moderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is that
her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of her, finds
the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him that she should
furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of her
husband, and that her husband should have no desire to adorn her, and
that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby,
with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its hat--a burlesque
baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for that too makes subtly
for her abasement. Charles Keene, again--another contemporary, though he
lived into a later and different time. He saw little else than common
forms of human ignominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupid
prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater
proportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or
by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not
sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered
with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain
sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get
convinced that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have
insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through almost
a whole career. There is one drawing in the "Punch" of years ago, in
which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the
invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has
gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, and
the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep
at his side in a night-cap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine
how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across
the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene
drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity,
ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old
common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one