"Wretch," I said, turning on the miserable
woman who had brought this ruin
about, "begone! leave my house. Darken
my threshold no longer. Let your accursed
presence haunt me no more. You have
wrought deadly mischief—embittered my
existence! Begone! Take thy beak from
out my heart," I continued, apostrophising
her as the late Mr. Poe did his raven,
"and thy form—thy ugly" (this adjective
was not in the original text) "form from off
my door. Begone! Begone, I say!"

She shrank away appalled, and the next
morning, the hair-trunks were seen in the
hall. I forced her to go, I would submit to
the thraldom no longer; but purchased liberty
at a heavy pecuniary compensation.

CHIP.

ART IN ITS CHIMNEY-CORNER.

LONDON may well devote herself to a
profound study of Gothic and Italian styles,
when there is a fresh ornament to be added
to the decoration of her not particularly well
dressed person. The choice of a pattern for
a Foreign Office is to her as serious a matter
for debate as the selection of a new bracelet
by one of her thousand-thousand daughters.
She has not yet distinguished herself very
favourably by her taste in decoration.
Monster pins, like her monuments, are not to
be equalled by the ornaments of any other city
in the world for ugliness. What will our
Madam think of it, should the day come
when Madam Birmingham or Madam Leeds
aim shafts of defiance at her—even chimney
shafts—and making a grace of a necessity,
establish the reputation of a town full of
factory chimneys, for an adorned beauty as
enchanting to the stranger as that of the
gay lady of the Golden Horn with all her
minarets.

Why should a tall shaft, or a forest of tall
shafts, tapering into the air, be ugly? When
we erect a pillar as an ornament, it
commonly turns out to be an eyesore. We know
that a column ought, by its nature, to be an
architectural embellishment to any town,
but we do not appear to admit, though we
know perfectly well, that a column, with
the swelling capital that furnishes a part of
the support to a stone roof, looks merely
lumpish and uncomfortable when it expands
at the summit to support nothing at all, and
for no purpose at all except the direct
suggestion that it is a lost morsel of
something else. Our factories provide an actual
necessity for the erection of tall columns as
air-shafts, furnace chimneys, ventilating flues,
and so forth. In a few years they will be
pouring into the upper air only invisible
products of combustion and decomposition,
since furnaces are now being taught to burn
the solid matter of their smoke. But if they
must emit smoke, let them by all means
do so; they may be none the uglier for any
cloud they blow. A very able writer upon
architecture has boldly declared his opinion
that the Shot Tower, on the south side of
Waterloo Bridge, is a better ornament to
London than the Monument on Fish Street
Hill. And he is right. The Shot Tower
breaks an outline pleasantly with something
real, and manifestly it is in its place, although
as much a tower as if it had been built only
for romantic purposes.

An eminent engineer, Mr. Robert
Rawlinson, now claims for art its chimney
corner. He recommends owners of factories,
builders of country houses, or of public
buildings, which require tall ventilating
shafts, and all others whom it may concern,
to remember that the lofty shaft is seen from
afar, that it is an architectural feature of which
the great capabilities have in this country
been almost entirely overlooked, and that
at an increase of cost too slight to be grudged
by any man of capital who builds for himself,
it may be made, either singly or as one of a
group, an ornament to any neighbourhood.
This gentleman accordingly has just issued
a very handsome volume of large plates, on
which we see depicted chimney and
ventilating shafts, single or grouped, as they may
be attached to factories or country houses,
and that really are worth making into
pictures. A little just regard to form and
to colour—coloured bricks being of course
pressed into service—with a true artistic
sense of what is graceful, will suffice to
enable private gentlemen and manufacturers
to put to shame the column building of
the British Government, without stepping
aside out of their every-day path in life, or
subjecting themselves to an expense which
they need think worth very serious
consideration. Mr. Rawlinson has found in his
book of pictures an effective way of
recommending his idea; and that his idea is a very
good one, that it points in a direction which
we really must take sooner or later, who can
doubt? We join heartily, for our own part,
in this claim for some union of the graces
with one of the necessities of life, which
has been hitherto left to be satisfied only in
the rudest manner. It will be a pleasant
thing for many men, if Mr. Rawlinson
succeeds in his polite endeavour to instal Art
comfortably in her chimney corner.

MICHELET'S LOVE.

OF this last production the critic says:
Firstly, that its title, L' Amour, is much less
appropriate than those of its predecessors,
the Bird and the Insect;* that it really should
have followed their example, and have called
itself La Femme (Woman), because it is,
actually, as much a treatise on female nature

* See Household Words, Nos. 452 and 465 of the present
volume.