Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of “pootiness and wirtue.”  I so agree with him!  I adore them both, especially in women and children.  I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the pootiness.

But indeed for me—­speaking as an artist, and also, perhaps, a little bit as a man—­pootiness is almost a wirtue in itself.  I don’t think I shall ever weary of trying to depict it, from its dawn in the toddling infant to its decline and setting and long twilight in the beautiful old woman, who has known how to grow old gradually.  I like to surround it with chivalrous and stalwart manhood; and it is a standing grievance to me that I have to clothe all this masculine escort in coats and trousers and chimney-pot hats; worse than all, in the evening dress of the period!—­that I cannot surround my divinity with a guard of honour more worthily arrayed!

Thus, of all my little piebald puppets, the one I value the most is my pretty woman.  I am as fond of her as Leech was of his; of whom, by-the-way, she is the granddaughter!  This is not artistic vanity; it is pure paternal affection, and by no means prevents me from seeing her faults; it only prevents me from seeing them as clearly as you do!

Please be not very severe on her, for her grandmother’s sake.  Words fail me to express how much I loved her grandmother, who wore a cricket-cap and broke Aunt Sally’s nose seven times.

[Illustration:  A PICTORIAL PUZZLE

TENOR WARBLER (with passionate emphasis on the first word of each line)—­ “Me-e-e-e-e-e-t me once again, M-e-e-e-e-t me once aga-a-ain—­”

Why does the Cat suddenly jump off the Hearth-rug, rush to the Door, and make frantic Endeavors to get out?—­Punch.]

Will my pretty woman ever be all I wish her to be?  All she ought to be?  I fear not!  On the mantelpiece in my studio at home there stands a certain lady.  She is but lightly clad, and what simple garment she wears is not in the fashion of our day.  How well I know her!  Almost thoroughly by this time—­for she has been the silent companion of my work for thirty years!  She has lost both her arms and one of her feet, which I deplore; and also the tip of her nose, but that has been made good!

She is only three feet high, or thereabouts, and quite two thousand years old, or more; but she is ever young—­

      “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
      Her infinite variety!”

and a very giantess in beauty.  For she is a reduction in plaster of the famous statue at the Louvre.

They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos!  It is a calumny—­a libel.  She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is on the side of austerity.  She is not only pootiness but wirtue incarnate (if one can be incarnate in marble), from the crown of her lovely head to the sole of her remaining foot—­a very beautiful foot, though by no means a small one—­it has never worn a high-heel shoe!