“Those,” continued YORICK, “who go, like the ’Knight of the Rueful Countenance,’ in quest of melancholy adventures, need not to make deliberately ‘Sentimental Journeys’ through France, or Italy, or by forest or mountain, picturesque hamlet, or romantic stream.  The purlieus of great cities amongst the poverty-stricken members of what it is usual to call the ‘lower middle-classes,’ will furnish multitudinous subjects for pensive thought, and—­what were a whole world better—­for practical benevolence.  ’Tis too late, alas! to do aught for this dead Violinist, but were eyes and pen more sedulously and sympathetically employed about real, if sordid-seeming, in place of imaginary, if picturesque, woes, why verily, EUGENIUS, something more, perchance, might be done in such pitiful cases as that I have described to thee in non-journalistic language, than what was formally done by the Coroner’s Jury, who—­as they were bound to do, indeed—­’returned a verdict in accordance with the medical testimony.’”

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[Illustration:  PUNCH’S PIC-NIC.  THE PARLIAMENTARY MIRAGE.]

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LETTERS TO ABSTRACTIONS.

NO.  XIII.—­TO IRRITATION.

I have just come home from my Club in a state bordering upon distraction.  No great misfortune has happened to me, my dearest friend has not been black-balled, the Club bore has not had me in his unrelenting clutches.  The waiters have been, as indeed they always are, civil and obliging, the excellent chef catered with his usual skill to my simple mid-day wants, my table companions were good-humoured, cheerful, and pleasantly cynical.  What then, you may ask, has happened to shatter my nerves and impair my temper for the day?  It is a simple matter, and I am almost ashamed to confess it openly.  But I am encouraged by the fact that two eminently solid and, so far as I could see, perfectly unemotional gentlemen were as deeply pricked and worried by what happened as I was myself.  To begin with, I do not admit that my nerves vibrate more easily than those of my fellow-men.  I have never killed an organ-grinder, I am guiltless of the blood of a German band, I have even gone so far as to spare guards who asked for my railway-ticket after I had carefully wrapped myself up for a journey, and no touting vendor of subscription books or works of art can truthfully say that I have kicked him.  On the whole I think I am reasonably even-tempered and of higher than average amiability.  Others may judge me differently.  I don’t wish to quarrel with them.  I simply reiterate my opinion.  Why then am I to-day in a seething state of exception to my rule?  Here is the cause: 

[Illustration]