“‘In an hour’s time we shall be attacked by the military,’” to whom he promises a warm reception; and in the event of the robbers being overpowered by numbers, “a train communicates with the magazine below.”
“Here the head of the unfortunate nun made its appearance on a silver dish. Its loveliness, even in death, was intensely overpowering. With a grin of fiendish malice, Grabalotti seized it by the hair, but no sooner did the features meet his eye, than he relinquished his hold and fell, senseless, backwards, faintly gasping, like a dying echo, ‘’Tis she! ’Tis Giulia!!’”
Unless the artist guest was possessed of courage uncommon among our fraternity, he could not have contemplated being blown into the air with the robbers, or being shot by the soldiers, with equanimity; and he must have been much relieved in any case by Grabalotti, who, when “the violence of frantic ferocity” had given way to “the calm profundity of despair,” muttered in a low and suppressed tone: “Nay, thou shalt live to tell the world my story!” and to enable his guest to do this eventually, “in a tone of sweetest melancholy” he said:
“Stranger, hence! thy further stay is perilous. Yon by-path will conduct thee to the valleys.”
Rising from “the valleys” was a crag, to the summit of which half an hour’s walk would take the artist, and from thence he was assured that “if he turned his gaze backwards he should see something worth seeing.”
The narrator tells us that he reached the crag in twenty-nine minutes exactly.
“For one minute I gazed in the direction of the Brigands’ Haunt, from which, precisely at the expiration of that time, a vivid flash of flame, shooting into the air, accompanied by a dense column of smoke, and followed by a terrific explosion, proclaimed too plainly the last achievement of the Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell.”
Mr. Percival Leigh contributes a second story to the “Fiddle-Faddle Fashion-book,” in which the novel of fashionable life, not uncommon fifty years ago, is satirized under the title of “Belleville: a Tale of Fashionable Life,” not less happily than the sanguinary and terribly romantic writers are treated in the burlesque of Grabalotti. The “Clara Matilda poets” of the Keepsake time are also amusingly parodied in some short poems, which, with comic advertisements, occasionally very humorous, fill up the literary portion of the “Fiddle-Faddle Fashion-book.”
This book is not the only one in which Leech’s powers have been enlisted—I was nearly saying prostituted—in publications devoted to eccentricities in dress and the caprices of fashion. In illustrations by him of the tale of fashionable life, or of Grabalotti, the genius of that great artist would have had full play; but as the draughtsman of fashion-plates it was, in my opinion, degraded. In vindication of my judgment I present my readers with two plates from the “Fiddle-Faddle” book, in which Leech portrays—no doubt under direction—caprices of fashion which could only have existed in his own imagination, and produced with a feeling of caricature that is so conspicuous by its absence in his usual work.
I now return to the paper which Mr. Leigh wrote with a view to this memoir.