OUR LIBRARY--BUSTS--DISTINGUISHED CHARACTERS--MELANCHOLY--GUESSES--
SOAMES--MRS. BOODELS AGAIN--MILBURD--HIS JOKE--A NUISANCE.
Of all the melancholy objects of Art Busts are the most so.
Do you want a sensation of Miserable Melancholy?
Take, yourself----
Off to a dusty library of bookshelves, chiefly empty, and the remainder
having an occasional medical treatise in the original Latin, with
diagrams of the human frame, no fire, rain pouring, damp mist over the
landscape, no pens, ink, or even paper to tear up into fanciful shapes,
and nothing for company except busts of celebrated people, looking like
the upper part of the ghosts of half-washed chimney-sweepers.
After a time, they only resemble one thing, a collection of several
homicidal criminals.
Sit before a bust, any bust, under the above circumstances.
You wonder to what you would have condemned this hideous creature had he
been brought up, in his lifetime, before you, as a magistrate.
On every feature is stamped Ruffian. This man _must_ have been hung,
were there any justice in the world.
No. This bust is of the late venerable and excellent Archbishop
Snuffler.
Is it possible. And all these other savage-looking creatures?... "Are,"
says my informant in the damp library who only comes in for a minute,
"Archbishops, Bishops, celebrated Philanthropists, Doctors, and men of
science."
And here they are perched up aloft, like overgrown cherubs, whose wings
have been taken off by some surgical operation.
_Happy Thought._--If you want to be revenged on somebody, and don't mind
expense, have his portrait painted with all his defects glaringly
rendered, and present it, as a mark of esteem, to his family.
On his fiftieth birthday give him a bust of himself to be placed in his
hall. Depend upon it you've punished him.
Jenkyns Soames, our Professor of Scientific Economy, was talking of the
Zoological Gardens.
"I dispute," says he, "the fact of the Hyaena laughing."
"Why?"
"Why? Solvitur ambulando, or rather non ambulando, for I've stood in
front of his cage for half an hour, and I've never seen him laugh once."
This was repeated to Mrs. Boodels.
"Yes," says she, "that's very probable. But when Mr. Jenkyns _went
away_ * *"
Milburd tried to cap this by asking as a conundrum "why the Hyaena
wouldn't laugh in your face?"----
As Mrs. Boodels rose, the ladies had to go out too, so no one stopped
for the answer. He caught me alone in a corner and told me what it was.
I think he said that it was because the Hyaena was an _Hy-brid_ animal.
He explained that he meant "_high-bred_."
_Happy Thought._--To say, "Oh, that's very old." This has the same
effect on a conundrum-maker as the most brilliant repartee.
Unless it leads him to come to you three times a day ever afterwards,
with fresh ones, all hot as it were from the baker's, and ask you
perpetually, "Well, is _this_ old?"
[Illustration: JO MILLER, (_Bringing more Material for Joke_).]