Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/368

 Wilson ("Kit North," his father's friend), "looking like a lion with his hat on," laughed at the catalogued title of 'Memory recalling from the Heraclea of Departed Hopes the Spectre of the Deserted Lover.' He pretended not to understand the meaning, and laughed, but added: "After all, it's a damned good picture." Both this and the views of Edinburgh are now in my possession, having been given to me by the artist during his lifetime.

Ebsworth's first appearance in print was in Hogg's Instructor. This was in 1845, when he sent to it, on chance, a poem entitled 'The Railway Express.' Though naturally gratified at its being accepted, it "did not turn my head or make me rush anew into print, for I wrote but little verse until 1848." That year he went to work at Manchester with Faulkner Brothers as their chief artist, and, "like every one else in the final quarter of the great Railway Plan year, I worked day and night in lithographing the genuine and bogus sheets of engineers' plans in order that they might be in time for lodgment and official certification." Ebsworth could get no rest until Christmas, when he enjoyed intercourse with many literary friends whom George Faulkner, "a good, quiet, honourable, and scholarly man," had employed onBradshaw's Magazine while he was the successful editor of that cheap illustrated periodical. Among these were John Crutchley Prince and that genial Radical Sam Bamford. At the time of the French Revolution of 1848 he took a brief holiday hi Paris, and enjoyed life "in the dear old Latin Quarter," where he would dine for a franc, including wine, frequently partaking of the dish known as the "Harlequin." "Eugene Sue's 'Mysteres de Paris' initiates the neutral world of cowans to the hotch-pot ingredients of the luscious 'Harlequin.' Compared to it, the pot au feu was tame and innocent." He saw some of the fighting, and received a swordcut across his brow.

On leaving the Faulkners he went to the Glasgow Government School of Design, where he had again for his close friend and instructor Heath Wilson, son of Andrew Wilson, "who collected the splendid gallery of plaster casts from my favourite Elgin Marbles, and gave them to the Board of Trustees for Manufacture at Edinburgh." Ebsworth always remembered with wrath the attack that had been made by Punch on his instructor while he was at the Government School of Design at Somerset House, when "Herbert, R.A., and his faction were at war with him, and conquered by displacing him." On the 31st of August, 1845, Punch had a caricature of Wilson headed 'A Night Scene at the School of Bad Designs.' The boy who is trying to copy a colossal female bust, but is shadowed by the podgy standing figure of the head master, C. H. Wilson "a capital portrait," in shepherd's plaid and with a Glengarry cap on his foxy hair says to him: "If you please, sir, you are standing in our light."