"And keep thy wealth, thou cruel heart!
     It never shall be told,
My wife had not sufficient worth
     To be mine, without gold."
Thus cast they from their halls of pride
     Their innocent reproach;
But her bruised heart felt evermore
     Affection's healing touch.

And love, o'er the unsightly face,
     To its old magic true,
Shed coloured floods of softened light
     To please the husband's view;
She read and sang to win his ear,
     And often would he bless
The voice, that seemed the lingering sprite
     Of her dead loveliness.

And, as the years increased, arose
     Fair children round her knees,
Who only felt their mother's love,
     Not her deformities.
Her features did from her altered life
     Such natural graces gain,
Her mother's self could scarce have known
     The happy Lady Jane.

PHASES OF " PUBLIC " LIFE.
IN THREE CHAPTERS.— CHAPTER THE SECOND.

IN a suburban locality, mostly, shall you
find the artistic public-house. There is
nothing essentially to distinguish it from other
houses of entertainment. Indeed, by day,
were it not for the presence, perhaps,
of an old picture or two in the bar, and
a bran-new sacred piece by young Splodger
"Madonna col Bambino " (models Mrs.
Splodger and Master W. Splodger), with an
intensely blue sky, a preternaturally fat
Bambino, and a Madonna with a concentrated
sugar-candyish sweetness of expression—
were it not for these, you would be puzzled
to discover that the arts had anything to do
with this class of public. But after eight
o'clock at night, or so, the smoking-room
is thronged with artists, young and old:
grey-headed professors of the old school, who
remember Stothard, and have heard Fuseli
lecture; spruce young fellows who have
studied in Paris, or have just come home
from Italy, full of Horace Vernet, Paul
Delaroche, the loggie and stanze of the Vatican, the
Pitti Palace, and the Grand Canal; moody
disciples of that numerous class of artists
known as the "great unappreciated," who
imagine that when they have turned their
shirt collars down, and their lips up, grown
an enormous beard and moustache, and
donned an eccentric felt hat, all is done
that can be done by art, theoretical, practical
and æsthetical, and that henceforward it is a
burning and crying shame if their pictures
are not hung " on the line " in the Exhibition
of the Royal Academy, or if the daily papers
do not concur in an unanimous pæan of
praise concerning their performances. Very
rarely condescends also to visit the artists'
public that transcendent genius Mr. Cimabue
Giotto Smalt, one of the P.P.P.B. or
"Præpainting and Perspective Brotherhood." Mr.
Smalt, in early life, made designs for the
Ladies' Gazette of Fashion, and was sus-
pected also of contributing the vigorous and
highly-coloured illustrations to the Hatchet
of Horrors—that excellent work published
in penny numbers by Skull, of Horrorwell
Street. Subsequently awakening, however, to
a sense of the hollowness of the world, and
the superiority of the early Italian school
over all others, he laid in a large stock of cobalt,
blue, gold leaf, small wooden German dolls,
and glass eyes, and commenced that course of
study which has brought him to the proud
position he now holds as a devotional painter
of the most æsthetic acerbity and the most
orthodox angularity. He carefully unlearned
all the drawing and perspective which his
kind parents had been at some trouble and
expense to have him taught; he studied the
human figure from his German dolls, expression
from his collection of glass eyes, drapery
from crumpled sheets of foolscap paper, colour
from judiciously selected morceaux (in panel)
such as Barclay and Perkins's blue board, and
the "Red Lion" at Brentford. He paints
shavings beautifully, sore toes faultlessly. In
his great picture of St. Laurence, the bars of
the gridiron, as branded on the saint's flesh, are
generally considered to be masterpieces of
finish and detail. Some critics prefer his
broad and vivid treatment of the boils in
his picture of "Job scraping himself" (the
potsherd exquisitely rendered), exhibited at
the Academy last year, and purchased by
the Dowager Lady Grillo of Pytchley. He
dresses in a sort of clerico-German style, cuts
his hair very short, sighs continually, and
wears spectacles. No Mondays, Tuesdays, or
Wednesdays, are there in his calendar. The
days of the week are all Feasts of St.
Somebody, or Eves of something, with him.
When he makes out his washing bill his
laundress is puzzled to make out what
"shyrtes " and " stockynges " mean, for so he
writeth them down; and when he wanted to
let his second floor, not one of the passers-by
could for the life of them understand the
wondrous placard he put forth in his parlour-
window, the same being an illuminated scroll,
telling in red, blue, and gold hieroglyphics of
something dimly resembling this:

FVRNISHED CHAMBERES MAIE ON YE UPPER
FLOOR BEE HADDE.

Pipes are in great request in the smoking-
room of the artist's public—fancy pipes of
elaborate workmanship and extraordinary
degrees of blackness. The value of a pipe
seems to increase as its cleanliness diminishes.
Little stumpy pipes, the original cost of
which was one halfpenny, become, after they
"have been effectually fouled and smoke-
blackened, pearls beyond price—few content
themselves with a simple yard of clay—some-
thing more picturesque—more moyen âge.