MISS KILMANSEGG IN A NEW DRESS.*

MR. SECCOMBE has shown himself, in his illustrations of this best and most characteristic of Hood's poems, not only a rare artist, but a fine critic. The best artists we have will hardly take the trouble to enter into the literary spirit of the scenes they under- take to illustrate. They take the words to which their pictures are appended as a mere motto, a text from which to let their own fancies wander off into any vision they choose to summon up ; and the result is that, even when their pictures are most powerful, they almost spoil the book in which they appear, so far-removed are they from the theme depicted. Critics are apt to hate illustrated books, because the illustrations are so wide of the mark that they interrupt instead of interpreting the context. But Mr.' Seccombe has entered into the very soul of Hood, into the thorough horror of money-worship which is at the basis of his poem, and the tenderness and pathos with which Hood describes some of the results ; but also and equally into the extravagance of the wit, the rattle of the rhodomontade, the grimness of the irony which bespangle this fantastic piece with the quaint- est and most motley puns, and cause it to jingle with the wildest surprises of rhymes that come pattering down on the astonished reader like hailstones out of a perfectly clear sky. From the first illustration to the last, Mr. Seccombe interprets Hood in every drawing he givt. us. Look only at those attendants in waiting who stand outside the puppet-show, one on each side of • Miss Kitmansegg and her Precious Leg. A Golden Legend by Thomas Hood. With 60 Illustrations by Thomas S. Seceombe, R.A., engraved by F. Joubert. London : Moxon. 1570.

the model of the great golden leg whose story is to be pictorially illustrated within. One of them—the stout one, with the great feather in his cap, and the fat rosettes on his shoes—blows the trumpet, while the other in cocked hat and sword and elaborate ruffles, with eyes cast humbly down, bowing with the most courtly and obsequious air, holds the staff of a major-domo in his hand, and prepares to usher in the public. They are exquisite symbols of the style of the poem,—the puffed-out, blatant official symbolizing the ostentatious mock-grandiloquence of the praise lavished on the golden calf ; the bowing and courtly major-domo symbolizing the ironic deference to public taste which ministers with such apparently profound but sardonic homage to the gaping and admiring crowd about to be admitted. Or take the second illustration, in which, in the true spirit of Hood, Mr. Seccombe plays upon Hood, and makes, as it were, a sort of pictorial pun on Hood's verse. Hood in describing the Kilmansegg pedigree mentions the great Kilmansegg ancestor :—

" A lord of land on his own estate, He lived at a very lively rate;

But his income would bear carousing ; Such acres he had of pasture and heath, With herbage so rich from the ore beneath, The very ewes' and lambkins' teeth Were turned into gold by browsing."

Mr. Seccombe has taken the first three lines alone, and put a gro- tesque play upon their meaning, painting the " lord of land on his own estate " as an Irish soldier with battered hat and a wooden leg, sitting down, in the happy phase of intoxication, on the pave- ment outside the gin-palace; the coin dropping from his pocket intimating how his income (derived probably from begging or stealing) would bear carousing ; while an ill-looking dog, far more in earnest than himself, is coming up with a very menacing air to inquire his business. Of the same sort is the exquisitely humorous rendering of Hood's suggestion that with regard to the tale of the Kilmansegg ancestry,

" Certain people would wink and grin, And declare the whole story a parable."

—whereupon we are shown four old women sitting over their tea and toast, a favourite parrot in its cage behind them I—the lean and ill-natured spinster at the top of the table is stooping forward and explaining with malicious satisfaction to the sisterhood the factitious character of the asserted lineage ; the matron next her in the high cap is listening with feeble anxiety, her tea cup hardly lifted above the table in the intensity of her pleasurable regret that the Kilmanseggs should circulate such false accounts of their ancient glories ; while the grinning spinster next her is all wonder and delight at this new bit of scandal ; and the jolly old lady in the turban at the bottom of the table, with the cup close to her lips, is just raising her eyebrows and giving a keen smile, as though she would say, I always knew the story was trumped up.' rhe illustration is almost equivalent to a new verse of Hood's best writing,—so rich is its humour and so completely in Hood's own vein.

What a wealth of power there is in those five little illustrations of " what different lots our stars accord !" In the centre, in a rich bed, under a splendid canopy, is a baby "hailed and woo'd as a lord," and "born to a prospect all bright and burnished," a baby

Which "comes to the world as a gentleman comes

To a lodging ready furnished,"

while all round it are depicted the dingy lots of the less happy children of labour. There is the travelling juggler, with his drum on his back, a short pipe in his mouth, followed by a foreign- looking lad in a showman's dress, trudging wearily along an open common, the booths of the country fair in the distance ; there is the poor sweeper sweeping away in the dirty street ; there is the desolate mother resting herself, with her baby in her lap, in the bleak country, under some naked wintry trees, to which a notice of "Trespassers will be prosecuted" is attached ; and there, too, is a far finer conception of Hood's wretched seamstress,—though this woman is not exactly a shirt-maker, but apparently braiding a large piece of work,—than Gustave Dord's elaborate drawing, which we mentioned last week. The drudge-like expression of the face, the hollow, worn-out cheeks,—you can see the hectic spot, slight as the engraving is,—the dip-candle flickering in the socket, the small garret window, the anxious stoop of the poor creature's shoulders, convey a far more powerful conception of utter penury and exhaustion than Dord's,with those fanciful and mythical little angels at the window, managed to convey. It would be impossible to express better the spirit of Hood's bitter verse,-

" Not so with the infant Kilmansegg! She was not born to steal or beg,

Or gather creases in ditches; To plait the straw, or bind the shoe, Or sit all day to hem and sew As females must, and not a few, To fill their insides with stitches!"

Mr. Seccombe, too, shows Hood's own power of making common cares at once ludicrous and grim. We scarcely know which is the better in its way, Hood's grotesque description of poor pater- familias' nightly troubles, as the difficulty of making both ends meet haunts him, or Mr. Seccombe's powerful picture of the spectres which present themselves to the same harassed mind in visions of the night. Hood wrote,-

" No part had she in vulgar cares

That belong to common household affairs ; Nocturnal annoyances such as theirs Who lie with a shrewd surmising, That while they are couchant (a bitter cup !) Their bread and butter are getting up, And the coals—confound them !—are rising."

Mr. Seccombe is quite as grotesque, and still more powerful. He has thrown a bald-headed, middle-aged paterfamilias into a dis- tressed sleep, haunted by the most terrible images. His eldest son, a smart young cavalry officer, leading his horse with one hand, is dragging forwards painfully with the other a gigantic file of gigantic bills bigger than himself ; the second son, a young col- legian, in college cap and gown, is prostrate at his father's feet with another file of bills, not so pompous, but a very effective accompaniment to his brother's ; the daughter in a bridal veil is being led forward by her mother, who holds in her hand an inter- minable length of paper containing the innumerable items of the wedding trousseau, which mamma presents with a most peremp- tory smile to the wretched dreamer ; the youngest boy sits on a pile of schoolbooks behind his father's head, with a flowing bill for schooling and all the etcmteras in his childish hand ; while out of the paternal mansion itself, which forms the background of his terrible vision, a thin, ghostly arm reaches forth a bill for Rent, and bottle imps dancing over his head, stretch out bills, we sup- pose, for wine and spirits. There is something at once ludicrous, grotesque, and dreadful in this nightmare of indebtedness, and the common-place, coarse, old Philistine face, which is snoring away in dreary puckers of consternation just above the blankets, excites a feeling of pathos as well as of laughter in the mind of the spectator.

We should hardly ever have done if we went through these sixty illustrations, picking out only those which have struck us for something far more than ordinary skill. The illustrations of fashionable society are quite as good as the illustrations of grotesquer scenes ; the pictures of village simplicity are as perfect as the illustrations of society. The illustration to " there's a twofold sweetness in double pipes," is as genuinely kindly in its humour as the illustration to " the downright loving of pretty Cis" is kindly in its grace. Then, again, each of the six bridesmaids all in white "rehearsing their own hymeneals " with that extremely imbecile-looking crowd of young fashionables behind them, has a separate expression of her own, yet all alike are obviously conscious of being pretty and obviously rehearsing the greater glory to come. The picture of the fancy-ball, where Miss Kilmansegg, after giving the Bonze her "golden bow to hold," and " the Hermit her belt and bugle of gold," and " the Abbot her golden quiver," finishes off " with a whirligig bout,"

" While the precious leg stood stiffly out Like the leg of a Figurante,"

is almost as rich in humour as Dickens's picture of the famous fancy-dress archery-meeting, where Mrs. Leo Hunter and Count Smorltork will figure as long as the English tongue endures ; and the picture of the christening, where Sir Jacob Kilmansegg

" Washes his hands with invisible soap In imperceptible water,"

and Lady Kilmansegg's head

" Niddle-noddles at every word,

And seemed so happy, a Paradise Bird Had nidificated upon it,"

is as good as Mr. Richard Doyle's very best renderings of English drawing-rooms. Sir Jacob's high, bald head, lank figure, and amiable company smile, as he performs the above operation before a very arch dowager with a splendid fan and three sets of flounces, who is evidently joking mildly about babies, is one of the most humorous and yet entirely uncaricatured figures we ever remember to have seen. There is slyness as well as wealth in the face, and yet ostentation too. Sir Jacob is skinny, but bland,— a very climax of lean enjoyment. • What a contrast to the striking picture in which " the bowing Sir Jacob " bows his head " to Death with his usual urbanity." There, the grisly monarch, crowned, but shrouded in white drapery, is stretching out a skeleton hand over Sir Jacob, as bald and skinny as before but with all the sly complacency faded out of his face, as he bends his stony profile urbanely cowering beneath that dread and impera- tive finger. Yet even now we doubt if we have mentioned the best of these striking illustrations. Perhaps the one which most of all identifies the artist with the poet is that appended to the verse :—

" Had it been a leg like those perchance

That teach little boys and girls to dance, To set, poussette, recede, and advance,

With the steps and figures most proper,—

Had it hopped for a weekly or quarterly sum, How little of praise or of grist would have come To a mill with such a hopper!"

As his commentary on this verse, Mr. Seccombe has given us a poor dancing-master, with a ruinous umbrella up, just leaving the door of the preparatory school of a country town, in a driving rain. He carries his fiddle in a green baize bag under his arm, and his pumps in his hand, and is just hesitating before crossing the muddy street, though the only object out is a solitary dog, hardly as comfortless as himself. Yet the man is evidently a hard worker, and by no means sullen or discontented ; he is very hungry-looking, but he only makes a half-comic face at the pro- spect of his dismal walk,—giving a sort of whistle under his mous- tache as he contemplates the mud and rain, and bravely prepares to face it. The picture would go to Hood's own heart. It has, like all Hood's best comic verses, something intermediate between a laugh and a cry in it.

We can say with perfect truth that we never remember seeing illustrations to any poem which add so much to the wealth of conception it contains, and add it in the same spirit. Retech's

outlines to Goethe's Faust—though in a higher plane of imagina- tion, of course—would not even be an exception.