“‘Mr. Smee, you are looking at my picture of “Boadishia?”’ says Gandish. Wouldn’t he have caught it for his quantities at Grey Friars, that’s all.
“‘Yes—ah—yes,’ says Mr. Smee, putting his hand over his eyes, and standing before it, looking steady, you know, as if he was going to see whereabouts he should hit Boadishia.
“‘It was painted when you were a young man, four years before you were an associate, Smee. Had some success in its time, and there’s good pints about that picture,’ Gandish goes on. ‘But I never could get my price for it; and here it hangs in my own room. Igh art won’t do in this country, Colonel—it’s a melancholy fact.’
“‘High art! I should think it is high art!’ whispers old Smee; ‘fourteen feet high, at least!’ And then out loud he says ‘The picture has very fine points in it, Gandish, as you say. Foreshortening of that arm, capital! That red drapery carried off into the right of the picture very skilfully managed!’
“‘It’s not like portrait-painting, Smee—Igh art,’ says Gandish. ‘The models of the hancient Britons in that pictur alone cost me thirty pound—when I was a struggling man, and had just married my Betsey here. You reckonise Boadishia, Colonel, with the Roman elmet, cuirass, and javeling of the period—all studied from the hantique, sir, the glorious hantique.’
“‘All but Boadicea,’ says father. ‘She remains always young.’ And he began to speak the lines out of Cowper, he did—waving his stick like an old trump—and famous they are,” cries the lad:
“When the British warrior queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods”—
“Jolly verses! Haven’t I translated them into alcaics?” says Clive, with a merry laugh, and resumes his history.
“‘Oh, I must have those verses in my album,’ cries one of the young ladies. ‘Did you compose them, Colonel Newcome?’ But Gandish, you see, is never thinking about any works but his own, and goes on, ‘Study of my eldest daughter, exhibited 1816.’
“‘No, pa, not ’16,’ cries Miss Gandish. She don’t look like a chicken, I can tell you.