pedigree was correct, some of his ancestors must have suffered a more
heavy declension, since the good man his father executed the necessary,
and, I trust, the honest, but certainly not very distinguished,
employment of tailor in ordinary to the village of Langdirdum in the
west.. Under his humble roof was Richard born, and to his father's
humble trade was Richard, greatly contrary to his inclination, early
indentured. Old Mr. Tinto had, however, no reason to congratulate
himself upon having compelled the youthful genius of his son to forsake
its natural bent. He fared like the school-boy who attempts to stop with
his finger the spout of a water cistern, while the stream, exasperated
at this compression, escapes by a thousand uncalculated spurts, and wets
him all over for his pains. Even so fared the senior Tinto, when his
hopeful apprentice not only exhausted all the chalk in making sketches
upon the shopboard, but even executed several caricatures of his
father's best customers, who began loudly to murmur, that it was too
hard to have their persons deformed by the vestments of the father, and
to be at the same time turned into ridicule by the pencil of the son.
This led to discredit and loss of practice, until the old tailor,
yielding to destiny and to the entreaties of his son, permitted him to
attempt his fortune in a line for which he was better qualified.

There was about this time, in the village of Langdirdum, a peripatetic
brother of the brush, who exercised his vocation sub Jove frigido, the
object of admiration of all the boys of the village, but especially
to Dick Tinto. The age had not yet adopted, amongst other unworthy
retrenchments, that illiberal measure of economy which, supplying by
written characters the lack of symbolical representation, closes one
open and easily accessible avenue of instruction and emolument against
the students of the fine arts. It was not yet permitted to write upon
the plastered doorway of an alehouse, or the suspended sign of an