A Parrot.
This representative of the most “popular” of “all the winged inhabitants of air,” might have been taken for the likeness of some species between an owl and the booby-bird; but then the wings and back were coloured with a lively green, and the under part had yellow streaks, and the beak was of a red colour, and any colour did for the eyes, if they were larger than they ought to have been. “In my time” too, there was an “image” of a “fine bow pot,” consisting of half a dozen green shapes like halbert tops for “make believe” leaves, spreading like a half opened fan, from a knot “that was not,” inasmuch as it was delicately concealed by a tawny coloured ball called an orange, which pretended to rest on a clumsy clump of yellowed plaster as on the mouth of a jar—the whole looking as unlike a nosegay in water as possible. Then, too, there was a sort of obelisk with irregular projections and curves; the top, being smaller than the bottom, was marked out with paint into a sort of face, and, by the device of divers colours, it was bonnetted, armed, waisted, and petticoated—this was called a “fine lady.” A lengthened mass became by colourable show, “a dog”—like ingenuity might have tortured it into a devil. The feline race were of two shapes and in three sizes; the middle one—like physic in a bottle, “when taken, to be well shaken,” moved its chalk head, to the wonder and delight of all urchins, until they informed themselves of its “springs of action,” at the price of “only a penny,” and, by breaking it, discovered that the nodding knob achieved its un-cat-like motion, by being hung with a piece of wire to the interior of its hollow body. The lesser cat was not so very small, considering its price—“a farthing:”—I speak of when battered button tops represented that plentiful “coin of the realm.” Then there was the largest
Cat.
Cat.
The present [representation] favours the image too much. Neither this engraving, nor that of the “parrot,” is sufficiently like—the artist says he “could not draw it bad enough:” what an abominable deficiency is the want of “an eye”—heigho! Then there were so many things, that were not likenesses of any thing of which they were “images,” and so many years and cares have rolled over my head and heart, that I have not recollection or time enough for their description. They are all gone, or going—“going out” or “gone out” for ever! Personal remembrance is the frail and only memorial of the existence of some of these “ornaments” of the humble abodes of former times.
The masterpieces on the board of the “image-man,” were “a pair,”—at that time “matchless.” They linger yet, at the extreme corners of a few mantle-pieces, with probably a “sampler” between, and, over that, a couple of feathers from Juno’s bird, gracefully adjusted into a St. Andrew’s cross—their two gorgeous eyes giving out “beautiful colours,” to the beautiful eyes of innocent children. The “images,” spoken of as still in being, are of the colossal height of eighteen inches, more or less: they personate the “human form divine,” and were designed, perhaps, by Hayman, but their moulds are so worn that the casts are unfeatured, and they barely retain their bodily semblance. They are always painted black, save that a scroll on each, which depends from a kind of altar, is left white. One of the inscriptions says,
“Into the heaven of heavens I have presumed, &c.”
and all, except the owners, admire the presumption. The “effigy” looks as if the man had been up the chimney, and, instead of having “drawn empyrean air,” had taken a glass too much of Hodges’s “Imperial,” and wrapped himself in the soot-bag to conceal his indulgence and his person—this is “Milton.” The other, in like sables, points to his inscription, beginning,
“The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, &c.”