And now for social pictorial satire considered as a fine art.

They who have practised it hitherto, from Hogarth downward, have not
been many--you can count their names on your fingers! And the wide
popularity they have won may be due as much to their scarcity as to
the interest we all take in having the mirror held up to ourselves--to
the malicious pleasure we all feel at seeing our neighbours held up to
gentle ridicule or well-merited reproof; most of all, perhaps, to the
realistic charm that lies in all true representation of the social
aspects with which we are most familiar, ugly as these are often apt
to be, with our chimney-pot hats, and trousers that unfit us, it
seems, for serious and elaborate pictorial treatment at the hands of
the foremost painters of our own times--except when we sit to them for
our portraits; then they have willy-nilly to make the best of us, just
as we are!

[Illustration: REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH

(SCENE--_A Drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton_.")

FAIR AESTHETIC (_suddenly, and in deepest tones to Smith, who has just
been introduced to take her in to Dinner_).

"Are you Intense?"--_Punch_, June 14, 1879.]

The plays and novels that succeed the most are those which treat of
the life of our own day; not so the costly pictures we hang upon our
walls. We do not care to have continually before our eyes elaborate
representations of the life we lead every day and all day long; we