Punch (78.1880)

Jdne by 1880.] PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

253

FRED ON PRETTY GIRLS AND PICTURES.

Dear Gcs,

I ’m not top form at writing,
but seeing you ’re laid by the leg—
Beastly bother that cropper on Bugler !
—that horse must have been a bad
egg!—

I will drop you some chat, as I promised.
Don’t look for Ted’s rattle, I beg !

Awful fellow that Ted at his letters!—
he writes for the Scanmag, you know;
And his style never falls below “par.”
—Not my joke, heard him putting
it so—

And the “pars” in the Scanmag— he
does them—are proper, and chock
full of ‘ go.’

Only paper I care to grind through, never
preachy, or gushing, or slow !

“ Terse and tart!” is Ted’s motto, he
says; and he does touch ’em up,
Gtrs, indeed!

“ The Slow is the only Gehenna that’s
left in Society’s Creed
That’s another of Ted’s apopth—Oh,
come, I really can't spell it, old man:
Means maxims, you know. Well, I
think, having prowled from Beer-
sheba to Dan,

That Society isn’t far wrong. Dan, dear boy, was the Grosvenor, with me,

And Beersheba was Burlington House, both as beastly slow holes as can be.
Talk of valleys of Dry Bones ! I tell you the specimens “ down in Judee,”

Must have been precious dry to beat Bond Street on Saturday morning at
three,

“ Why go ? ” Well, the Scraggington girls, who are nuts upon “ motives” and
tones,—

Who go in for wasp-waists and Rosetti—though he’s a bit “ fleshly,” Bell owns,
(Which is very much more than she is, for her flesh scarcely covers her bones,)
And gush till their eyes grow like saucers concerning that fellow Burne J ones—
Are up, and 1 have to escort them, worse luck ! Oh, dear boy, how I gape !
Why there isn’t one out of the three has a bit more of sense than of shape.

If one of those paint-spilling chaps had a clothes-prop to pose and to drape
With a few yards of tight-twisted serge, Bell would beat it for slimness and
angles.

I give you my word I’m so sick of her sausage-skin dress and her bangles,

Her voice which is always a gasp, and her hair which is always in tangles,

I’d like, yes, by Jingo, to dose her with one of Medea’s worst messes,

Dr choke the last “oh!” from her thorax with one of her own snaky
tresses.

Art ’8 rot. I’ve arrived at that sweeping conclusion by rigorous roads,

And I’ll stick to it, Gussy, my boy, though they prod me with critical goads.
Pretty girls, nicely painted, I grant you, are all very well, in their way,

Though one pretty girl on your arm is worth twenty on canvas, 1 say ;

But the deuce of it is they aren't pretty, these painters’ she-creatures. A hag
With a face like a sea-sick consumptive’s, a neck that’s a regular scrag,

For a beauty is rather too rich ; sots a fellow adrift to be told,

By a similar guy in the flesh,—what there is of it—open and bold,

That the pea-green presentment is Psyche or Yenus. It strikes me, dear boy,
Though classical trash and stone figures are things I could never enjoy,

Those Greek fellows were far better form than to worship a woman whose skin
Was the colour of stale sorrel soup, and whose hand was as limp as a fin.

No, the painters can’t paint pretty girls. As for anything else, such as pigs,
And babies, and buttercup gatherers, buffers in full-bottomed wigs,

Rustics, female and male, digging things, in a style in which Hodge never digs,

As though they were posed for a tableau, and stockingless chits dancing jigs,
Historical Swells in their war-paint, and landscapes all wheel-rucks and
twigs—

It’s all bread and butter and bunkum. Dare say there’s some use for a saint,
P’raps even for babies and boors, but I really don’t think it’s to paint.

Bad enough to put up with such bores in the flesh, but to hang them in rooms,
Where elbow spread’s not to be had, and the skirts brush the dust up like
brooms,

Till the small of one’s back is one ache, and one’s neck has a horrible crick,—
Oh, it’s just purgatorial penance, a draw in advance on Old Nick !

At least so the thing seemed to me, though I do not pre-
tend I’m a judge,—

“How supremely intense!” groans the girl. “How
intensely disgusting! ” says I.

“You’re a Philistine, Fred!” she remarks, with no
end of contempt in her eye.

“But what is the subject?” “Oh! subject, in Art, is
no object,” she said.

“Gad, Gladys,” I cried, “there you’re wrong, you are
putting the tail for the head ;

“ /should say such an object as that is no subject for
Art.” But, dear boy,

A man with a fresh-broken leg is not likely this trash to
enjoy.

We are going to Bond Street again, almost envy you
stretched on your bed;

Four hours of Makart and Burne-Jones beats a fracture!

Yours, wearily,

Fred.

FIRES IN SURREY.

’Arry’s Spring depredations are confined to the haw-
thorns and chestnuts. But Surrey is worse than ’Arry.
Its roughs are firing its commons, setting the gorse
blazing over hundreds of acres, and leaving a blackened
waste, where but now all was spring green and golden
blossom.

This is mischief all the more irritating that it is either
wanton, and malicious, or the mask of other mischief
more insidious and demoralising if less conspicuous.
Some say that these fires are the work of poaching rogues
who take this means of drawing keepers and cottagers in
one direction, that they may pursue their little game of
stealing pheasants’ eggs in another. Others say it is the
work of labourers irritated by curtailment of common
privileges enjoyed so long that they had assumed the
character of rights in the eyes of those who used them.

In any case these fires leave ugly scathes and scars
on the face of the coimtry at its fairest, and, worst of
all, within the range of some of Punch's favourite walk-
ing and sketching haunts, all about Dorking, and Leith
Hill, and Holmwood, with their wild stretches of fir-forest,
and gorsy common, and lovely birch and beech copse.
Only the other day we heard of a painter—a friend of
the human race—whose house at Holmbury was with
difficulty saved from the black jaws of mie of these
Surrey incendiary fires.

If only Punch could light upon the sneaking kindlers
of these fires, how he would like to inflict summary
justice on them, before handing them over to Mr. Hard-
man, the excellent Chairman of the Surrey Bench—the
harder the man the better fitted to deal with such
rascals!

Punch would be almost tempted to pitch a few of the
scoundrels into their own fires. That would be at least
giving bits of the waste to feed the flames!

PICKPURSES.

From some recent correspondence it appears that the
thieves in our thoroughfares have lately turned their
especial attention to “purse-snatching.” For this
ladies are described as offering every facility by a
habit they have lately adopted of carrying their purses
in their hands as they walk the streets. One ob-
server declared that he and a friend, in the course of
a walk from the Army and Navy Club to Grosvenor
Square, counted no less than seventeen ladies thus
carrying their purses. This fashion may have been sug-
gested by the example of the legendary little pigs that
ran about ready-roasted crying, “Come, eat me!” So,
“Come, pick me! ” is the cry of these purses in their
fair owner’s hands. Wearing your heart on your sleeve,
for daws to peck at, is a practice which Othello con-
demns. What would the Moor have said to carrying your
purse in your hand, for London thieves to “grab at ?”

Art’s rot! Give me Nature, dear boy, wearing “ Sixes ” but pretty and plump.
The worst is that girls dress up now to the daubs of each dashed High Art
Pump.

The lemon and sunflower lot, sour and gawky like Gwenda and Gladys,

They ’re two of the Scraggington girls—crack-jaw names the last finical fad is—
Are out of the race by a mile. I was looking with one, at a smudge,—

Quoth the Basuto.

“ Am I not a man and a brother ? ”

Asked a Governor Punch could well spare.

“ Nay,” said the Basutos ; “ quite t’other ;

’Tis by name, not by nature, you’re FrcreP