Chapter 3

In our last we briefly adverted to the gratifying fact that Mr. Barry had at least a thousand superficial feet on the walls of the new Houses of Parliament at the services of the historical painters of England; and we also, in a passing manner, suggested a few compositions worthy of their pencils. A reconsideration of the matter convinces us that the subject is too important--too national, to be adopted as merely the fringe of our article; and we have therefore determined within ourselves to devote our present essay to a serious discussion of the various pictures that are, or _ought_, to decorate the interior of the new House of Commons. As for the House of Lords, we see no necessity whatever for lavishing the fine inspirations of art on that temple of wisdom; inasmuch as the sages who deliberate there are, for the most part, born legislators, coming into the world with all the rudiments of government in embryo in their baby heads, and, on the twenty-first anniversary of their birthday, putting their legs out of bed adult, full-grown law-makers. It would be the height of democratic insolence to attempt to teach these chosen few: it would, in fact, be a misprision of treason against the sovereignty of Nature, who, when making the _pia mater_ of a future peer of England, knows very well the delicate work she has in hand, and takes pains accordingly. It is different when she manufactures a mob of skulls which, by a jumble of worldly accidents, or by the satire of Fortune in her bitterest mood, may ultimately belong to Members of the House of Commons. These she makes, as they make blocks in Portsmouth-yard, a hundred a minute. All she has to do is to fulfil her contract with the world, taking care that there shall be no want of the raw material for Members of Parliament, leaving it to Destiny to work it up as she may. We have not the slightest doubt, by-the-by, that poor Nature is often very much confounded by the ultimate application of her own handiwork. We can fancy the venerable old gossip at her business, patting up skulls as serenely as our lamented great grandmother (she wrote a very pretty book on the beauties of population, and illustrated the work, too, with portraits from her own hand) was wont to pat up apple-dumplings:--we can imagine Nature--good old soul!--looking over her spectacles at the infant dough, and saying to herself as she finishes skull by skull--"Ha! that will do for a pawnbroker;"--"That, as it's rather low and narrow, for a sharp attorney;"--"That for a parish constable;"--"That for a clown at a fair,"--and so on. And we can well imagine the astonishment of simple-hearted old Nature on getting a ticket for the gallery of the House of Commons (for very seldom, indeed, has she been known to show herself on the floor), to see her skull of a pawnbroker on the shoulders of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; her _caput_ of the sharp attorney belonging to a Minister of the Home Department; her head of a parish constable as a Paymaster of the Forces; and the dough she had intended to swallow knives and eat fire at wakes and fairs gravely responded to as "an honourable and gallant member!" Whereupon, who can wonder at the amazement and indignation of Mother Nature, and that, with a keen sense of the misapplication of her skulls, she sometimes abuses Mother Fortune in good set terms, mingling with her reproaches the strongest reflections on her chastity?

We have thought it due to the full consideration of our subject so far, to dwell upon the natural difference between the skull of a Peer and the skull of a Commoner. The skull of the noble, as we have shown, is a thing made to order--fitted up, like Mr. MECHI'S pocket-dressing-case, with the ornamental and useful: no instrument can be added to it--the thing is complete. Hence, to employ historical painters for the education of the House of Lords would be a useless and profligate expenditure of art and money. It would be to paint the lily LONDONDERRY--to add a perfume to the violet ELLENBOROUGH. All Peers being from the first--indeed, even _in utero_--ordained law-makers, statute-making comes to them by nature. How much history goes to prove this, showing that the House of Lords--like the Solomons of the _fleur-de-lis_--have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing! To attempt to instruct a Peer would be as gross an impertinence to the instinct of his order as to present MINERVA--who no doubt came from the head of JOVE a Peeress in her own right--with a toy alphabet or horn-book.

For the skulls of the House of Commons,--that is, indeed, another question! We are so far utilitarian that we would have the pictures for which Mr. BARRY offers a thousand feet selected solely with a view to the dissemination of knowledge amongst the many benighted members of the House of Commons. We would have the subjects so chosen that they should entirely supersede _Oldfield's Representative History_; never forgetting the wants of the most illiterate. For instance, for the politicians on the fifth form, the SIBTHORPS and PLUMPTRES, whose education in their youth has been shamefully neglected, we would have a nice pictorial political alphabet. We do not pride ourselves, be it understood, upon writing unwrinkled verse; we only present the subjoined as a crude idea of our plan, taken we confess, from certain variegated volumes, to be had either of Mr. SOUTER, St. Paul's Churchyard, or Messrs. DARTON and HARVEY, Holborn.

A was King ALFRED, a monarch of note; B is BURDETT, who can well turn a coat.

Here we would have the chief incidents of Alfred's life nicely painted, with BURDETT, late Old Glory, and now Old Corruption. As for the poetry, when we consider the capacities of the learners, _that_ cannot be too simple, too homely. The House, however, may order a Committee of Versification, if it please; all that we protest against is D'ISRAELI being of the number.

C is the CORN-LAWS, that famish'd the poor; D is the DEBT, that will famish them more.

Here, for the imaginative artist, is an opportunity! To paint the wholesale wickedness and small villanies of the Corn-laws! What a contrast of scene and character! Squalid hovels, and princely residences--purse-proud, plethoric injustice, big and bloated with, its iniquitous gains, and gaunt, famine-stricken multitudes! Then for the Debt--that hideous thing begotten by war and corruption; what a tremendous moral lesson might be learned from a nightly conning of the terrific theme!

We have neither poetic genius nor space of paper to go through the whole of the alphabet; we merely throw out the above four lines--and were we not assured that they are better lines, far more musical, than any to be found in BULWER'S SIAMESE TWINS, we should blush much nearer scarlet than we do--to give an idea of the utility and beautiful comprehensiveness of our plan.

The great difficulty, however, will be to compress the subjects--so multitudinous are they--within the thousand feet allowed by the architect. To begin with the Wittenagemot, or meeting of the wise men, and to end with portraits of Mr. Roebuck's ancestors--to say nothing of the fine imaginative sketch of the Member for Bath tilting, in the mode of Quixote with the steam-press of Printing-house-square--will require the most extraordinary powers of condensation on the parts of the artists. Nevertheless, if the undertaking be even creditably executed, it will be a monument of national wisdom and national utility to unborn generations of Members. What crowds of subjects press upon us! The _History of Bribery_ might make a sort of Parliamentary Rake's Progress, if we could but hit upon the artist to portray its manifold beauties. _The Windsor Stables_ and _the Education of the Poor_ would form admirable companion-pictures, in which the superiority of the horse over the human animal could be most satisfactorily delineated--the quadruped having considerably more than three times the amount voted to him for snug lodging, hay, beans, and oats, that the English pauper obtained from Parliament for that manure of the soil--as congregated piety at Exeter Hall denominates it--a Christian education!

What a beautiful arabesque border might be conceived from a perusal of the late Lord Castlereagh's speeches! We should here have Parliamentary eloquence under a most fantastic yet captivating phase. Who, for instance, but the artist to PUNCH could paint CASTLEREAGH'S figure of a smug, contented, selfish traitor, the "crocodile with his hand in his breeches' pocket?" Again, does not the reader recollect that extraordinary person who, according to the North Cray Demosthenes, "turned his back _upon himself_?" There would be a portrait!--one, too, presenting food for the most "sweet and bitter melancholy" to the GRAHAMS and the STANLEYS. There is also that immortal Parliamentary metaphor, emanating from the same mysterious source,--"The _feature_ upon which the question _hinges_!" The only man who could have properly painted this was the enthusiastic BLAKE, who so successfully limned the ghost of a flea! These matters, however, are to be considered as merely supplementary ornaments to great themes. The grand subjects are to be sought for in _Hansard's Reports_, in petitions against returns of members, in the evidence that comes out in the committee-rooms, in the abstract principles of right and wrong, that make members honest patriots, or that make them give the harlot "ay" and "no," as dictated by the foul spirit gibbering in their breeches' pockets.

That we may have painted all these things, Mr. BARRY offers up one thousand feet. Oh! Mr. B. can't you make it ten!

Q.

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PUNCH's PENCILLINGS.--No. XV.

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THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE LONDON MEDICAL STUDENT.

4.--OF THE MANNER IN WHICH THE FIRST SEASON PASSES.

From the period of our last Chapter our friend commences to adopt the attributes of the mature student. His notes are taken as before at each lecture he attends, but the lectures are fewer, and the notes are never fairly transcribed; at the same time they are interspersed with a larger proportion of portraits of the lecturer, and other humorous conceits. He proposes at lunch-time every day that he and his companions should "go the odd man for a pot;" and the determination he had formed at his entry to the school, of working the last session for all the prizes, and going up to the Hall on the Thursday and the College on the Friday without grinding, appears somewhat difficult of being carried into execution.

It is at this point of his studies that the student commences a steady course of imaginary dissection: that is to say, he keeps a chimerical account of extremities whose minute structure he has deeply investigated (in his head), and received in return various sums of money from home for the avowed purpose of paying for them. If he really has put his name down for any heads and necks or pelvic viscera at the commencement of the season, when he had imbibed and cherished some lunatic idea "that dissection was the sheet-anchor of safety at the College," he becomes a trafficker in human flesh, and disposes of them as quickly as he can to any hard-working man who has his examination in perspective.

He now assumes a more independent air, and even ventures to chalk odd figures on the black board in the theatre. He has been known, previously to the lecture, to let down the skeleton that hangs by a balance weight from the ceiling, and, inserting its thumb in the cavity of its nose, has there secured it with a piece of thread, and then, placing a short pipe in its jaws, has pulled it up again. His inventive faculties are likewise shown by various diverting objects and allusions cut with his knife upon the ledge before him in the lecture-room, whereon the new men rest their note-books and the old ones go to sleep. In vain do the directors of the school order the ledge to be coated with paint and sand mixed together--nothing is proof against his knife; were it adamant he would cut his name upon it. His favourite position at lecture is now the extremity of the bench, where its horse-shoe form places him rather out of the range of the lecturer's vision; and, ten to one, it is here that he has cut a cribbage-board on the seat, at which he and his neighbour play during the lecture on Surgery, concealing their game from common eyes by spreading a mackintosh cape on the desk before them. His conversation also gradually changes its tone, and instead of mildly inquiring of the porter, on his entering the school of a morning, what is for the day's anatomical demonstration, he talks of "the regular lark he had last night at the Eagle, and how jolly screwed he got!"--a frank admission, which bespeaks the candour of his disposition.

Careful statistics show us that it is about the end of November the new man first makes the acquaintance of his uncle; and observant people have remarked, as worthy of insertion in the Medical Almanack amongst the usual phenomena of the calendar--"About this time dissecting cases and tooth-instruments appear in the windows, and we may look for watches towards the beginning of December." Although this is his first transaction on his own account, yet his property has before ascended the spout, when some unprincipled student, at the beginning of the season, picked his pocket of a big silver lancet-case, which he had brought up with him from the country; and having, pledged it at the nearest money-lender's, sent him the duplicate in a polite note, and spent the money with some other dishonest young men, in drinking their victim's health in his absence. And, by the way, it is a general rule that most new men delight to carry big lancet-cases, although they have about as much use for them as a lecturer upon practice of physic has for top boots.

Thus gradually approaching step by step towards the perfection of his state, the new man's first winter-session passes; and it is not unlikely that, at the close of the course, he may enter to compete for the anatomical prize, which he sometimes gets by stealth, cribbing his answers from a tiny manual of knowledge, two inches by one-and-a-half in size, which he hides under his blotting-paper. This triumph achieved, he devotes the short period which intervenes before the commencement of the summer botanical course to various hilarious pastimes; and as the watch and dissecting-case are both gone, he writes the following despatch to his governor--

LETTER No. II.--(_Copy._)

MY DEAR FATHER,--You will, I am sure, be delighted to learn that I have gained the twenty-ninth honorary certificate for proficiency in anatomy which you will allow is a very high number when I tell you that only thirty are given. I have also the satisfaction of informing you that the various professors have given me certificates of having attended their lectures _very diligently_ during the past courses.

I work very hard, but I need not inform you that, with all my economy, I am at some expense for good books and instruments. I have purchased _Liston's Surgery_, Anthony Thompson's _Materia Medica_, Burns and Merriman's _Midwifery_, Graham's _Chemistry_, Astley Cooper's _Dislocations_, and Quain's _Anatomy_, all of which I have read carefully through twice. I also pay a private demonstrator to go over the bones with me of a night; and I have bought a skeleton at Alexander's--a great bargain. This, when I "pass," I think of presenting to the museum of the hospital, as I am under great obligations to the surgeons. I think a ten-pound note willl clear my expenses, although I wish to enter to a summer course of dissections, and take some lessons in practical chemistry in the laboratories with Professor Carbon, but these I will endeavour to pay for out of my own pocket. With my best regards to all at home, believe me,

Your affectionate son,

JOSEPH MUFF.

As soon as the summer course begins, the Botanical Lectures commence with it, and the polite Company of Apothecaries courteously request the student's acceptance of a ticket of admission to the lectures, at their garden at Chelsea. As these commence somewhere about eight in the morning, of course he must get up in the middle of the night to be there; and consequently he attends very often, of course. But the botanical excursions that take place every Saturday from his own school are his especial delight. He buys a candle-box to contain all the chickweed, chamomiles, and dandelions he may collect, and slinging it over his shoulder with his pocket-handkerchief, he starts off in company with the Professor and his fellow-herbalists to Wandsworth Common, Battersea Fields, Hampstead Heath, or any other favourite spot which the cockney Flora embellishes with her offspring.

The conduct of medical students on botanical excursions generally appears in various phases. Some real lovers of the study, pale men in spectacles, who wear shoes and can walk for ever, collect every weed they drop upon, to which they assign a most extraordinary name, and display it at their lodgings upon cartridge paper, with penny pieces to keep the leaves in their places as they dry. Others limit their collections to stinging-nettles, which they slyly insert into their companions' pockets, or long bulrushes, which they tuck under the collars of their coats; and the remainder turn into the first house of public entertainment they arrive at on emerging from the smoke of London to the rural districts, and remain all day absorbed in the mysteries of ground billiards and knock-'em-downs, their principal vegetable studies being confined to lettuces, spring onions, and water-cresses. But all this is very proper--we mean the botanical part of the story--for the knowledge of the natural class and order of a buttercup must be of the greatest service to a practitioner in after-life in treating a case of typhus fever or ruptured blood-vessel. At some of the Continental Hospitals, the pupil's time is wasted at the bedside of the patient, from which he can only get practical information. How much better is the primrose-investigating _curriculum_ of study observed at our own medical schools!

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SOME THINGS TO WHICH THE IRISH WOULD NOT SWEAR.

MR. GROVE.--This insufferably ignorant, and, therefore, insolent magisterial cur, who has recently made himself an object of unenviable notoriety, by asserting that "the Irish would swear anything," has shown himself to be as stupid as he is malignant. Would, for instance, the most hard-mouthed Irishman in existence venture to swear that--

Mr. Grove is a gentleman; or that-- Sir Francis Burdett has brought honour to his grey hairs; or that-- Colonel Sibthorp has more brains than beard; or that-- Sir Robert Peel feels for anybody but himself; or that-- Peter Borthwick was listened to with attention; or that-- Sir Peter Laurie's wisdom cannot be estimated; or that-- Sir Edward George Erle Lytton Bulwer thinks very small beer of himself; or that-- The Earl of Coventry carries a vast deal of sense under his hat; or that-- Mr. Roebuck is the pet of the _Times_; or, in short, that-- The Tories are the best and most popular governors that England ever had.

If "the Irish would swear" to the above, we confess they "would swear anything."

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COMING EVENTS CAST THEIR SHADOWS BEFORE THEM.

SIR JAMES CLARK is in daily attendance at the Palace. We suppose that he is looking out for a new berth under Government.

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HOSTILITIES IN PRIVATE LIFE.

We have just heard of an event which has shaken the peace of a highly respectable house in St. Martin's Court, from the chimney-pots to the coal-cellar. Mrs. Brown, the occupier of the first floor, happened, on last Sunday, to borrow of Mrs. Smith, who lived a pair higher in the world, a German silver teapot, on the occasion of her giving a small twankey party to a few select friends. But though she availed herself of Mrs. Smith's German-silver, to add respectability to her _soirée_, she wholly overlooked Mrs. Smith, who was _not_ invited to partake of the festivities. This was a slight that no woman of spirit could endure; and though Mrs. Smith's teapot was German-silver, she resolved to let Mrs. Brown see that she had herself some real Britannia _mettle_ in her composition. Accordingly when the teapot was sent up the following morning to Mrs. Smith's apartments, with Mrs. Brown's "compliments and thanks," Mrs. Smith discovered or affected to discover, a serious contusion on the lid of the article, and despatched it by her own servant back to Mrs. Brown, accompanied by the subjoined note:--

"Mrs. Smith's compliments to Mrs. Brown, begs to return the teapott to the latter--in consequence of the ill-usage it has received in her hands."

Mrs. Brown, being a woman who piques herself upon her talent at epistolary writing, immediately replied in the following terms:--

"Mrs. Brown's compliments to Mrs. Smith, begs to say that her paltry teapot received no ill usage from Mrs. Brown.--Mrs. B. will thank Mrs. S. not to put two _t_'s at the end of _teapot_ in future."

This note and the teapot were forthwith sent upstairs to Mrs. Smith, whose indignation being very naturally roused, she again returned the battered affair, with this spirited missive:--

"Mrs. Smith begs to inform Mrs. Brown, that she despises her insinuations, and to say, that she will put as many _t_'s as she pleases in her _teapot_.

"P.S.--Mrs. S. expects to be paid 10s. for the injured article."

Again the teapot was sent upstairs, with the following reply from Mrs. Brown:--

"Mrs. Brown thinks Mrs. Smith a low creature.

"P.S.--Mrs. B. won't pay a farthing."

The correspondence terminated here, the German-silver teapot remaining in _statu quo_ on the lobby window, between the territories of the hostile powers; and there it might have remained until the present moment, if Mrs. Brown had not declared, in an audible voice, at the foot of the stairs, that Mrs. Smith was acting under the influence of gin, which reaching the ears of the calumniated lady, she rushed down to the landing-place, and seizing the teapot, discharged it at Mrs. Brown's head, which it fortunately missed, but totally annihilated a plaster figure of Napoleon, which stood in the hall, and materially damaged its own spout. Mrs. Brown, being wholly unsupported at the time, retired hastily within the defences of her own apartments, which Mrs. Smith cannonaded vigorously for upwards of ten minutes with a broom handle; and there is every reason to believe she would shortly have effected a practicable breach, if a reinforcement from the kitchen had not arrived to aid the besieged, and forced the assailant back to her second-floor entrenchments. Mrs. Smith then demanded a truce until evening, which was granted by Mrs. Brown; notwithstanding which the former lady was detected, in defiance of this arrangement, endeavouring to _blow up_ Mrs. Brown through the keyhole.

There is no telling how this unhappy difference will terminate; for though at present matters appear tolerably quiet, we know not (as in the case of the Canadas) at what moment we may have to inform our readers that

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GEOLOGY OF SOCIETY.

SECTION II.