 Ashley, performs with his horses and things. As everybody went 
 there, and we were told it was quite the thing. Jemmy agreed 
 that we should go too ; and go we did. 
 
 It’s just like Ashley’s : there’s a man just like Mr. Piddicombe, 
 who goes round the ring in a huzzah-dress, cracking a whip ; there 
 are a dozen Miss Woolfords, who appear like Polish Princesses, 
 Dihannas, Sultannas, Cachuchas, and heaven knows what ! There’s 
 the fat man, who comes in with the twenty-three dresses on, and 
 turns out to be the living skeleton ! There’s the clowns, the 
 sawdust, the white horse that dances a hornpipe, the candles 
 stuck in hoops, just as in our own dear country. 
 
 My dear wife, in her very finest clothes, with all the world 
 looking at her, was really enjoying this spectacle (which doesn’t 
 require any knowledge of the language, seeing that the dumb 
 animals don’t talk it), when there came in, presently, ‘ the great 
 
OCTOBER — NOTICE TO QUIT. r. 390. 
 
BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 391 
 
 Polish act of the Sarmatian horse-tamer, on eight steeds,’ which 
 we were all of ns longing to see. The horse -tamer, to music 
 twenty miles an hour, rushed in on four of his horses, leading the 
 other four, and skurried round the ring. You couldn’t see him 
 for the sawdust, but everybody was delighted, and applauded like 
 mad. Presently, you saw there were only three horses in front ; 
 he had slipped one more between his legs, another followed, and 
 it was clear that the consequences would be fatal, if he admitted 
 any more. The people applauded more than ever ; and when, at 
 last, seven and eight were made to go in, not wholly, but sliding 
 dexterously in and out, with the others, so that you did not know 
 which was which, the house, I thought, would come down with 
 applause ; and the Sarmatian horse-tamer bowed his great feathers 
 to the ground. At last the music grew slower, and he cantered 
 leisurely round the ring; bending, smirking, seesawing, waving 
 his whip, and laying his hand on his heart, just as we have seen 
 the Ashley’s people do. But fancy our astonishment when, 
 suddenly, this Sarmatian horse-tamer, coming round with his four 
 pair at a canter, and being opposite our box, gave a start, and a 
 — hupp ! which made all of his horses stop stock-still at an 
 instant ! 
 
 ‘ Albert ! ’ screamed my dear Jemmy ; ‘ Albert ! Bahbahbah — 
 baron ! ’ 
 
 The Sarmatian looked at her for a minute ; and turning head 
 over heels, three times, bolted suddenly off his horses, and away 
 out of our sight. 
 
 It was His Excellency the Baron de Punter ! 
 
 Jemmy went off in a fit, as usual, and we never saw the Baron 
 again ; but we heard, afterwards, that Punter was an apprentice of 
 Franconi’s, and had run aw^ay to England, thinking to better him 
 self, and had joined Mr. Richardson’s army ; but Mr. Richardson, 
 and then London, did not agree with him ; and we saw the last 
 of him as he sprung over the barriers at the Tuggeridgeville 
 tournament. 
 
 ‘Well, Jemimarann,’ says Jemmy, in a fury, ‘you shall marry 
 Tagrag ; and if I can’t have a baroness for a daughter, at least you 
 shall be a baronet’s lady.’ Poor Jemimarann only sighed ; she 
 knew it was of no use to remonstrate. 
 
 Paris grew dull to us after this ; and we were more eager than 
 ever to go back to London ; for what should we hear, but that 
 that monster, Tuggeridge, of the City — old Tug’s black son, 
 forsooth ! — was going to contest Jemmy’s claim to the property, 
 and had filed I don’t know how many bills against us in Chancery . 
 Hearing this, we set off immediately, and we arrived at Boulogne, 
 
392 BARBER COX, 
 
 and set off in that very same Grand Turk which had brought us 
 to France. 
 
 If you look in the bills, you will see that the steamers leave 
 London on Saturday morning, and Boulogne on Saturday night ; 
 so that there is often not an hour between the time of arrival and 
 departure. Bless us ! bless us ! I pity the poor Captain that, for 
 twenty-four hours at a time, is on a paddle-box, roaring out, ^ Ease 
 her ! Stop her ! ’ and the poor servants, who are laying out 
 breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, supper ; — breakfast, lunch, dinner, 
 tea, supper again ; — for layers upon layers of travellers, as it were ; 
 and, most of all, I pity that unhappy steward, with those un- 
 fortunate tin basins that he must always keep an eye over. 
 
 Little did we know what a storm was brooding in our absence, 
 and little were we prepared for the awful, awful fate that hung 
 over our Tuggeridgeville property. 
 
 Biggs, of the great house of Higgs, Biggs, and Blatherwick, 
 was our man of business : when I arrived in London I heard that 
 he had just set off to Paris after me. So we started down to 
 Tuggeridgeville instead of going to Portland Place. As we came 
 through the lodge -gates, we found a crowd assembled within 
 them ; and there was that horrid Tuggeridge on horseback, with 
 a shabby -looking man, called Mr. Scapgoat, and his man of 
 business, and many more. ‘Mr. Scapgoat,’ says Tuggeridge, 
 grinning, and handing him over a sealed paper, ‘ here’s the lease ; 
 I leave you in possession, and wish you good morning.’ 
 
 ‘ In possession of what ? ’ says the rightful lady of Tuggeridge- 
 ville, leaning out of the carriage -window. She hated black 
 
 Tuggeridge, as she called him, like poison : the very first week of 
 our coming to Portland Place, when he called to ask restitution of 
 some plate which he said was his private property, she called him 
 a base-born blackamoor, and told him to quit the house. Since 
 then there had been law-squabbles between us without end, and all 
 sorts of writings, meetings, and arbitrations. 
 
 ‘ Possession of my estate of Tuggeridgeville, Madam,’ roars he, 
 
 ‘ left me by my father’s will, which you have had notice of these 
 three weeks, and know as well as I do.’ 
 
 ‘Old Tug left no will,’ shrieked Jemmy; ‘he didn’t die to 
 leave his estates to blackamoors — to negroes — to base-born mulatto 
 
 story-tellers ; if he did, may I be ’ 
 
 ‘0, hush ! dearest mamma,’ says Jemimarann. 
 
 ‘ Go it again, mother ! ’ says Tug, who is always sniggering. 
 ‘What is this business, Mr. Tuggeridge?’ cried Tagrag (who 
 was the only one of our party that had his senses), ‘ what is this 
 will?’ 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 393 
 
 ‘ 0, iUs merely a matter of form/ said the lawyer, riding up. 
 
 ‘ For heaven’s sake, madam, be peaceable ; let my friends, Higgs, 
 Biggs, and Blatherwick, arrange with me. I am surprised that 
 none of their people are here. All that you have to do is to eject 
 us ; and the rest will follow, of course.’ 
 
 ‘ Who has taken possession of this here property ? ’ roars 
 Jemmy, again. 
 
 ‘My friend Mr. Scapgoat,’ said the lawyer. — Mr. Scapgoat 
 grinned. 
 
 ‘Mr. Scapgoat,’ said my wife, shaking her fist at him (for she 
 is a woman of no small spirit), ‘ if you don’t leave this ground. I’ll 
 have you pushed out with pitchforks, I will, you and your beggarly 
 blackamoor yonder ; ’ and, suiting the action to the word, she 
 clapped a stable fork into the hands of one of the gardeners, and 
 called another, armed with a rake, to his help, while young Tug 
 set the dog at their heels, and I hurrahed for joy to see such 
 villainy so properly treated. 
 
 ‘ That’s sufficient, ain’t it ? ’ said Mr. Scapgoat, with the 
 calmest air in the world. ‘ 0, completely,’ said the lawyer. 
 ‘ Mr. Tuggeridge, we’ve ten miles to dinner. Madam, your very 
 humble servant : ’ and the w^hole of them rode away. 
 
 NOVEMBER — Law Life Assurance. 
 
 We knew not what this meant, until we received a strange 
 document from Higgs, in London ; which begun, ‘ Middlesex to 
 wit. Samuel Cox, late of Portland Place, in the city of West- 
 minster, in the sf^id county, was attached to answer Samuel 
 Scapgoat, of a plea, wherefore, with force and arms, he entered 
 into one messuage, with the appurtenances, which J ohn Tuggeridge, 
 Esq., demised to the said Samuel Scapgoat, for a term which is 
 not yet expired, and ejected him.’ And it went on to say, that 
 ‘we, with force of arms, viz.^ with swords, knives, and staves, 
 had ejected him.’ Was there ever such a monstrous falsehood? 
 when we did but stand in defence of our own ; and isn’t it a sin, 
 that we should have been turned out of our rightful possessions 
 upon such a rascally plea ? 
 
 Higgs, Biggs, and Blatherwick had, evidently, been bribed ; 
 for, would you believe it ?— they told us to give up possession at 
 once, as a will was found, and we could not defend the action. 
 My Jemmy refused their proposal with scorn, and laughed at the 
 notion of the will ; she pronounced it to be a forgery, a vile 
 
« 
 
 NOVEMBER — LAW LIFE ASSURANCE. 
 
BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 395 
 
 blackamoor forgery ; and believes, to this day, that the story of 
 its having been made thirty years ago, in Calcutta, and left there 
 with old Tug's papers, and found there, and brought to England, 
 after a search made, by order of Tuggeridge, junior, is a scandalous 
 falsehood. 
 
 Well, the cause was tried. Why need I say anything con- 
 cerning it ? What shall I say of the Lord Chief Justice, but that 
 
 he ought to be ashamed of the wig he sits in. What of Mr. , 
 
 and Mr. , who exerted their eloquence against justice and 
 
 the poor ? On our side, too, was no less a man than Mr. Serjeant 
 Binks, who, ashamed I am, for the honour of the British bar, to 
 say it, seemed to have been bribed too ; for he actually threw up 
 his case ! Had he behaved like Mr. Mulligan, his junior — and 
 to whom, in this humble way, I offer my thanks — all might have 
 been well. I never knew such an effect produced, as when Mr. 
 Mulligan, appearing for the first time in that court, said, ‘ Standing 
 here, upon the pidestal of secred Thamis, seeing around me the 
 arnymints of a profission I rispict ; having before me a vinnerable 
 Judge, and an elightened Jury — the counthry's glory, the netion's 
 cheap defender, the poor man's priceless palladium — how must 
 I thrimble, my Lard, how must the blush bejew my cheek — 
 (somebody cried out, “ 0 cheeks ! " In the court there was a 
 dreadful roar of laughing ; and when order was established, Mr. 
 Mulligan, continued) — my Lard, I heed them not ; I come from 
 a counthry accustomed to opprission, and as that counthry — yes, 
 my Lard, that Ireland — (do not laugh, I am proud of it) — is ever, 
 in spite of her tyrants, green, and lovely, and beautiful ; my 
 client's cause, likewise, will rise shuperior to the malignant 
 imbecility — I repeat, the malignant imbecility, of those who 
 would thrample it down ; and in whose teeth, in my client's 
 name, in my counthry's, ay, and my own^ I, with folded arrums, 
 hurl a scarnful and eternal defiance ! ' 
 
 ‘ For heaven's sake, Mr. Milligan ' — ‘ Mulligan, me lakd,' 
 cried my defender — ‘ Well, Mulligan, then, be calm, and keep to 
 your brief.' 
 
 Mr. Mulligan did ; and for three hours and a quarter, in a 
 speech crammed with Latin quotations, and unsurpassed for 
 eloquence, he explained the situation of me and my family ; the 
 romantic manner in which Tuggeridge, the elder, gained his 
 fortune, and by which it afterwards came to my wife ; the state 
 of Ireland ; the original and virtuous poverty of the Coxes — from 
 which he glanced passionately, for a few minutes (until the judge 
 stopped him), to the poverty of his ov/n country ; my ex- 
 cellence as a husband, father, landlord ; my wife's, as a wife. 
 
396 BARBER COX, 
 
 mother, landlady. All was in vain — the trial went against 
 us. 
 
 I was soon taken in execution for the damages ; five hundred 
 pounds of law expenses of my own, and as much more of 
 Tuggeridge’s, 
 
 He would not pay a farthing, he said, to get me out of a 
 much worse place than the Fleet. 
 
 I need not tell you, that along with the land went the house 
 in town, and the money in the funds. Tuggeridge, he who had 
 thousands before, had it all. 
 
 And when I was in prison, who do you think would come 
 and see me? None of the Barons, nor Counts, nor Foreign 
 Ambassadors, nor Excellencies, who used to fill our house, and 
 eat and drink at our expense, — not even the ungrateful Tagrag ! 
 
 I could not help now saying to my dear wife, ‘ See, my love, 
 we have been gentlefolks for exactly a year, and a pretty life we 
 have had of it. In the first place, my darling, we gave grand 
 dinners, and everybody laughed at us.^ 
 
 ‘Yes, and recollect how ill they made you,’ cries my daughter. 
 
 ‘We asked great company, and they insulted us.’ 
 
 ‘And spoilt mamma’s temper,’ said Jemimarann. 
 
 ‘ Hush ! Miss,’ said her mother ; ‘we don’t want your advice.’ 
 
 ‘ Then you must make a country gentleman of me.’ 
 
 ‘And send Pa into dunghills,’ roared Tug. 
 
 ‘ Then you must go to operas, and pick up foreign Barons and 
 Counts.’ 
 
 ‘ 0, thank heaven ! dearest papa, that we are rid of them,’ 
 cries my little Jemimarann, looking almost happy, and kissing 
 her old pappy. 
 
 ‘ And you must make a fine gentleman of Tug there, and send 
 him to a fine school.’ 
 
 ‘ And I give you my word,’ says Tug, ‘ I’m as ignorant a chap 
 as ever lived.’ 
 
 ‘You’re an insolent saucebox,’ says Jemmy; ‘you’ve learned 
 that at your fine school.’ 
 
 ‘ I’ve learned something else, too, ma’am ; ask the boys if I 
 haven’t,’ grumbles Tug. 
 
 ‘ You hawk your daughter about, and just escape marrying her 
 to a swindler.’ 
 
 ‘And drive off poor Orlando,’ whimpered my girl. 
 
 ‘Silence, Miss,’ says Jemmy, fiercely. 
 
 ‘You insult the man whose father’s property you inherited, 
 and bring me into this prison, without hope of leaving it : for he 
 never can help us after all your bad language.’ I said all this 
 
AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 397 
 
 very smartly ; for the fact is, my blood was up at the time, and I 
 determined to rate my dear girl soundly. 
 
 ‘ Oh ! Sammy,’ said she, sobbing (for the poor thing’s spirit 
 was quite broken), ‘ it’s all true ; I’ve been very, very foolish and 
 vain, and I’ve punished my dear husband and children by my 
 follies, and I do so, so repent them ! ’ Here Jemimarann at once 
 burst out crying, and flung herself into her mamma’s arms, and the 
 pair roared and sobbed for ten minutes together. Even Tug looked 
 queer : and as for me, it’s a most extraordinary thing, but I’m blest 
 if seeing them so miserable didn’t make me quite happy. — I don’t 
 think, for the whole twelve months of our good fortune, I had ever 
 felt so gay as in that dismal room, in the Fleet, where I was locked up. 
 
 Poor Orlando Crump came to see us every day ; and we, who 
 had never taken the slightest notice of him, in Portland Place, 
 and treated him so cruelly that day at Beulah Spa, were only too 
 glad of his company now. He used to bring books for my girl, 
 and a bottle of sherry for me ; and he used to take home Jemmy’s 
 fronts, and dress them for her ; and when locking-up time came, 
 he used to see the ladies home to their little three pair bed-room, 
 in Holborn, where they slept now. Tug and all. ‘ Can the bird 
 forget its nest ? ’ Orlando used to say (he was a romantic young 
 fellow, that’s the truth, and blew the flute and read Lord Byron, 
 incessantly, since he was separated from Jemimarann) ; ‘ can the 
 bird, let loose in eastern climes, forget its home ? Can the rose 
 cease to remember its beloved bulbul ? — Ah, no. Mr. Cox, you 
 made me what I am, and what I hope to die — a hairdresser. I 
 never see a curling-irons before I entered your shop, or knew 
 Naples from brown Windsor. Did you not make over your house, 
 your furniture, your emporium of perfumery, and nine-and-twenty 
 shaving customers, to me? Are these trifles? Is Jemimarann a 
 trifle ? if she would allow me to call her so. 0, Jemimarann ! 
 your Pa found me in the workhouse, and made me what I am. 
 Conduct me to my grave, and I never, never shall be different ! ’ 
 When he had said this, Orlando was so much affected, that he 
 rushed suddenly on his hat, and quitted the room. 
 
 Then Jemimarann began to cry too. ‘0, Pa ! ’ said she, ‘isn’t 
 he, isn’t he a nice young man ? ’ 
 
 ‘ I’m hanged if he ain’t,’ says Tug. ‘ What do you think of 
 his giving me eighteenpence yesterday, and a bottle of lavender 
 water for Mimarann ? ’ 
 
 ‘ He might as well offer to give you back the shop, at any rate,’ 
 says Jemmy, 
 
 ‘ What ! to pay Tuggeridge’s damages ? My dear, I’d sooner 
 die than give Tuggeridge the chance.’ 
 
DECEMBER — CHRISTMAS BUSTLE. P. 39S. 
 
BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 399 
 
 DECEMBER — Christmas Bustle. 
 
 Tuggeridge vowed that I should finish my days there, when he 
 put me in prison. It appears that we both had reason to be 
 ashamed of ourselves ; and were, thank God ! I learned to be 
 sorry for my bad feelings towards him, and he actually wrote to 
 me to say, — 
 
 ‘Sir, — I think you have suffered enough for faults which, I 
 believe, do not lie with you, so much as your wife ; and I have 
 withdrawn my claims which I had against you while you were in 
 wrongful possession of my father’s estates. You must remember 
 that when, on examination of my father’s papers, no will was 
 found, I yielded up his property, with perfect willingness, to 
 those who I fancied were his legitimate heirs. For this I received 
 all sorts of insults from your wife and yourself (who acquiesced in 
 them) ; and when the discovery of a will, in India, proved my 
 just claims, you must remember how they were met, and the 
 vexatious proceedings with which you sought to oppose them. 
 
 ‘ I have discharged your lawyer’s bill ; and, as I believe you 
 are more fitted for the trade you formerly exercised than for any 
 other, I will give five hundred pounds for the purchase of a stock 
 and shop, when you shall find one to suit you. 
 
 ‘I enclose a draft for twenty pounds, to meet your present 
 expenses. You have, I am told, a son, a boy of some spirit ; if 
 he likes to try his fortune abroad, and go on board an Indiaman, 
 I can get him an appointment ; and am. Sir, your obedient 
 servant, John Tuggeridge.’ 
 
 It was Mrs. Breadbasket, the housekeeper, who brought this 
 letter, and looked mighty contemptuous as she gave it. 
 
 ‘I hope. Breadbasket, that your master will send me my 
 things, at any rate,’ cries Jemmy. ‘ There’s seventeen silk and 
 satin dresses, and a whole heap of trinkets, that can be of no 
 earthly use to him.’ 
 
 ‘ Don’t Breadbasket me, mem, if you please, mem. My master 
 says that them things is quite obnoxious to your sphere of life. 
 Breadbasket, indeed ! ’ and so she sailed out. 
 
 Jemmy hadn’t a word ; she had grown mighty quiet since we 
 had been in misfortune ; but my daughter looked as happy as a 
 queen ; and Tug, when he heard of the ship, gave a jump that 
 nearly knocked down poor Orlando. ‘Ah, I suppose you’ll 
 
400 BARBER COX, AND THE CUTTING OF HIS COMB 
 
 forget me now,' says he, with a sigh ; and seemed the only 
 unhappy person in company. 
 
 ‘ Why, you conceive, Mr. Crump,' says my wife, with a great 
 deal of dignity, ‘ that connected as we are, a young man born in 
 a work ' 
 
 ‘ W Oman ! ' cried I (for once in my life determined to have 
 my own way), ‘ hold your foolish tongue. Your absurd pride has 
 been the ruin of us, hitherto ; and, from this day. I'll have no 
 more of it. Hark ye, Orlando, if you will take Jemimarann, you 
 may have her ; and if you'll take five hundred pounds for a half 
 share of the shop, they're yours ; and that^s for you, Mrs. Cox.' 
 
 And here we are, back again. And I write this from the old 
 back shop, where we are all waiting to see the new year in. 
 Orlando sits yonder, plaiting a wig for my Lord Chief Justice, 
 as happy as may be ; and Jemimarann and her mother have been 
 as busy as you can imagine, all day long, and are just now giving 
 the finishing touches to the bridal dresses ; for the wedding is to 
 take place the day after to-morrow. I've cut seventeen heads 
 off (as I say) this very day; and as for Jemmy, I no more mind 
 her than I do the Emperor of China and all his Tambarins. 
 Last night we had a merry meeting of our friends and neighbours, 
 to celebrate our re-appearance among them ; and very merry we 
 all were. We had a capital fiddler, and we kept it up till a 
 pretty tidy hour this morning. We begun with quadrills, but 
 I never could do 'em well ; and, after that, to please Mr. Crump 
 and his intended, we tried a gallopard, which I found anything 
 but easy ; for since I am come back to a life of peace and comfort, 
 it's astonishing how stout I'm getting. So we turned at once to 
 what Jemmy and me excels in — a country dance ; which is rather 
 surprising, as we was both brought up to a town life. As for 
 young Tug, he showed off in a sailor's hornpipe ; which Mrs. 
 Cox says is very proper for him to learn, now he is intended for 
 the sea. But stop ! here comes in the punch-bowls ; and if we 
 are not happy, who is ? I say I am like the Swish people, for I 
 can't flourish out of my native hair. 
 
 THE END 
 
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