“That pretence,” continued the poet triumphantly, “is not confined to the head, though naturally it finds there its most swollen expression.”
“By the Lord, that’s true,” murmured Mr. Bellingham, and the sweet Corinna choked a little laugh into her handkerchief.
“Those side elevations, for instance,” went on Mr. Cibber, with a doubtful glance askance at the lady, “concealing as they do the buttresses and clerestory windows of the nave, constitute in their upper order a mere mask to the real form and construction of the building. Now, in a perfect design there should be no screening of structural necessities, but an ingenious adaptation of all such to the general conception. These, sir, are a few of the most patent defects, upon which, saving your patience, I could enlarge at pleasure. But I trust I have said enough to correct your point of view to its necessary focus; and if some disenchantment is the result——”
“Well, well, Mr. Cibber,” interrupted the old gentleman—“well, well. But I don’t know that I can quite confess to that.”
“O, very good, sir!” cried the poet ironically. “And according to what impenetrable illusion, if you please, do you persist in your faith?”
“Why,” said the old gentleman—“why, you see, Mr. Cibber, I designed the thing myself.”
“Sir Christopher, Sir Christopher!” cried a breathless gentleman who came hurrying up at the moment. “We had lost you, sir. This was naughty of you to venture up the hill alone.”
Mr. Bellingham, with one look at the rueful Laureate, sat flat down upon the pavement and delivered himself to hysterics.
THE SURGEON OF GOUGH SQUARE
He was a young man, but appearing careworn and prematurely aged. His face had a spoiled and dingy look such as an actor’s bears by daylight, when for the paint and glow and glamour of the boards are substituted the grey and gripping realities of existence. The fruitlessness of all hope, of all cheery effort, seemed typified for him in the stagnant November fog which brooded over the City without. As he gazed through his window into the dreary murk, the dull roar which reached his ears from Fleet Street and its adjacent market sounded to him like the boom of surf to a castaway in a desolate land. He was stranded, he felt, among the waste places of life, and no prospect of release was ever more to be his.