atch the painter's doing--the bumps
he has given you.

You must not, however, on this account, think too ill of the poor painter.
He is subject to human infirmities--so are you--and his hand and eye are
not always in tune. He has, too, to deal with all sorts of people--many
difficult enough to please. You know the fable of the painter who would
please everybody, and pleased nobody. You sitters are a whimsical set,
and most provokingly shift your features and position, and always expect
miracles, at a moment, too; you are here to-day, and must be off to-morrow.
It is nothing, to you that paint won't dry for you, so even that must be
forced, and you are rather varnished in than painted, and no wonder if
your faces go to pieces, and you become mealy almost as soon as you have
had the life's blood in you, and that with the best carmine. And often you
take upon yourselves to tell the painter what to do, as if you knew
yourselves better than he, though he has been staring at nothing but you
for an hour or two at a time, perhaps. You ask him, too, perpetually what
feature he is now doing, that you may call up a look. You screw up your
mouths, and try to put all the shine you can into your eyes, till, from
continual effort, they look like those of a shotten herring; and yet you
expect all to be like what you are in your ordinary way. After he has
begun to paint your hair, you throw it about with your hands in all
directions but the right, and all his work is to begin over again. You
have no notion how ignorant of yourselves you are. I happened to call,
some time since, upon a painter with whom I am on intimate terms. I found
him in a roar of laughter, and quite alone. "What is the matter?" said I.
"Matter!" replied he; "why, here has Mr B. been sitting to me these four
days following, and at last, about half an hour ago, he, sitting in that
chair, puts up his hand to me, thus, with 'Stop a moment, Mr Painter; I
don't know whether you have noticed it or not, but it is right that I
should tell you that _I have a slight_ cast in my eye.' You know Mr B., a
worthy good man, but he has the very worst gimlet eye I ever beheld." Yes,
and only _slightly_ knew it, Eusebius. And I have to say, he thought his
defect wondrously exaggerated, when, for the first time, he saw it on
canvas; and perhaps all his family noticed it there, whom custom had
reconciled into but little observation of it, and the painter was
considered no friend of the fa