Like all the best of its kind, and its kind the best, she never sates nor palls, and the more I look at her the more I see to love and worship—­and, alas! the more dissatisfied I feel—­not indeed with the living beauty, ripe and real, that I see about and around—­mere life is such a beauty in itself that no stone ideal can ever hope to match it!  But dissatisfied with the means at my command to do the living beauty justice—­a little bit of paper, a steel pen, and a bottle of ink—­and, alas! fingers and an eye less skilled than they would have been if I had gone straight to a school of art instead of a laboratory for chemistry!

And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.

They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not been many—­you can count their names on your fingers!  And the wide popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves—­to the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of the foremost painters of our own times—­except when we sit to them for our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just as we are!

[Illustration:  REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH

(SCENE—­A Drawing-room in “Passionate Brompton.”)

FAIR AESTHETIC (suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to Dinner).

“Are you Intense?”—­Punch, June 14, 1879.]

The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our walls.  We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we like best that which rather takes us out of it—­romantic or graceful episodes of another time or clime, when men wore prettier clothes than they do now—­well-imagined, well-painted scenes from classic lore—­historical subjects—­subjects selected from our splendid literature and what not; or, if we want modern subjects, we prefer scenes chosen from a humble sphere, which is not that of those who can afford to buy pictures—­the toilers of the earth—­the toilers of the sea—­pathetic scenes from the inexhaustible annals of the poor; or else, again, landscapes and seascapes—­things that bring a whiff of nature into our feverish and artificial existence—­that are in direct contrast to it.

And even with these beautiful things, how often the charm wears away with the novelty of possession!  How often and how soon the lovely picture, like its frame, becomes just as a piece of wall-furniture, in which we take a pride, certainly, and which we should certainly miss if it were taken away—­but which we grow to look at with the pathetic indifference of habit—­if not, indeed, with aversion!