ANTWERP AND BRUSSELS.
London was hot, and London was noisy. Everybody was leaving London, but
the more the people poured out of it the noisier it seemed to get.
Moreover, it was dull. So I said to myself, said I, ‘I’ll get out of
it.’
Thus said I to myself, said I, and off I went; and on a hot Saturday
afternoon I got into a train at Liverpool Street, and went down to the
sea with three Dutchmen and two Belgians; and when for two mortal hours
we had been baked and boiled and fried in a compartment that must have
been specially heated by a private pipe from the kitchen of his Majesty
King Pluto, we arrived at Harwich, and went, ‘all that was left of us,’
on board a vessel; and then the whistle blew, and the anchor was heaved,
and the harbour lights grew faint and fainter on our lea, and presently
a lovely little breeze sprang up, and we were out on the open sea
cleaving the waves, and making the best of our way towards Flanders.
I had a berth in a cabin with four other gentlemen. The berth was
excellent, the sheets were sweet and clean as snow, the pillow was soft,
and all was there to tempt one to sleep as soundly as the cabin-boy
mentioned by our grand William. But, alas! one of the gentlemen in my
cabin snored as surely never mortal snored before, and another dreamed
dreams, and dreamed them aloud. Now he was pursued by banditti, and
vowed that he would only surrender his purse with his life; anon, he was
on a precipice, and before being hurled over it, he begged a few
minutes’ respite that he might make his will. So much I gathered from
his disjointed remarks. Towards two in the morning the will must have
been made, and he must have been lying senseless at the foot of the
precipice, for he broke the silence of the night no more. But the
snoring gentleman snored louder than ever, and I lay and tossed, and
grew hot, and longed for daylight, and when daylight came I went on deck
and drank in the cool morning air and some hot coffee, and wondered
whether at any time the country on both sides of the Scheldt had been
rolled so beautifully level by a steam-roller. At half-past nine we were
alongside the quay at Antwerp, and the sweet chimes of the cathedral
rang out a dulcet welcome that promised rest and repose.
Rest and repose! Alas! it was fête-day at Antwerp. It was ‘festa,’ as
they say in Italy, and there was no peace that day for the native or the
stranger within the gates. All Antwerp and its wife, or its sweetheart,
turned out for the Kermesse. Through the streets in the heat of the day
there passed the great procession of the Church. Hundreds of waving
banners, thousands of candles, brazen images held aloft, a band, a
chorus of mellow voices chanting, and then, under a broad canopy of
gold, a sacred symbol to which, as it passed, the mighty crowd
reverently bared the head and bowed the knee. A fine sight, a
magnificent spectacle! I saw it four times, doubling on it down
side-streets as the boys double on the Lord Mayor’s Show. And all the
time the vertical rays of the sun poured down on the back of my neck,
and I would have given all the circular notes in my pocket for a
cabbage-leaf.
All day long the people stopped in the streets and sang songs and drank
beer, and at night we had fireworks and ‘a grand harmony,’ and the
tramcars were loaded with fifty or sixty people at a time, and only one
little horse to draw the lot. Poor horses! how they must dread ‘festa'!
The drivers in most countries double their fares, but the horses fare
worse than ever. It was midnight before Antwerp settled down into its
usual calm, and the noisiest Sunday I have known for years came to an
end.
If ever you want to see how closely a church can be made to resemble a
theatre, go to Antwerp Cathedral about noon, when the strangers come to
see the Rubens pictures, which are covered with green baize curtains
during the hours of service lest those who come to worship should get a
peep at the paintings for nothing.
About twelve, when the service is over, the poor and the devout are
driven out, and the sacristan and the guides swoop down on the
foreigners and drive them up into a corner; and then seats are brought,
and one fancies one’s self in the stalls or the pit of a theatre,
especially when an attendant in uniform comes round and demands a franc
from each spectator before the green baize curtain rises on the show.
Many Englishmen, I have no doubt, share with me an antipathy to being
‘guided’ through cathedrals, picture-galleries, and museums on the
Continent. But no one should miss the Antwerp pictures. ‘The Descent
from the Cross’ makes one forget the flippancy and bad English of the
guide. One doffs one’s hat reverently to Peter Paul Rubens, and yields
one’s imagination to him without a murmur.
When I entered the ‘sacred edifice’ the famous Rubens pictures were
uncovered. A British tourist in a violent red and yellow tweed suit was
staring at ‘The Descent from the Cross’ through a pair of race-glasses,
while the raucous-voiced and grinning guide, who seems nowadays to be
part and parcel of a cathedral, was explaining carefully to him that the
fat female was the painter’s wife. I wish I had never known that the
well-developed and modern lady who constantly appears in Peter Paul’s
pictures was Mrs. Rubens. One can have too much even of this lady, whom
I once heard an American irreverently describe as ‘Mrs. R.’ Rubens could
no more keep the head of Mrs. R. (would that he had been satisfied with
the head!) out of his pictures, than Mr. Dick could keep King Charles’s
head out of his memorials, and I can’t help thinking that, had she been
a Mrs. Jackson, instead of ‘a model wife,’ it would have been a distinct
gain to art.
Irritated by the eternal Mrs. R., the tourist with the race-glasses, and
the irreverent comments of the grinning guide, I turned from the Rubens
picture, and seeing a crowd in the centre of the building, made my way
towards it. I found myself in front of a beautifully-decorated ‘May
altar.’ Evidently some ceremony was expected, for on both sides was a
densely-packed mob of bareheaded women and girls. I asked what was
expected, and someone told me at three o’clock was to take place ‘the
benediction of the children.’ Wondering what this might mean, I waited
patiently, and my patience was later on rewarded by a touching and
beautiful spectacle.
Presently a priest came out of the gloomy recesses of the cathedral,
clad in raiment of white and gold, and ascended the altar-steps and
waited. Soon afterwards there came from the far corner of the cathedral,
by the small entrance door, the faint sound of little children’s voices
singing. All that one could hear as the baby chorus rose and fell was
‘Ave Maria.’ Nearer and nearer came the sound, and every head was turned
in one direction. Then there came into sight a long procession of baby
girls and boys, walking bareheaded, two and two. There were some two
hundred children, and not one of them was over seven. The little girls
were perfect Rubens babies; chubby-faced and rosy-cheeked, and their
fair hair was prettily tied with gay ribbons, pink and blue being the
prevailing colours. The little baby-boys had each his right arm tied up
with a light blue or pink bow, and every little boy and every little
girl carried a candle as an offering to the Virgin. Slowly the sweet
procession filed along, the children breaking out from time to time in
their little hymn of praise. The procession passed between the crowd of
mothers and sisters right up to the altar, and then the good priest took
from each little hand the candle it bore aloft and laid it on the
altar-steps. All the children passed to the chairs arranged for them,
and then the sunshine streamed through the stained-glass windows on
their little sea of golden curls, making a picture that will linger in
my mind for many a year to come.
After the children had presented their candles, a few lame and sickly
little ones were carried up to the altar by their mothers to give
theirs. One baby-boy had to be coaxed to let his candle go. He had been
playfully beating his nurse with it, after the manner of infants, and
when he got to the priest he had succeeded in putting the candle into
his mouth. Gently the priest unclosed the little fist, and, patting the
baby on the head, took the candle and laid it with the rest, while all
the mothers smiled.
The last candle had been given up, the last child had been quietly
seated in its chair, and there was a deep silence. Then a little girl of
about six--a pretty little mite, with long fair hair, dressed in a
red-spotted frock and a white pinafore--was lifted on to a chair in
front of the altar, and, raising her little hands, she began to speak.
The whole proceedings were in Flemish, and the child’s words hardly
reached me, as I stood at the edge of the crowd, so I may be wrong in
saying that it was a speech--it might have been a prayer. Whatever it
was it was intensely dramatic, and yet sweetly simple. Amid the dead
silence that reigned in the great cathedral, the little mite spoke for
nearly five minutes, using her hands with the grace and skill of a baby
Bernhardt. And the mothers--rough working women, coarse of frock, stern
of feature, and innocent of headgear most of them--wept. Some of the
fathers--artisans and dock-labourers--who had come to see their children
take part in the ceremony, tugged at their moustaches for a bit and blew
their noses defiantly, and then rubbed their knuckles in their eyes, and
at last gave it up as a bad job and let the big tears come. I could see
the tears in the good priest’s eyes as he listened to the baby’s speech,
and when she sat down, and the women, overcome with emotion, sobbed, I
had to yield to the influence of my surroundings, and I bit my lip hard
and had a wild struggle with the apple in my throat, and then I had to
let the salt drops have their way.
I would give a good deal to be able to paint that scene, to reproduce on
canvas that beautiful May altar in Antwerp Cathedral, and the great
congregation of fair-haired, blue-eyed Flemish babies, in their simple
little frocks and their pretty ribbons, all sitting as still as mice
while their little playmate, standing on a chair, lifted her baby hands
to heaven and prayed her prayer. I would that I were even an artist in
words that I might give you some faint idea of the simple grandeur, the
quiet pathos, the gentle beauty of that ‘children’s service’ in the
great cathedral. Alas, that glorious privilege is not mine! I am but a
journeyman labourer in the great field of literature. I can but bow my
head and uncover when the Angelus rings out, and leave you to read upon
my face the message that it carries to my soul. I only know that in
Antwerp Cathedral that sunny afternoon the message of the children
touched me as no words of man have ever touched me yet, and I stole
softly away from the flower-laden altar of the Mother of God, and passed
out into the busy world with a baby’s voice whispering words of hope and
comfort to my doubting and desponding heart.
In the evening the scene was changed. On the Place Verte I was stopped
by a mighty procession, headed by a band, and bearing illuminated
banners. It was a Liberal manifestation, and five thousand lusty
Liberals were yelling, ‘Down with the Jesuit schools!’ Presently, in an
opposite direction, came a Catholic demonstration several thousand
strong. They also had a band, and a yell, and a battle-cry. I was in the
middle of the two processions, and I stopped till they met.
Then the fun began, and the police rushed in, and sticks were whirled
about, and feet and fists went busily to work. I had dropped in for a
political riot. Heads were broken--thank goodness, not mine. I managed
to scramble out of the crowd and get behind a tree. After a good fight
the processions separated and marched in different directions, shouting,
hooting, cheering, singing. The whole town was in an uproar. The row was
deafening. Till long past midnight the rival bands promenaded, and twice
again they met and fought, and the sticks came down like a rain of hail.
In Antwerp the political feeling is fiercer than in any part of Belgium,
and the enmity of Liberals and Catholics leads at times to considerable
bloodshed. I followed the Liberals, as they looked the stronger, and I
huzzaed and shouted ‘Hear, hear!’ when a stand was made and a speech
delivered.
But directly the fighting began I retired to a convenient distance. It
was past one in the morning when I withdrew from the battlefield of the
Liberals and the Catholics, but the shouts of the rival factions rang in
my ears until I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. I shall have to try
Holland. I have heard of a very nice quiet place there where the
peaceful Dutch enjoy themselves, and only express their joy in a quiet
grunt. I sincerely hope there won’t be a fête or a riot on when I arrive
at the next station of my journey in search of a day’s repose.
Enough of Antwerp. I tear myself away from Rubens and Quentin Matsys,
from the silver chimes and the little carts drawn by the poor docile
dogs; I blush and pass by the shop-window that exhibits ‘Borgia
s’amuse,’ and I put my luggage on a fly and drive to the station. I
arrive at Antwerp station half an hour before the train starts, and I
consume five-and-twenty minutes of that spare time in a process
peculiarly Continental, known as registering the baggage. At last I am
allowed to pay a fabulous price for the carriage of my portmanteau. I
enter the train and I start.
I had said to myself, said I, ‘I will go to Brussels. It is a hot day.
There will be no one in the wide, clean streets. I will potter about the
Galerie de la Reine; I will climb the Rue Montagne de la Cour, and I
will sit on a ten centimes chair in the park, and watch the clean
Brussels nurses and the pretty little Brussels babies. I love to
contemplate innocence. It rests the jaded eye and improves the _blasé_
mind. So to Brussels I went, and when I got out at the station I thought
‘Bedlam’ had broken loose. Thousands of men dressed in the usual
fête-day costume of the ‘braves Belges'--all black--were promenading the
streets with tickets stuck in their hats. In their hands they had flags
and dolls and long trumpets and Japanese parasols. Shouting and singing
and pouring through the streets in lines of twenty arm-in-arm, they
carried all before them, and I had to dart into shops, to climb
lamp-posts, and to crawl under the tables outside the cafés, or over and
over again I should have been borne along by the mighty procession. Once
I snatched at a flag and a Japanese umbrella, and thought it would be
better to fall in and shout and sing; but I felt that an Englishman
might recognise me, and my character would be gone for ever. So I went
up a very narrow street, where there was only room for one person at a
time, and hid in a doorway and waited till a policeman came by. Then I
asked him what was the matter. He told me that to-day was the
fifty-fourth anniversary of the National Independence, and all Belgium
had gone mad and come to Brussels. That I should have chosen this of all
days in the year! I am indeed the victim of a relentless fate--I mean
‘fête.’
In Brussels I went to the Wiertz Museum. Antoine Wiertz, the mad
painter, the ‘eccentric genius’ who refused to sell his pictures and
flung back to the ‘patrons of art’ their proffered gold at a time that
he was almost starving, crying out that gold was the murderer of art, is
slowly but surely earning the fame for which he pined during his
lifetime. That Wiertz was mad I have not the slightest doubt, but his
madness was that to which ‘great genius is oft allied,’ and the world
owes much to its madmen. I would a million times rather be mad with
Wiertz than sane with some of the gentlemen who cover the walls of the
Academy with pictures of ‘Eliza, Wife of Jeremiah Snooks, Esq.,’ ‘A
Soldier Buying a Baked Potato,’ ‘The Dying Cabman’s Farewell to his
Badge,’ ‘Wandsworth Parish Pump by Moonlight,’ ‘A Roman Lady Taking an
Eighteenpenny Bath,’ or ‘A Greek God Waiting for his Shirt to Come Home
from the Wash.’
The story of the life of Wiertz, the mad painter of Brussels, is a
romance which belongs to the heroic age. It is a romance which is as
startling in these matter-of-fact and money-grubbing days as the
Clitheroe case would have been in the days of Eros and Psyche.
Wiertz was born in 1806 in Dinant, on the banks of the Meuse, and he
died in 1865 in Brussels. He wanted to be Rubens at fourteen, and he
spent his life in trying to be Rubens. He began to paint in a granary,
which was so low that as he grew he had to stoop in it to avoid hitting
his head against the roof. He starved to paint, and he painted for a
long time only to starve. He attracted attention at last, and then he
was allowed to paint in empty factories and lofty unused warehouses,
because these were the only places where he could put up the huge
canvases he sought to cover. His picture of the Greeks and Trojans
contending for the body of Patroclus is thirty feet high and twenty feet
wide. It is his grandest work, and the one which will live on through
the centuries. All through his life he endured the most terrible
disappointments, but at last he secured a studio where he could carry
out his gigantic ideas. The Government gave it him, and there in a side
street in Brussels he lived and painted, and to-day his house and studio
form the Wiertz Museum, and there you can see his life-work, for he was
true to his convictions to the end, and sold nothing.
In his later years he gave the reins to his fiery, untamed imagination,
and it reared up occasionally and eventually bolted with him. Some of
the paintings which adorn the museum you would only expect to find in a
lunatic asylum where they have had artists for patients. Many of them
are madly horrible, and their horror is heightened by a method of
arrangement which is only worthy of the murder department of a waxwork
exhibition. And yet the genius of the man is sublime. A hundred years
hence he will be world-famous. To-day, outside Belgium he is
comparatively little known.
Next to his ‘Patroclus’ his finest works are ‘The Triumph of Christ,’
‘The Revolt of Hell,’ and ‘The Forge of Vulcan.’ But for one person who
goes to admire these magnificent creations, a hundred go to the museum
to gaze on the horrible, the grotesque, and the fantastic specimens of
his art. One of his pictures, ‘The Thoughts and Visions of a Severed
Head,’ is enough to make a nervous man have a fit in the building. I
have just read a story in a magazine which professes to be a true
account of what a decapitated head saw. The author has probably seen
Wiertz’s picture, and worked up the details in connection with
hypnotism. The picture shows what the head of a guillotined man sees and
_thinks_ the first moment, the second moment, and the third moment after
decapitation. It might with great propriety be called ‘The Nightmare of
Jack the Ripper, after eating a whole cold sucking-pig for supper.’
You look through a peephole to see ‘Hunger, Madness, Crime,’ and you
behold a remarkably realistic picture of a young mad mother cutting up
her baby in order to have it for dinner. The bleeding body is in the
mother’s lap; the foot and leg of the child are sticking out of the
saucepan which is on the kitchen fire. I have a photograph of this
picture hanging in my study now. Every time I look at it, portions of my
hair, beard, and moustache turn white.
You look through another peephole, and see your own face, and, by a
clever contrivance, all the rest of the picture is ‘Old Nick.’ Startled,
you turn away, and you come upon a mad dog. He is tearing at his chain.
You spring back, for you think it is a real dog. It is a madman’s trick,
and is painted on the wall, and intended to frighten you. Near it is the
picture of a gentleman who has been buried in cholera times. The
interment has been ‘a little too previous,’ and you see a living man
madly trying to get out of his coffin. But heavy coffins are on one half
of his ‘casket,’ and amid the ghastly surroundings of the charnel-house
you know he will have to die of slow starvation.
A Belgian lady struggling with a French soldier fires a revolver in his
face. The face which you see is pleasantly described in the catalogue as
‘shattered into an indistinguishable mass of agony and horror.’ ‘The
Orphans’ is an awful picture of a family of children fighting with the
undertaker for their father’s corpse. They don’t want the strange man to
take ‘papa’ from them. You turn away with a shudder, and your hair rises
on end. A woman opposite you is dragging a shrieking blistered child
from a cradle which has caught fire. The flesh seems to peel from the
little body as the terrified woman drags it from the flaming bassinette.
With your eyeballs starting from their sockets you shriek for somebody
to give you an arm to lean on that you may totter out, and then you
pause and burst into a roar of laughter. M. Wiertz has had a funny fit,
and painted for you the wife who wished for a black-pudding, and the
husband who wished that it might stick to the end of her nose.
I need not take you through the catalogue of the master’s mad vagaries
and sickening atrocities. Once out in the air and the sunlight again,
you gradually forget them; but his noble and heroic works, his idyllic
and beautiful works, once seen will never fade from your memory. You
have only to look upon his ‘Patroclus’ and his ‘Triumph of Christ,’ and
you know that you have been in the presence of ‘one of the great ones of
the earth'--an artistic giant, a mighty genius, born in an age which has
no room for genius that is above the regulation standard.
Wiertz died as he had lived--a disappointed man. His body and mind both
gave way at last. He had sworn to rival Rubens, and he came very near
the master once; but the fatal taint in his blood overpowered him, and
he descended to the ghastly horrors of the charnel-house and the
guillotine, and to arranging cannibal mothers and buried-alive bodies as
peep-shows. He was raving when he died. In his last delirium he shrieked
for his brushes and his palette. ‘Quick! quick!’ he cried; ‘bring them
to me. Oh, the picture I shall paint! Oh, I will surpass Raphael!’ And,
shrieking out what mighty things he meant to do, he fell back
motionless, and passed into the great silence.
The fame he longed for during his life has come, even after his death,
but slowly. But it will increase, and it will last. And this is the best
way for fame to come to any man who works not for his own little day,
but for the long ages the world has yet to know.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
* * * * *
GEORGE R. SIMS’S BOOKS.
=Rogues and Vagabonds.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.;
cloth limp, 2s. 6d.
‘Mr. G. R. Sims is the Dante of the London slums. He has penetrated into
the lowest dens of our social Inferno, and recorded the sights and
sufferings he met with in pages which will never be forgotten.... The
story is a very thrilling one, readable to the last line.'--_Daily
Telegraph._
=The Ring o’ Bells, etc.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth
limp, 2s. 6d.
‘“The Ring o’ Bells” is a collection of short stories, some of which
will make some people cry, and others have certainly made us laugh. The
pathos of “The Ring o’ Bells” and of “The Doll’s Secret” depends a good
deal on the sufferings of children, and there are tastes to which this
kind of distress does not appeal in fiction. But here Mr. Sims has
Dickens and probably the majority of readers on his side, and can afford
to disregard the vote of critics who do not care for Little Nells and
Little Dombeys.... In short, there is abundance of variety and
readableness in “The Ring o’ Bells,” which will especially please
students who like the theatre and desire to be pretty frequently
reminded of Dickens in his Christmas moods.'--_Daily News._
=Mary Jane’s Memoirs.= Compiled from her original MS. Post
8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp, 2s. 6d.
‘There are some pages in these Memoirs which it is impossible to read
without laughing heartily, while the chapters devoted to the account of
the Chelsea mystery are almost tragic in their intense realism....
Dickens never did anything better than “Mrs. Three-doors-up,” or “Mr.
Saxon, the Author, and his Mother-in-law.” ... The book is full of
unvarnished naturalism of a healthy, sensible, wholesome kind. It is
quite the best thing Mr. Sims has yet written.'--_Whitehall Review._
=Mary Jane Married=: Tales of a Village Inn. Post 8vo., illustrated
boards, 2s.; cloth limp, 2s. 6d.
‘Told with admirable freshness and humour, and with the realistic touch
which Mr. Sims unites with a kind of gentle poetry and pathos peculiarly
his own. We have always thought that if Mr. Sims would seriously take to
constructing a realistic novel he would beat Zola into fits. “Mary Jane”
is one of his best English types, and both her slavey and the
hotel-keeper’s wife are fresh, natural, interesting, and English--a real
creation.'--_Star._
=Tales of To-day.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp,
2s. 6d.
‘No one knows better than Mr. Sims how to write a short story of
sensational interest, and all these tales are good examples of his
skill. All the stories are good, and the book will please readers of the
most varied tastes.'--_Scotsman._
=Dramas of Life.= With 60 illustrations by J. H. RUSSELL. Post
8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp, 2s. 6d.
‘In “Dramas of Life” Mr. Sims shows himself a master of the art of
telling short stories. Each is a little melodrama in itself.... He shows
the self-restraint of a genuine artist; moreover, his tales are full of
ingenious surprises, and we can hardly imagine a book better fitted to
wile away the time.'--_Manchester Guardian._
=The Case of George Candlemas.= Crown 8vo., picture
cover, 1s.; cloth, 1s. 6d.
‘The reader must learn for himself how the amateur detective is almost
run down by the professional as his own murderer, and how all comes
right in the end. The complications of the plot are ingenious and
exceedingly well managed.'--_Glasgow Herald._
=Tinkletop’s Crime, etc.= With a Frontispiece by MAURICE
GREIFFENHAGEN. Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth, 2s. 6d.
‘In “Tinkletop’s Crime,” Mr. George R. Sims has republished not only
that amusing tale, but also a number of other short stories, full of the
mingled humour and pathos for which he is renowned.... There could not
be a better companion than this entertaining volume.'--_Daily
Telegraph._
=Zeph=: a Circus Story, etc. Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth
limp, 2s. 6d.
‘Mr. Sims’s touch is remarkably light, and his effects are all delicate.
There are few writers since Dickens who have such mastery over all the
emotions as he. Farce and pathos, and all the varying gradations
between, are alike within his compass.... “Dagonet,” thanks to his wide
experiences of slum-life, has sounded every note in the gamut of human
passion. Like Mr. Besant, he enjoys the rare distinction of having
promoted in substantial fashion the great work of redeeming the
vice-slaves of the London purlieus.'--_National Press._
=My Two Wives.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth, 2s. 6d.
‘Mr. Sims is sometimes called an English Zola, sometimes a present-day
Dickens. He is something of both; but that he has qualities of his own,
and is without a peer in his peculiar line of alternate mirth and
humour, is proved once again by this welcome volume.'--_Weekly
Dispatch._
=Memoirs of a Landlady.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.;
cloth, 2s. 6d.
‘Mrs. Jarvis, the pleasant, motherly old landlady, who gives her
pathetic and humorous, sometimes tragic, reminiscences with delightful
digression, will take her place next to Mr. Sims’s inimitable Mary Jane.
Mrs. Jarvis is one of the most lovable of the many lovable womanly women
he has created.'--_Star._
=Scenes from the Show.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.;
cloth, 2s. 6d.
‘A combination of humour and pathos that will be found thoroughly
enjoyable. Amid writers of the old and new schools Mr. Sims occupies a
distinctive and original place. His stories abound with touches of
sympathy and have in them the true ring of humanity which interests and
moves both rich and poor.'--_Lloyd’s News._
=The Dagonet Reciter and Reader=: being Readings and
Recitations in Prose and Verse, selected from his own Works by
GEORGE R. SIMS. Crown 8vo., 1s.; cloth limp, with Portrait, 1s. 6d.
‘The author of “The Dagonet Ballads” is able to portray both the tragedy
and the comedy of human life with singular power.'--_Leeds Mercury._
=Dagonet Ditties.= Crown 8vo., 1s.; cloth limp, 1s. 6d.
‘The satirical humour, the playful extravagance, and the skilful knack
of versifying which he brings to bear upon topics of the
hour--political, social, judicial, and military--will afford abundant
entertainment.'--_Daily News._
=How the Poor Live=; and =Horrible London=. With a
Vignette by F. BARNARD. Crown 8vo., picture cover, 1s.; cloth,
1s. 6d.
‘Mr. Sims describes what he has actually seen. He visited the worst dens
of London. He sketches all the aspects of this gloomy side of London
life, its grim humour as well as its deplorable.'--_Daily News._
LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.