APPENDIX. 389 



old maid, and a conceited apprentice, mixed up with a cer- 

 tain quantity of ordinary operatic pastoral stuff, about a pretty 

 Dolly in ribands, a lover with a wooden leg, and an heroic 

 locksmith. For these latter, the only elements of good, or 

 life, in the filthy mass of the story,* observe that the author- 

 must filch the wreck of those old times of which we fiercely 

 and frantically destroy every living vestige, whenever it is pos- 

 sible. You cannot have your Dolly Varden brought up behind 

 the counter of a railway station ; nor your jolly locksmith 

 trained at a Birmingham brass-foundry. And of these mate- 

 rials, observe that you can only have the ugly ones illustrated. 

 The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, or 

 honesty ; and for Dolly Varden, or the locksmith, you will look 

 through the vignettes in vain. But every species of distorted 

 folly and vice, the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcomb, the 

 paltry fool, the degraded woman, are pictured for your hon- 

 orable pleasure in every page, with clumsy caricature, strug- 

 gling to render its dulness tolerable by insisting on defect, 

 if perchance a penny or two more may be coined out of the 

 Cockney reader's itch for loathsomeness. 



Or take up, for instance of higher effort, the ' Cornhill Mag- 

 azine ' for this month, July, 1876. It has a vignette of Venice 

 for an illuminated letter. That is what your decorative art 

 has become, by help of Kensington ! The letter to be pro- 

 duced is a T. There is a gondola in the front of the design, 

 with the canopy slipped back to the stern like a saddle over a 

 horse's tail. There is another in the middle distance, all gone 

 to seed at the prow, with its gondolier emaciated into an oar, 

 at the stern ; then there is a Church of the Salute, and a Du- 

 cal palace, in which I beg you to observe all the felicity and 

 dexterity of modern cheap engraving ; finally, over the Ducal 

 palace there is something, I know not in the least what meant 

 for, like an umbrella dropping out of a balloon, which is the 

 ornamental letter T. Opposite this ornamental design, there 

 is an engraving of two young ladies and a parasol, between 



* The raven, however, like all Dickeus's animals, is perfect ; and lam 

 the more angry with the rest because I have every now and then to open 

 the book to look for him. 



