Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

THOMAS BEWICK AND HIS ART

The charge for lodging, it will be seen, is almost the smallest item. Nivernais, of course, paid the bill en grand seigneur, merely remarking that business on such terms must be exceptionally profitable. The sequel of the story is, however, entirely to the credit of "perfidious Albion." The county gentry were scandalized at the imposition, and the other Canterbury innkeepers at once took steps to disclaim all connection with their rapacious brother. In a letter to the St. James's Chronicle, the "Lion" endeavoured to justify himself upon the grounds above stated; but he was practically boycotted, and ruined in six months, being at last only set on his feet again by the Duke himself, who helped him from France with money.

(Eighteenth Century Vignettes. Second Series.)

THOMAS BEWICK AND HIS ART

IF you ask a true Bewickian about Bewick, he will begin by dilating upon the markings of the Bittern, the exquisite downy plumage of the Short-eared Owl, the lustrous spring coat of the Starling, the relative and competitive excellences of the Woodcock and the White Grouse; but sooner or later he will wander off unconsciously to the close-packed pathos of the microscopic vignette where the cruel cur is tearing at the worried ewe, whose poor little knock-kneed lamb looks on in trembling terror; or to the patient, melancholy shapes of the black and white horses seen vaguely through the pouring rain in the tailpiece to

THOMAS BEWICK AND HIS ART

the "Missal Thrush "; or to the excellent jest of the cat stealing the hypocrite's supper while he mumbles his long-winded grace. He will tell you how Charles Kingsley, the brave and manly, loved these things; how they fascinated the callow imagination of Charlotte Brontë in her dreary moorland parsonage ; how they stirred the delicate insight of the gentle, pure-souled Leslie; and how Ruskin (albeit nothing if not critical) has lavished upon them some of the most royal of his epithets.

As a moralist, Bewick is never tired of exhibiting the lachrimæ rerum, the brevity of life, the emptiness of fame. The staved-in, useless boat; the ruined and deserted cottage, with the grass growing at the hearthstone; the ass rubbing itself against the pillar that celebrates the "glorious victory"; the churchyard, with its rising moon, and its tombstone legend, "Good Times, bad Times, and all Times got over," are illustrations of this side of his genius. But the subject is one which could not be exhausted in many papers, for this little gallery is Bewick's "criticism of life," and he had seventy-five years' experience. His final effort was a ferryman waiting to carry a coffin from Eltringham to Ovingham; and on his death-bed he was meditating his favourite work. In a lucid moment of his last wanderings he was asked of what he had been thinking, and he replied, with a faint smile, that he had been devising subjects for some new Tailpieces.

(Eighteenth Century Vignettes. First Series.)

THE SIMPLE LIFE

THE SIMPLE LIFE

"And 'a babbled of green fields.”

-SHAKESPEARE-CUM-THEOBALD.

WHEN the starlings dot the lawn,

Cheerily we rise at dawn;

Cheerily, with blameless cup,
Greet the wise world waking up ;--
Ah, they little know of this,-
They of Megalopolis !

Comes the long, still morning when
Work we ply with book and pen ;
Then, the pure air in our lungs,-
Then "persuasion tips our tongues ";
Then we write as would, I wis,
Men in Megalopolis!

Next (and not a stroke too soon !)
PHYLLIS spreads the meal of noon,
Simple, frugal, choicely clean,
Gastronomically mean;-
Appetite our entrée is,

Far from Megalopolis !

Salad in our garden grown,
Endive, beetroot,-all our own;

Bread, we saw it made and how ;
Milk and cream, -we know the cow;
Nothing here of " Force " or " Vis "
As at Megalopolis!

44

THE SIMPLE LIFE

After, surely, there should be,
Somewhere, seats beneath a tree,
Where we-'twixt the curling rings-
Dream of transitory things;
Chiefly of what people miss
Drowsed in Megalopolis !

Then, before the sunlight wanes,
Comes the lounge along the lanes;
Comes the rocking shallop tied
By the reedy river-side ;-
Clearer waves the light keel kiss
Than by Megalopolis !

So we speed the golden hours
In this Hermitage of ours
(Hermits we are not, believe !
Every Adam has his Eve,
Loved with a serener bliss
Than in Megalopolis) :-

So until the shadows fall:

Then Good Night say each and all;
Sleep secure from smoke and din,
Quiet Conscience tucks us in;
Ah, they nothing know of this,—
They of Megalopolis!

(Thus URBANUS to his Wife
Babbled of The Simple Life.
Then his glances unawares
Lighting on a List of Shares-
Gulping all his breakfast down,
Bustled, by the Train, to Town.)

A VISIT TO HORACE WALPOLE

A VISIT TO HORACE WALPOLE

44

To the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism it may seem an almost hopeless task to revive the details of a day in a Twickenham Villa when George the Third was King. And yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's letters, of the " Walpoliana " of Pinkerton, and, above all, of the catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its owner in 1774, there is no insurmountable difficulty in deciding what must probably have been the customary course of events. Nothing is needed at the outset but to assume that you had arrived, late on the previous night, at the embattled Gothic building on the Teddington Road, and that the fatigues of your journey had left you little more than a vague notion of your host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast hour was nine. Then, after carrying with you into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber an indistinct recollection of Richardson's drawings of Pope and his mother, and of Bermingham's "owl cut in paper," which you dimly make out with your candle on the walls, you would be waked at eight next morning by Colomb, the Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master as his compatriot Canton in the "Clandestine Marriage"), and in due time would repair to the bluepapered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, looking pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coasting leisurely round the apartment, you would probably pause before M. de Carmontel's double picture of your host's dead friend, Madame du Deffand, and her relative the Duchesse de Choiseul, or you would peer curiously at the view of Madame de Sévigné's hotel

« AnkstesnisTęsti »