Yet, as I approached my ideal, and seemed about to complete my picture, I found there was much more to do than I expected. Every day showed me some distinction between my sitter and my design upon the canvas, that had not previously been discovered. Every look convinced me of the necessity of some fresh touches not previously essential. But it was a labour of love; the toil indeed was ecstasy; and on I went working. Weeks flew, nay, months rolled on, and still left me heightening and altering, filling up and enriching; in a word, perfecting my picture; until at last the dream was a reality, the picture was finished, the poet breathed in colour, life looked from my canvas.

A crowd gathered round it on the day of exhibition, I expected many opinions, but only one was expressed. With a single voice the many decided that I had aimed at drawing a Dutch Apollo. They unanimously charged me with having stolen Dickens's Fat Boy, and clapped a pair of wings on his broad shoulders!

Fat! Well, I had anticipated objections to the colour and the drawing, the fiery visage and the skeleton figure; but to discover in my dainty, delicate, refined, ethereal youth, the counterpart of the Fat Boy.

I listened, and to my utter and inexpressible astonishment, they were all in earnest. So in a short time was all the world. Everybody had heard of prize-poems; and everybody saw in my design the representation of a prize-poet obese as a prize-ox!

And all the world was quite right! The objection had no sooner settled in my head, than my eyes opened upon my extraordinary mistake. Unconsciously, indeed, I had followed the advice of my critic friend to corpulency; and I now, for the first time, plainly saw, as clearly revealed as it had been hidden from me before, the maddening truth that my slim and all but winged

divinity had become, under my fastidious and fondlylabouring pencil, heavy, lumpish, fat. My flying fish was a porpoise.

But under what magical influences had I committed such an error with my eyes open, producing the very effect I would religiously have avoided! Under none. I had found my model slight, spare, and spiritual; I recognised in him the very person of the true poet; and I continued month after month to transfer to my canvas all that my searching eye could detect in his corporeal mould and in his mental nature. Alas! I very innocently paid my model the sum agreed upon at the close of every sitting! I was very foolishly stone-blind to the natural effects of so many half-crowns dropped into the pocket of the hungry.

He was at first poor and pinched; thought, study, and the fiery mind working out its way, seemed to have wreaked their vengeance upon his frame; and I gratefully paid him double for his sitting again and again. He then began to pick up, as they say; but my eye, deceived by the original image reflected, and left glowing on my mind, beheld not this slow slight change. His limbs grew by insensible degrees much rounder, but to me they daily appeared the same; his sunken cheeks now plumped, his throat and shoulders prospered more and more, and his chest gradually got on in the world; yet I saw still the same pallid, thoughtful, passion-lighted visage, the same fragile and delicate body, the same thin wan hands, though they were by this time deeply dimpled with fat round every knuckle. He grew wide apace, and daily received the fee with a truly unpoetical punctuality, and daily did he return, with the mens divinior more profoundly embedded, I should say rather engulphed, in a world of happy, conscious, and luxuriant flesh. As regularly, therefore,

week by week, did I alter and add to my design, expanding my outline, filling my hollows, and fattening my poet; wondering still to find how far I was from the point I seem to have approached, that there was ever something fresh to do, and that before I had worked many days at the head, the body needed a new enlargement. I began at a consumption and left off at a dropsy.

Thus do all of us too often toil to realise the truth of our young dreams, blind to everything, throughout the anxious and unrewarding work, save the one glowing and exalted image, which enchanted us at first, but exists no longer; and thus does the comfortable and sympathising world laugh at our labour of love, recognising in our poetic vision a satire and a burlesque, and in our cherubim and seraphim nothing but fat boys with feather jackets!

THE MUTUAL PIECE-OF-PLATE PRESENTATION CLUB.

A LITTLE preliminary plain English; an illustrative prologue, not a flourish of trumpets; will be sufficient to lead the moral self-respecting reader, by an easy and natural train of reflection, to a proper appreciation of the objects contemplated by this new Society; of whose prospects as well as purposes we are happily enabled to offer an exclusive account.

It may be true enough that there is nothing which the world produces in such vast and superabundant quantities, as Merit. The daily supply is, no doubt, at least equal to a three-months' demand. But what is merit unrecognised, unrecompensed! Virtually, of no

more consequence than an unfeathered peacock. Merit, without its reward and certificate, is a mere Frenchman without the ribbon of the Legion. The pure coin of gold or silver which everybody is in a conspiracy not to take, is of no more use to its owner, practically of no greater value, than the detected counterfeit. The claim to rank as "Most Noble," or to have a legal right to be addressed as "My Lord Duke," seems too absurd, when nobody, from one end of life to the other, will consent to call us anything but "You Dick!"

We want to see merit universally acknowledged, obtaining a lawful stamp, wearing accredited honours, and carrying its credentials about with it; if in no weightier form than a snuff-box or a tooth-pick, subscribed for by admiring friends. We look eagerly for the dawning of the great day of philanthropy, when every man shall be able to refer to some more shining, more tangible testimony of his own manifold excellences, than his own bare word; pertinaciously contradicted, perhaps, by spiteful neighbours, who have known him all his days. And this bright dawn we may now hope to behold full soon; a dawn of best-plated, of real silver, and of silvergilt; through the medium of the proposed association, described as the Mutual Piece-of-Plate Club for the encouragement of social virtues, the publicity of private character, and the elevation of bashful retiring merit upon a flaring brazen pedestal.

There can be little doubt that the world would have been a witness of its own virtue and glory in this respect long ago, but for the rooted prejudices existing among certain orders of moralists, who, though themselves eminently meritorious, are bitterly opposed to a general recognition of merit, and to all extension of its rewards. and honours.

It is argued by these enemies to remunerated merit,

who are of course inimical to the projected Piece-ofPlate Club, that the principle advocated strikes at the root of every constituted establishment in the country; nay, of every institution within the boundaries of civilisation. They allege it to be a doctrine which never yet found favour in any age of the world; it was never tolerated but as a fable in any school; never practised but in caprice in any state; and that, above all, to adopt such a rule here in England, would be equivalent to turning the globe completely over into the air, and bringing New Zealand where the Observatory on Greenwich-hill is.

Institute such a principle as the recognition and reward of merit, and how, these moralists contend, will you provide for the extraordinary rush upwards in life which must instantaneously take place! Society would all at once become "top-heavy;" the people would be all head.

How carry on a war with an army nine-tenths officers! How maintain a representative government with electors all members of Parliament to a man! Could you enforce the game-laws, they urge, when every poacher turned out to be a justice of peace; or expect the due performance of multitudinous marriages, christenings, and burials, when every harassed jaded curate had dozed himself into a deanery, and was already dreaming of the mitre. It really might be dangerous, this we may fairly own, to make all your midshipmen rear-admirals at a

move.

How would you get your play acted, they cry, when the whole company, including, of course, the "starved apothecary," claimed an equal right, on the score of merit, to be Romeo! In fact, how could the stage go on at all if merit were allowed to make its way on it! How prevent the boards from being crowded with