“Oh,” was the reply, “I think I know what you are; but what’s your name?”
“You know what I am?” said I, surprised; “what am I?”
“Well, you are in the same line that we are, I fancy.”
“And what line is that?”
“The army tailoring. Am I right?”
In the illustration that accompanies these remarks Leech has succeeded in presenting to us a Norman knight completely characteristic, a Crusader more real, I think, than any modern could have rendered him. The lady he escorts, in a dress a few hundred years after Crusading times, is very lovely. The capital little Marchioness, with the big door-key, the four-wheeler, and the laughing crowd, make up a scene of inimitable humour.
We now come to the first of those precocious youths in whose mannish ways, whose delightful impertinence to their elders, whose early susceptibility to the passion of love for ladies three times older than themselves, are shown by Leech in many a scene I should have given to my readers, but over them the Copyright Act stands guard. “’Tis true, ’tis pity, pity ’tis, ’tis true,” that in a book intended solely to do honour to Leech’s genius, so many of the most perfect examples of it are denied to us.
| “Sir! Please, Mr.! Sir! you’ve forgot the Door-key!” |
Well may the governor stare with open-mouthed astonishment at such a proposal from such a creature! Look at him as he throws his little arm over his chair in the swaggering attitude he has so often observed in his elders, and raises a full glass of claret! “Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined;” but that we know that in this instance the twig is indulging in a harmless freak, one might be inclined to dread the tree’s inclining.
| Eton Boy (loq.): “Come, governor! just one toast—‘The Ladies’!” |