Head Number Five: The pictures that puzzle
me. These are so numerous, as judged by their
titles, that I hardly know which to pick out,
by way of example, first. Suppose I select the
shortest—"Happy!" Not a word of quotation
or explanation follows this. Who (I ask myself,
tossing on my weary pillow)—who, or what is
happy? Does this mysterious picture represent
one of the Prime Minister's recently made peers,
or a publican at election time, or a gentleman
who has just paid conscience-money to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, or a group of
enraptured ladies at the period when watch-
spring petticoats were first introduced, or boys
at a Pantomime, or girls at a dance, or dogs in
a cover, or cats in a dairy? Impossible to say:
there are ten thousand things the picture might
represent, and it probably depicts the ten
thousand and first, of which I have no suspicion.
Hardly less puzzling is " A Lesson on Infant
Treatment." What is infant treatment? In
some families it means a smack on the head;
in others, it means perpetual cuddling; in all
it implies (for such is the lot of mortality)
occasional rhubarb and magnesia. Is the lesson
painted here a lesson on the administration of
nauseous draughts, fond kisses, or corrective
smacks? Do we read in this mysterious picture
a warning against the general nursery error of
pinning up a baby's skin and a baby's clothes both
together? Or is the scene treated from a heartlessly-
comic point of view; and does it represent
a bedchamber by night—papa promenading
forlorn with his screeching offspring in his arms,
and mamma looking on sympathetically from her
pillow? Who can say? It is a picture to give
up in despair.

"Gretna Green. A runaway match; the
postboy announcing pursuit; one of the last
marriages previous to the alteration of the
Scottish law, with portraits painted on the
spot." More and more puzzling! Portraits
painted on the spot, when the bride and bridegroom
are running away, and the postboy is
announcing pursuit! Why, photography itself
would be too slow for the purpose! Besides,
how did the painter come there? Was he sent
for on purpose beforehand, or did he take up
his position on speculation? Or is the artist
himself the bridegroom, and was the taking of
his own likeness and his wife's the first idea
that occurred to him when he was married?
Curious, if it was so. I am a single man myself,
and have no right to an opinion; but I think, if
I ran away with my young woman, that I should
give up my profession for the day, at any rate.

No. 835—No title; nothing but this
quotation:

A guid New-year I wish thee, Maggie!
Hae, there's a ripp to thy auld baggie, &c.

What can this be? a sonsie lass takes a walk on
a New-year's morning, with an old bag over her
shoulder; a mischievous Scotchman rips it open
most improperly; exclaims, "Hae!" for which he
is little better than a brute; and abandons the
poor girl in a situation which it rings the heart
to think of. Is that the picture? I object to
it as " painful" if it is.

"Death-bed of Lorenzo de Medici. Father-
Confessor Girolamo Savonarola demands, as
the condition of absolving Lorenzo de Medici
of his sins, that he should restore liberty to
Florence, refusing which, he abandons him to his
fate." How, in the name of wonder, can this be
painted? Which of the two things is the father-
confessor doing? Is he making his demand, or
abandoning the unfortunate victim to his fate?
If he is making the demand, he must be painted
saying something, and how can that be done?
If, on the other hand, he is abandoning the
patient, the question arises whether he ought
not to abandon the picture also, or at least be
three parts out of it, so as to convey the two
necessary ideas of rapidity of action and of
personal absence from the bedroom. I don't see
my way to this work of art at all. Still less do
I understand "Harvest," the pervading
sentiment of which is supposed to be expressed
in this one alarming line of quotation:

When labour drinks, his boiling sweat to thrive.
CHAPMAN'S Hesiod.

Incredulous readers must be informed that the
above is copied from the catalogue of the present
year, at page twenty-seven. What on earth does
the line mean, taken by itself? And how in the
world do the resources of Art contrive to turn it
to graphic account in a picture of a Harvest? Say
that " When labour drinks" is personified, in the
foreground of the scene, by Hodge, with a great
mug in his hand, how, in that case, does the
illustrative faculty of the artist grapple next with
"his boiling sweat to thrive?" Is Hodge
presented bubbling all over with beer, at a temperature
of I don't know how many hundred degrees
Fahrenheit? And if he is, how does he "thrive"
under those heated circumstances? Or is he hissing
and steaming out of his own large bodily
resources; and is he trying to condense his own
vapour with successive jets of cold small beer?
Nay, is he even one Hodge only, boiling, sweating,
and thriving? May he not be possibly multiplied
into all the Hodges in the neighbourhood,
collected together in the harvest-field, and obscuring
the whole fertile prospect by scalding agricultural
exudations? I protest I am almost in the condition
of Hodge myself, only with thinking of this
boiling perplexity—except, indeed, that I see no
chance of thriving, unless I drop the subject
forthwith to cool my heated fancy. When I
have done this, all succeeding titles and
quotations become mirrors of truth, that reflect
the pictures unmistakably by comparison with
such an inscrutable puzzle as a harvest-field,
painted through the medium of Chapman's
Hesiod. With that work my bewilderment ends,
through my own sheer inability to become
confused under any other circumstances whatever;
and here, therefore, the list of the pictures that
puzzle me may necessarily and appropriately
come to an end also.

As to my final head, under which are grouped:
The pictures that I am quite certain to come away