LISPINGS FROM LOW LATITUDES.*
IT is not easy to make the East comic—almost as difficult as to travesty nature. Nobody ever got a laugh out of Niagara, or made the aspect of the Great Desert humorous, and it will be long before Englishmen can genuinely enjoy the ludicrous side of the scenes which he realizes in his own mind chiefly through his recollections of the Bible and the " Arabian Nights." A certain familiarity is necessary even to artistic contempt, and a Sheikh looks impressive to unaccustomed eyes even when perplexedly poring over the bars of an English crinoline. The skill and humour of the lady for whom Lord Dufferiu stands sponsor have been wasted on an impossibility—the effort to make the violent incongruity of a comic East laughable instead of annoying. Nothing can be more perfect than her drawings ; but they are seldom truly comic, except when the locale is suppressed, or so kept down that it arouses no more serious associations. There is an exception to this rule in plate xviii., in which Miss Gush- ington is implored to purchase a dozen of tawny babies, whose attitudes and expressions are, to any one who recollects them, most deliciously funny. So would be plats xiv., the runaway camel ; but that the eye dwells on the admirable drawing of the obstinate, lazy, vicious beast, which it pleases Englishmen to consider a model of animal virtue, rather than on the preposterous figure perched upon his back. In both cases the observer regrets the sketch so full of life and meaning which the same pencil would have given him, had it not been guided by a taste for caricature so inapplicable to the scene.
The idea of the work is a little old, the Hon. Impulsia Gushington—wonderfully sketched in plate ii., at the moment of inspiration—being, after all, only the Unprotected Female on her travels, with Egypt for the scene of her first adventure, and a romantic imagination, instead of the merely timid one which Punch delights to pourtray. Her comments on the adventures she encounters, the rascally Greek dragoman who " realizes her idea of what Lord Byron must have been in the first flush of
Livings from Low Latitudes; or, Extracts from the Journal of the Hoe. Impalas Gushtogtom John Murray. romantic manhoor the scrubby Scotch law clerk, with red hair, who •4 realizes in some degree my idea of the aid," the rais, "a fine prophetic-loaking man, who quite realizes my idea of Balsam," are irresistibly absurd, and give occasion for some designs which not being Oriental enable the authoress to bring out her talent for cericeture without a drawback. There is a delicious sketch of the Scotch party picnicing in the vestibule of an Egyptian tomb, with Mrs. Maaishy very flinch elevated, Mr. Andrew MaeFishy impudently gentish, Mr. MacFishy, senior, under the lively impression that be has just sat down on a scor- pion. All the Oriental figures, too, are, when not merely farcical, admirably rendered, the authoress not putting, like most English sketchers, Englishmen into Eastern dress. We have spoken of the Fellah babies. There is a man leading the Hon. Impula's camel (plate xiii.) whom every European in Egypt must hare met a hundred times, and a Nubian face in plate xvi., which is as inimitable as that of the donkey which, one perceives, has just made up its mind on the expediency of a good kick. The Nubian face is a photo- graph, contrasting oddly with that of the Hindoo ayah, which is the conventional one used in pictures, and about as like a Hindoo woman's face as it is to a Laplander or an Esquimaux, and is, more- over, never alike in the three pictures in which she is iutroduced. Altogether, the" livings" are creditable to their authoress, and will,we hope, be exchanged more or less speedily for an intelligible utterance on life in the East. Lord Dufferin must know the life of the higher classes of Syria as few Englishmen have ever done.
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