“Fifth Boy: ‘They don’t pinch his’n.’
“Sixth Boy: ‘Yes, they do.’
“First Boy: ‘Go easy, Blacky; mind his corns.’ (Swell winces.) ‘That was a nasty one.’
“(The comments are extended from the swell’s boots to his costume and appearance generally. And all this for a penny).”
Mr. Thackeray’s “Four Georges” are, no doubt, familiar to my readers, some of whom may also remember his delivery of them in the form of lectures to large audiences. In that great writer’s early time he wrote many essays, art-criticisms, etc., under the name of “Michael Angelo Titmarsh,” and it is under that title that he is represented in the drawing by his friend Leech, as he appeared at Willis’s Rooms “in his celebrated character of Mr. Thackeray.”
In the Month, Mr. Albert Smith makes Leech’s drawing a peg upon which he hangs some justly complimentary remarks on the Thackeray lectures which took the town by storm forty years ago.
Whether the “Belle of Hyde Park” or the “Belle of the Ball” is to be considered the belle of the Month’s July issue is left in doubt; but there is no doubt whatever about the claim of the pretty creature (who, accompanied by an extremely plain and dissolute-looking cavalier in the costume of Charles II.’s time, enters an imaginary ball-room) to a loveliness that it would be difficult to surpass, as the drawing amply proves.
This cut is accompanied by some verses which appear to me quite unreadable; I therefore spare my readers from the infliction of any of them.
The frontispiece to the Month for August is an etching by Leech of singular beauty, called “Charade Acting.” I have looked in vain through the letter-press for any explanation of this charade, so I suppose the meaning is purposely left for discovery to the intelligence of the observer. It represents the clever performance of Mr. Smiley and Miss Corgy.