oy who attempts to stop with
his finger the spout of a water cistern, while the stream, exasperated
at this compression, escapes by a thousand uncalculated spurts, and wets
him all over for his pains. Even so fared the senior Tinto, when his
hopeful apprentice not only exhausted all the chalk in making sketches
upon the shopboard, but even executed several caricatures of his
father's best customers, who began loudly to murmur, that it was too
hard to have their persons deformed by the vestments of the father, and
to be at the same time turned into ridicule by the pencil of the son.
This led to discredit and loss of practice, until the old tailor,
yielding to destiny and to the entreaties of his son, permitted him to
attempt his fortune in a line for which he was better qualified.

There was about this time, in the village of Langdirdum, a peripatetic
brother of the brush, who exercised his vocation sub Jove frigido, the
object of admiration of all the boys of the village, but especially
to Dick Tinto. The age had not yet adopted, amongst other unworthy
retrenchments, that illiberal measure of economy which, supplying by
written characters the lack of symbolical representation, closes one
open and easily accessible avenue of instruction and emolument against
the students of the fine arts. It was not yet permitted to write upon
the plastered doorway of an alehouse, or the suspended sign of an
inn, "The Old Magpie," or "The Saracen's Head," substituting that cold
description for the lively effigies of the plumed chatterer, or the
turban'd frown of the terrific soldan. That early and more simple age
considered alike the necessities of all ranks, and depicted the symbols
of good cheer so as to be obvious to all capacities; well judging that a
man who could not read a syllable might nevertheless love a pot of good
ale as well as his better-educated neighbours, or even as the parson
himself. Acting upon this liberal principle, publicans as yet hung forth
the painted emblems of their calling, and sign-painters, if they seldom
feasted, did not at least absolutely starve.

To a worthy of this decayed profession, as we have already intimated,
Dick Tinto became an assistant; and thus, as is not unusual among
heaven-born geniuses in this department of the fine arts, began to paint
before he had any notion of drawing.

His talent for observing nature soon induced him to rectify the errors,
and soar above the instructions, of his te