The pretty music seems to have sentimentalized the handsome youth, and drawn him closer to the performer, who is one of those sweet creatures with whom the artist has made us so familiar. I cannot refrain from presenting my readers with an example of the poetry that adorns the Month, so that they may be convinced of the propriety of giving them as little of it as possible. Forty-one verses, of which the two following are fair examples, accompany the drawing called Pestal:
| “In London, as usual, last season I spent, To Pocklington Square my notes were addressed all, And wherever I rambled or wandered or went, I was pestered with that horrid pest of a ‘Pestal.’ “I thought this mysterious, moreover, and queer, ’Tis better at once that the truth be confest all— That all through the city one word should appear, And that word the incomprehensible ‘Pestal.’” |
“The Great Dinner-Bell Nuisance” not only gives occasion for a capital drawing by Leech, but the title also heads a capital paper, in which the absurdity of the function, when there is not the least necessity for it, is well satirized. A retired lawyer named Watkins Brown lives in a village which contains at most 347 people, “in a comfortable sort of house in the Italian style, which he christened Somerford Villa.” He has no children, and his establishment consists of five persons, Mrs. W. B., Betsy, the cook, etc., including Buttons, the page. This boy, armed with a bell, is a nuisance to the neighbourhood; he performs upon it three times a day. “Now,” says the indignant writer, “why does Buttons do this? Is it to echo back the sound that comes at the same hours from Sir Marmaduke Hamilton’s, of Somerford Hall, and to impress people that Brown and Sir Marmaduke are the only gentlemen in the neighbourhood? It can’t be to let Brown and his wife know that luncheon or dinner is ready, for in nine cases out of ten they are in the room when the cloth is laid. Again I ask, why does Buttons do this? If he is of opinion that his master is unaware it is time to dress for dinner, why doesn’t he tell him so at once when he is in the room, instead of using such an absurd system of information? However, by six o’clock Brown and his wife are in the drawing-room, and Buttons seeing them there, and perceiving that they are just about to go to the dining-room, rushes out to the little court-yard, and then to the door of the miniature conservatory, and again commits the offence he had committed half an hour before. In the baby courtyard there are two dogs chained, and two other sporting dogs in a model of a kennel. Well, Buttons appears in the presence of the dogs with his great bell, and the sensible brutes, conscious of the pain they are about to endure, immediately set up a howl of quadruple agony, to which the bell tolls its awful accompaniment.”
Exactly fifty years ago I went on a portrait-painting tour into the country. Some sitters were promised to me, and I had hope, subsequently justified, that they would be the precursors of others. Amongst my patrons was a clergyman of aristocratic lineage; who, though he had inherited little in the shape of money, was possessed of certain tastes common to the upper ten, in which he could not afford to indulge; but amongst them was the dinner-bell, in which he did indulge, to the great annoyance of his neighbours. The Vicarage was an unpretending house with a small garden about it, in a small village; the inhabitants were chiefly Methodists, and the congregation at church was the smallest I ever saw.
The Vicar was not popular; the villagers disliked what they called “his airs and graces,” and they detested his dinner-bell. After sittings from the Vicar, he and I took occasional walks together, and one day, as we were passing a cobbler’s shop, the proprietor of it, “a detestable little Radical Methodist,” as the Vicar called him, appeared at his door with a huge bell in his hand; he stepped into the middle of the road, and, affecting not to see us, he rang it furiously.
“Man! man!” cried the Vicar, “stop that! What are you making that dreadful noise for?”
“Well, ye see,” replied the cobbler, in the language of the county, “it’s ma dinner-time, and aase joust ringin’ mysen in, to a bit of berry pudden.”
I was so vividly reminded by the Month’s “Dinner-Bell Nuisance” of my early experience, that I could not resist my inclination to introduce it into what purports to be the life of John Leech, in which it has no business whatever to appear. Once more I apologize, and hope I may not be tempted to “do it again.”
Of all the Belles of the Month, the belle of the month November is perhaps the most lovable. There she stands on Brighton Pier—stands, that is to say, as well as she can on those pretty feet of hers, against a wind that is so boisterously rude to her and to her mother, whose figure, blown out of shape, makes a striking contrast to her daughter’s. The little dog declines to face the gale, which seems likely to carry him away altogether, as well as the struggling child behind. The touches of cloud and sea, together with the screaming gulls, are indicated with the facile skill peculiar to Leech.
| The Belle of the Month November “in Distress off a Lee-shore—Brighton Pier.” |