“Egg will be pleased if you will dine with him any day next week, sir, that you may be disengaged. He expects the usual set—Dickens, Landseer, Leech, and the rest. You have never met Leech, I think; he is very desirous to make your acquaintance.”
“Ah, is he? Well, I don’t care about knowing Leech.”
“Really, sir” (it was always the Johnsonian sir to the old gentleman), said I, when I had recovered from my surprise, “may I ask why you won’t meet Leech?”
“Yes, you may,” said the old painter, “and I will tell you. Of course you remember that unfortunate postal envelope that I designed? Well, Leech caricatured it. You needn’t look so surprised—you don’t think I am such a fool as to mind being caricatured; but I do mind being represented as a blood-sucker! What else can he mean by using that infernal little leech in a bottle in the front of his caricature as my signature? You know well enough, Frith, that I have never asked monstrous prices for my pictures. You fellows get better paid for your work than I ever did, and you wouldn’t like to be called blood-suckers, I expect.”
Mr. Mulready was an Irishman, and rather a peppery one; and I am happy to say that I overcame my disposition to laugh in his face mainly through a feeling of astonishment that my old friend could be ignorant of the ordinary way in which Leech signed his drawings.
“Do you happen to have a number of Punch by you, Mr. Mulready?” said I.
“No; as a languid swell said when he was asked that same question, ‘I am no bookworm; I never see Punch.’”
As I could not give my angry friend ocular proof of his mistake by producing the usual signature to Punch drawings, I set to work to explain how the little leech came into the bottle, and, without much difficulty, convinced my old friend that an insult to him was not intended.
The two artists met; and it was delightful to watch Leech’s handsome face as Mulready himself told of his misconception. First there was a serious, almost pained, expression, which, no doubt, arose in that tender heart from being the innocent cause of pain to another; the serious look passed off, to give place to a smile, which broadened into a roar of laughter. From that moment Leech and Mulready were fast friends.
With an apology for the interruption, I return to my narrative.