up gouty old grandpapa to ring the bell; who decline aunt's pudding and
custards, saying that they will reserve themselves for an anchovy
toast with the claret; who talk together in ball-room doors, where Fred
whispers Charley--pointing to a dear little partner seven years old--"My
dear Charley, she has very much gone off; you should have seen that girl
last season!" Look well at everything appertaining to the economy of
the famous Mr. Briggs: how snug, quiet, appropriate all the appointments
are! What a comfortable, neat, clean, middle-class house Briggs's is (in
the Bayswater suburb of London, we should guess from the sketches of the
surrounding scenery)! What a good stable he has, with a loose box for
those celebrated hunters which he rides! How pleasant, clean, and
warm his breakfast-table looks! What a trim little maid brings in
the top-boots which horrify Mrs. B! What a snug dressing-room he has,
complete in all its appointments, and in which he appears trying on the
delightful hunting-cap which Mrs. Briggs flings into the fire! How
cosy all the Briggs party seem in their dining-room: Briggs reading
a Treatise on Dog-breaking by a lamp; Mamma and Grannie with their
respective needleworks; the children clustering round a great book of
prints--a great book of prints such as this before us, which, at this
season, must make thousands of children happy by as many firesides!
The inner life of all these people is represented: Leech draws them as
naturally as Teniers depicts Dutch boors, or Morland pigs and stables.
It is your house and mine: we are looking at everybody's family circle.
Our boys coming from school give themselves such airs, the young
scapegraces! our girls, going to parties, are so tricked out by fond
mammas--a social history of London in the middle of the nineteenth
century. As such, future students--lucky they to have a book so
pleasant--will regard these pages: even the mutations of fashion they
may follow here if they be so inclined. Mr. Leech has as fine an eye for
tailory and millinery as for horse-flesh. How they change those cloaks