The Three Clerks II

THE THREE CLERKS

be of an affectionate disposition, falls in tenderness at his feet. She is indeed in a very winning mood, and quite inclined to use every means allowable to a lady for retaining her lover; every means that is short of that specially feminine one of telling her secret.

‘We will give an extract from this love scene, partly for the sake of its grotesque absurdity —’

Charley kicked out another foot, as though he thought that the editor of the Daily Delight might perhaps be within reach.

‘ — And partly because it gives a fair example of the manner in which Mr. Tudor endeavours to be droll even in the midst of his most tender passages.

‘Leonora was at this time seated —’

‘Oh, skip the extract,’ said Charley; ‘I suppose there are three or four pages of it?’

‘It goes down to where Leonora says that his fate and her own are in his hands.’

‘Yes, about three columns,’ said Charley; ‘that’s an easy way of making an article — eh, Harry?’

‘Aliter non fit, amice, liber,’ said the classical Norman. ‘Well, skip the extract, grandmamma.’

‘Now, did anyone ever before read such a mixture of the bombastic and the burlesque? We are called upon to cry over every joke, and, for the life of us, we cannot hold our sides when the catastrophes occur. It is a salad in which the pungency of the vinegar has been wholly subdued by the oil, and the fatness of the oil destroyed by the tartness of the vinegar.’

‘His old simile,’ said Charley; ‘he was always talking about literary salads.’

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‘The gentleman, of course, gives way at the last minute,’ continued Mrs. Woodward. ‘The scene in which he sits with the unopened letter lying on his table before him has some merit; but this probably arises from the fact that the letter is dumb, and the gentleman equally so.’

‘D — — nation!’ said Charley, whose patience could not stand such impudence at this.

‘The gentleman, who, as we should have before said, is the eldest son of a man of large reputed fortune — —’

‘There — I knew he’d tell it.’

‘Oh, but he hasn’t told it,’ said Norman. ‘Doesn’t the word ‘reputed’ tell it?’

‘ — The eldest son of a man of large reputed fortune, does at last marry the heroine; and then he discovers — But what he discovers, those who feel any interest in the matter may learn from the book itself; we must profess that we felt none.

‘Wewillnotsaythereisnothingintheworkindicativeoftalent. The hero’s valet, Jacob Brush, and the heroine’s lady’s-maid, Jacintha Pintail, are both humorous and good in their way. Why it should be so, we do not pretend to say; but it certainly does appear to us that Mr. Tudor is more at home in the servants’ hall than in the lady’s boudoir.’

‘Abominable scoundrel!’ said Charley.

‘But what we must chiefly notice,’ continued the article, ‘in the furtherance of those views by which we profess that we are governed —’

‘Now, I know, we are to have something very grandiloquent and very false,’ said Charley.

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