A NEW FORM OF "PUFF."
THAT may be a pardonable deception which is meant to betray people into reading an innocent tale for a child, instead of a startling story ; but it unquestionably is a deception, and we set our faces distinctly against the custom, becoming so common, of giving names to books which do not suggest a correct idea of them— which, indeed, create an utterly false impression. Such, for in- stance, was the late title " Brought to Book," and such have been many others, this for one. Mrs. Melville seems a very kind,. motherly woman—but how, with this on her own conscience, can she any longer teach her little ones of whom she tells us those lines
of Dr. Watts,— "And he who does one fault at first, And lies to hide it, makes it two ;"
or that legend of the drowned cat beginning,
" When Jacky drown'd our poor cat Tib, He told a very naughty fib "?
We fear Mrs. Melville has "told a very naughty fib," and then. "made it two." It seems, as it were, borne in upon our minds, that so sensational a title and so ambitious a get-up have for their ultimate object the drawing attention to the eight appended pages of testimonials to Mrs. Melville's great powers as an artist, and suggestions of visits to her studio. If so, she has not written. merely to give us a kindly little tale ; and herein is the fib. And as the kindly little tale would scarcely attract any attention per se, she has called it £2,000 Reward, which is sure to create an active demand for it at the circulating libraries, but which, being utterly deceptive, is, we submit, "making it two." Mr. and Mrs. Mel- ville both seem well known in the world of art, though we fear it "argues ourselves unknown" that we have not happened to hear of them ; but their works are certified very admirable by the Standard, Telegraph, Morning Post, Court Circular, and, pre- eminently, by the Bayswater Chronicle, some of which influential papers assure us more than once that "they are not amongst those who believe that all the good pictures of the year are at the Royal Academy." We never heard that any one had such an article of faith.
The story, which would have been more suitable for a child's periodical or a tract, was suggested by the sight of a little boy,.
* £2,000 Reward. By Eliza A. Melville. London : Dean and Son.
the son of an apple-stall woman, but so exceedingly pretty that Mrs. Melville appears to have grudged him to the lower classes, and oonsequently wrote a story making him one of the upper ten thousand. But perhaps her children were more to blame for this than herself. She tells us that she only wanted to follow the little man's fortunes a little way and make an angel of him pretty early, but that her children would not hear of anything so melancholy, and insisted on a successful and glorious ending ; and we gather that the family committee thought that that could only be achieved in Eaton Square with a coronet on the carriage-panels. It is a little unkind to the excellent Mrs. Morgan, who guarded his infant days with such unselfish devotion, to deny to her, and such as she, the possession of beauty in their offspring, nor do we think that nature endorses Mrs. Melville's implied conviction.
While the purpose held of making the little hero a premature angel, the authoress illustrated her story with infantile pictures ; either done but imperfect justice to by her engraver, or not bear- ing out entirely the praises of her g enius for face and figure- painting to be found, as aforesaid, in the extracts from the Bayswater Chronicle, &c., in the last eight pages of the volume. Little Jem has a tendency to look idiotic, an expression which it cannot be denied somewhat damps the enthusiasm created by golden hair and violet eyes. In the frontispiece he is unsuccess- fully toasting, with mouth very wide open and eyes suggestive of saucers for the coming meal ; his granny the while, with a chin like a fork of a tree from which a bough has been sawn off by the careful pruner, showing culpable carelessness about the overflow of the cup as she stares at something above and beyond the picture. Further on poor little Jemmy becomes puddingy in form of face, with a tendency (at page 76) to look blind. When he appears, as the Honourable Harold, with a stomacher to his little dress that does not do credit to Lady Montague's taste, the idiotic expression is manifested in excess, perhaps with covert irony at her (the authorese's) own aristocratic proclivities. Only where—to reach his granny in the moon—he is climbing the lamp-post—from the lamp on which the most astonishing rays are diverging in the most unscientific directions—is his expression life-like, for these rays are evidently frightening the poor little man to that extent that we wonder his hair does not imitate their example, and stand out from his head till the rays and the hair are each a counterpart of the other. When the Eaton Square plan is substituted for the heavenly one, poetic justice demands that the divine afflatus should take wing and the illustrations abruptly cease; excepting the one wherethe noble little lord in the stomacher expresses his life-long gratitude to good Mrs. Morgan, and our authoress takes leave of her readers.
The plot is not unknown to readers of children's stories, and may be described as the "chimney-sweep plot." The hero's nurse—a sort of Eliza Davis—meets her British sailor bold and true on the Brighton beach, and lays her noble charge, then in his eighteenth month, under the shadow of a bathing-machine. When she returns in a very few minutes the shadow of the bath- ing machine knows him no more. The noble mother faints, and the noble father, regardless of expense, indiscreetly, as it seems to us who have been taught to know the value of money, offers £2,000 reward for finding his son. Nothing comes of it, and the authoress, doubtless regarding this large expenditure with a regretful dejection, cunningly arranges in the upshot that the Montagues shall find master Harold themselves, and snaps her fingers at the detectives and reward-seekers generally. No clue is ever obtained to the particulars of the abduction ; it would have been difficult certainly to explain the imbecility of the abductor in not contriving to place his finger firmly on the £2,000 note. Jemmy—formerly and afterwards Harold—first makes his appear- ance as a boy at the death-bed of an old woman whom he designates " Granny "—for the toast-and-tea episode only exists in the pictured page—and the feelings and conduct and subsequent life for six weeks of the poor child are nicely enough described. Here are his adventures after his descent from the lamp-post — "Just then he espied a bobby,' as he called the policeman, coming round the corner of the quiet square ; so he took to his heels and dived into the dark shadow of the first mews he saw, and, groping his way inwards, happily came upon a heap of straw in an open shed, where, covering himself over, he coiled himself up and was soon fast asleep. At early dawn, the ostler came down the mews whistling his morning tune, where many a little grimy London sparrow had already twittered and hopped about, industriously in search of its early breakfast ; but still Jemmy slept on ; no dreams disturbed him; he was oblivious to all his sorrows and his hardships. The man, seeing the little fellow, looked hard at him, and muttered to himself, 'Poor little chap ! sleep on a bit ; naebbe ye wor hard put to, to find a bed.' Having looked after his horses, and seeing the child still in a profound sleep, he called to his wife to come and look at the poor little ragged rascal who had got pos- session of his straw ; and on her doing so, woman-like, her first exclama- tion was, 'Poor little thing ! I wonder who he belongs to. Why, he must have been here all night, John. I wonder, now, if he was hungry when he came in here ? Bless his pretty face, he don't look like a common child, now does he John?'—' Well, well, common or no common, I'll take my davy, when he wakes him up, he'll peck above a bit, as some other folks as I know on '11 do, if ye'll only get summnt for 'em to peck at.' And so the kind-hearted woman, taking the hint, hurried up to her rooms over the stable to get the breakfast ready, not forgetting, whilst apportioning Jack the stableboy his share of the hot coffee and bread-and-dripping, to lay by the same for poor Jem; and shortly after- wards taking it to him, and finding him still asleep, she was about to waken him, when her husband called out, 'It won't not do him no harm to sleep, missus ; I'd let him have a lot of it; he mayn't get such a cosey crib another night. Leave him his coffee; he'll peck when he wakens, never fear.' And so she left him, leaving his breakfast on a horse-block close at hand. Scarcely had she turned her back, when the ostler, taking a pair of horses out, the noise of their hoofs on the stones of the yard wakened little Jem, when up he started, rubbed his eyes, and stared around, and there, lo! what did he see—close at his hand? At first he thought, surely his Granny was there, and for a moment he was still and waited; but the smell of the coffee was too great a tempta- tion to withstand long, so, without further ceremony, he attacked the coffee and bread with an appetite which only a little hungry boy can realize. Whilst busy about his breakfast, he began to think that he had never seen his Granny in that place, and before he had quite finished he remembered she was in the moon, and he began to wonder and have doubts whether he ought to have touched that breakfast at all; it might be for some one else, and the thoughts of the 'bobby' began to disturb his mind, and he was frightened; so, hastily swallowing the last dregs of the coffee, and cramming the last bit of crust into his mouth, he stealthily peeped about, and seeing no one, he sneaked out of the mews, and scampered off, fearful of being followed and punished for having eaten some one else's breakfast. And so poor little Jem had a fair start for another day."
As the cold weather approaches he gets very wretched, and at last he sees his old granny, as he thinks, and insists on her taking him home, and the good Mrs. Morgan—for it is she—actually accepts the responsibility. Fortunately she has a kind friend on her stair- case who has lately lost just such a little boy, so that clothes are forthcoming of an unexceptionable fit. But unfortunately, she has also a very savage, drunken husband, and a precociously wicked babe of two years old, a deformed little imp who screams and foams with jealous rage at little Jemmy. But these two are only temporary sojourners disturbing the peace of the otherwise happy party ; for the former, coming home exceedingly drunk on the very first occasion of meeting with his unexpected little tenant, sets fire to the house, and father and babe are hurried together from this mortal scene. Jemmy is soon after promoted to a fashionable crossing, and there, after greatly improving their joint financial position, of course gets run over by Lady Montague's own carriage, and is taken by her to the nearest hospital, and there recognized by presentiment, intuition, that never-absent mark on the arm— which the family nurse, of course, looked for—and a coronet on a little chemise, found with some valuable articles in the possession of a reprehensible relieving officer, who had never, in all those years, advertised the fact of their existence.
The style is not very easy, nor the English very elegant. It is evidently the work of an unpractised hand. We hear, for instance, of hospital beds " all occupied with the victims of various of the ills that flesh is heir to ;" and in the next page of the physician who, " though too well bred to make a direct inquiry, showed by a few words to his lordship that his curiosity was of the greatest." And again, Lady Montague " affected a resiornent to her lot which she often did not feel." And here is something worse,—" He would be sure to buy himself a hot potato, like he was used to do when his granny was alive." Little Jemmy, however, is an attractive little fellow, and we could easily forgive the defects of the story and the style and the illus- trations. Our quarrel is with the utterly misleading title, and with the too apparent fact that the tale is subsidiary to the artist's advertisement.
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