Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/697

1885.] young people about, who show what you were – while you in your turn console an anxious suitor here and there, with a smiling countenance, which shows that nothing more than becoming plumpness is what they will come to – you look very well under the trees. Gather round you in full abundance your silken skirts, your clouds of lace – the pretty mysteries that soften an outline fuller than it once was. It is your privilege to be more good-natured, more kind and liberal, than the others – than any others under the trees of May.

As for fat men, there is not a word to be said for them. No social eminence can be theirs. They are stockbrokers, or journalists, or millionaires. If by chance one of them gets into a Cabinet or a ball-room, 'Punch' has his eye upon him. There is no room for him in Rotten How. Let him betake himself to his club, and swell and swagger at a bow- window which repeats his proportions. We are sorry for him, but he is not sorry for himself. He laughs, and his big waistcoat heaves. He likes to "shake the press before him," and sit upon two chairs: but we dismiss him as altogether out of keeping. Those trim young exquisites can never grow to be like him; though he too, if you look at him, is almost offensively clean, and fresh, and well groomed, with a flower in his coat that scents the air.

If there is any other place where this crowd is to be seen in something like the same perfection, it will be at the period of private views with which this month commences, but to which, alas! at this present writing, we cannot guide the reader – for who knows what those judges may be deciding who have the fate of the young painters of England in their hands? who are now deliberating, or have deliberated, – an irresponsible council, in whose confidence are nobody but the porters, who, let us hope, with pitying hearts fasten up again in darkness the pictures with which so many hopes are entombed. We know more or less what there will be upon those shining walls, – though how many fine ladies stepping smiling out of the canvas, how many old gentlemen painted for their constituents or their societies, how many fox-hunters with their dogs, who can say? They will occupy probably half the space – and it is to be hoped that you, generous reader, will be thankful for the revelation of so many people who still, in those bad times, are able to pay handsomely for having their portraits painted; and there will be the usual number of clear and shining landscapes, as clear and free from mist or any atmospheric influence as were the exquisite young gentlemen of whom we have been talking. But the most innocent outsider is not so unsophisticated as to imagine that the pictures are the chief things to be looked at on the day of the private view. Perhaps you will only catch a glimpse of that portrait of Mr Millais's – painted, if with less glow of colour, as firmly and as proudly as Titian ever painted – over the shoulder of the fine lady who is discussing over again with a group of her semblables that eternal question about Lady Jane. You will see the sea-spray dashing, as Mr Hook has caught it, among the feathers of the tallest bonnet that Paris has persuaded London into accepting for the beginning of the season, but will not be able to smell the vigorous salt breeze which that painter has the secret of sending into Piccadilly, for the less wholesome and less agreeable odour of the patchouly. And Orchard-