MRS. JOHNNIE GILPIN IN ROTTEN ROW.

(A Modern Setting to an Old Gem.)
Her horse, who never in that sort
Had handled been before,
What thing upon his back had got Did wonder more and more.
The dogs did bark, the children screamed,
Some got a nasty fall,
And every soul cried out “ Police ! ”— Who did not come at call.
Hear Atlas sing, “ To stop this thing,
The world asks Mr. P.
So when she next did ride abroad,
Why, we were there to see.
PHILISTIA DEFIANT.
(A Fragment of the Fiction of the Future.)
Chapter XLIX.
In which JEsthetidsm, assisted by a Teapot, is the cause of a division between friends.
Mbs. Vamp’s High-Art boudoir in South Kensington was arranged and arrayed, for the reception of a visitor. That visitor was Bet
sinda Grig—Mrs. Grig, of Clapham Park—“ a dear creature,” as Mrs. Vamp would often remark, “ though a quite too awfully utter Philistine.” , .... ...
Mrs. Vamp’s boudoir was not a spacious one, but to the aesthetic soul the Intense is the Unconditioned. What Mrs. Vamp’s boudoir wanted in compass she made up in crockery, of which she had a large collection, disposed in every unlikely and inappropriate position about the walls thereof. F or the Incongruous and the Utter are One ! The pick and pride of this collection was for the moment a Teapot, an entirely too precious monstrosity in Blue, a Thing—say rather an Entity or Presence—to doat on by day and dream of by night.
Mrs. Vamp, who had long yearned to divert her friend Betsinda’s errant feet from the pathways of Philistia into the pleasaunces of Art’s Elect, had to-day urgently summoned her to inspect this fic
tile Portent, together with a pair of Japanose idols, a couple of bluemouldied bronzes, an etching by Bristler, a drowsy crayon sketch bv Simple Simeon, and a new ballade by Bowdewow. Mrs. Vamp adjusted her rust-tinted tresses against the verdigris-hued wall-paper,
twined her scant skirts into right classic contortions, crooked her elbows, cranked her knees, threw the needful expression of hollow aghastness into her eyes, and had then finished her preparations for the reception and conversion of the pretty Philistine her friend even unto the setting forth of two spiritually edible lily-branches, Intensely pallid.
******
Mrs. Vamp reached the Teapot from its dusk retirement, and placed it between the two lily-branches. .
“Well, Sara,” said Mrs. Grig,with some stoniness, “what is that?” Mrs. Vamp’s countenance expressing nothing more definite than a hungry agony of ecstatic absorption, Betsinda added—
“/sit one of the things they give away at cheap advertising tea warehouses to every purchaser of their superior bouchong at two and eight ? ”
“ No, Betsinda, it is not! was Mrs. Vamp’s murmurously reproachful response.
“ Well,” said Mrs. Grig, witn a short laugh, “it looks remarkably like it, only more cracked.”
“Betsinda,” Mrs. Vamp returned, with a glare of hollow yearning, “ this is the finished fictile incarnation of the Utter. It is the Symbol and quintessence, quite too consummately Too, of what that dear Matthew Arnold sweetly calls ‘the eternal and unseizable
Shadow, Beauty.’ A Thing to love, to languish over, to clasp and covertly caress, to yearn intimately into, to classically attitudinise around, to gasp and rapturously groan at, to pat, to pet, to paint, to perorate about, to prostrate one’s soul before, to hug in silence, to worship in company. In short, as the Supreme Symbol of the Supernal, the uttermost utterance of the unutterable Utter, it is a Thing to Live up to. Oh, my Betsinda, will you not essay to live up to it ? ”
During this touching address Mrs. Grig regarded the Teapot with coldly critical disfavour.
“\Vell,” said she, with drawlingly deliberate acerbity, “it’s dreadfully cracked, and horribly ugly; if that’s what you mean by Unutterably Utter and all the rest of it. And, upon nay word,
Sara, I think you must indeed be living up—or down—to it, for you seem to get more decidedly cracked and more utterly ugly every day.”
Mrs. Vamp went more deeply, darkly, unbeautifully sea-green, which is the /Esthete’s substitute for a flush. i For a brief space she seemed to be agonisedly wandering in the spiritual Inane.
Then Mrs. Vamp resumed:
“ The /Esthetes, Betsinda-;—”
“ Bother the/Esthetes! ” said Betsinda Grig. , .
Mrs. Vamp looked at her with amazement, incredulity, and indignation ; when Mrs. Grig, folding her arms in a manner more suggestive of Madame Angot than of High Art, uttered these memorable and tremendous words,—“ I don’t believe there are any such people !
******
Mem. by Scholiast of the period.—But there were! Unlike her celebrated antitype in circumstances somewhat similar, Mrs. Bet
sinda Grig had not hit upon the truth, the ^Esthetes not, unhappily,
being, like the apocrvphal Mrs. Harris, mere creatures of the imagination. It is to be supposed either that Mrs. Grig was driven into desperate denial by the iterated urgencies of Mrs. Vamp, or that she had been reading the Daily Gasometer, a sceptical and superfine journal of the time.
Cross Purposes.
Prince Leopold made a most able oration, The subject was Charity Organisation;
But the public, one thinks, would have suffered no loss, Had one had no remarks from the ponderous Cross ; He proposed to enliven their desolate hours
To give folks who starve a supply of fresh flow’rs ; ’Tis the craze of the day, but our blushes are red, At this offer of Art and exotics for bread!
A Choice of Evils.—Between the mines at St. Petersburg and
the mines of Siberia.