Lacépède composed his Histoire des Poissons during the French Revolution.
Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.
This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats, in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."
A Woman and a Child
On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully girlish young creature—a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love, maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.
We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her—she smiled delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty people never touched lips before—I'm certain of it. It was impossible to believe that this virginal creature was a mother—childbirth left no trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence that she was the mother at all.
The Albert Hall Hag
While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast thrust itself before me—she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt, cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes, dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat, beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a knot—this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!) stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the strings—they merely held the handle.
A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not 'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt, holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us—one would say she was frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.
After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful task—like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into bed—she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this harrowing incident—for each time she held out the bag, she smiled, which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar prominence and said something—an inarticulate noise in a very high pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R——, "She claims to be a woman." If any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing absently—two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.