Miss Kilmansegg.
Leech's drawings which decorate "Miss Kilmansegg" display his appreciation of beauty and character, and are, in some examples, of great artistic excellence—notably in the portrait of the foreign gentleman who became the husband of the heiress. Some of them are, of course, deficient in the artistic qualities with which his long practice enabled him to enrich his latest work.
My space will not permit of my making many extracts from Hood's admirable work—only, indeed, so far as to explain Leech's drawings; but to those of my readers who make Miss Kilmansegg's acquaintance for the first time in these pages, I heartily recommend a perusal of the poem, and envy them the pleasure they will find in reading it.
Of course Miss Kilmansegg
"... learnt to sing and to dance,
To sit on a horse although he should prance,
And to speak a French not spoken in France
Any more than at Babel's building."
The steed was a thoroughbred of great spirit—
"A regular thoroughbred Irish horse,
And he ran away, as a matter of course,
With a girl worth her weight in guineas."
I think it would be very difficult to find a description of any event in any book to equal Hood's account of the mad career of the Irish horse and its unfortunate rider: