superior to Sir Frederick Leighton; and one of the early Italian
painters, Francesco Bianchi, whom Vasari exhumes in some three or
four lines, was praised as possessing a subtle and mysterious talent
very different indeed from the hesitating smile of La Jaconde. There
is a picture of the Holy Family by him in the Louvre, and of it
Harding wrote--"This canvas exhales for us the most delicious
emanations, sorrowful bewitchments, insidious sacrileges, and
troubled prayers."

All institutions, especially the Royal Academy, St. Paul's Cathedral,
Drury Lane Theatre, and Eton College, were held to be the symbols of
man's earthiness, the bar-room and music-hall as certain proof of his
divine origin; actors were scorned and prize-fighters revered; the
genius of courtesans, the folly of education, and the poetry of
pantomime formed the themes on which the articles which made the
centre of the paper were written. Insolent letters were addressed to
eminent people, and a novel by Harding, the hero of which was a
butler and the heroine a cook, was in course of publication.

Mike was about to begin a series of articles in this genial journal,
entitled _Lions of the Season_. His first lion was a young man who
had invented a pantomime, _Pierrot murders his Wife_, which he was
acting with success in fashionable drawing-rooms. A mute brings
Pierrot back more dead than alive from the cemetery, and throws him
in a chair. When Pierrot recovers he re-acts the murder before a
portrait of his wife--how he tied her down and tickled her to death.
Then he begins drinking, and finally sets fire to the curtains of the
bed and is burnt.

It was the day before publishing day, and since breakfast the young
men had been drinking, smoking, telling tales, and writing
paragraphs; from time to time the page-boy brought in proofs, and
the narrators made pause till he had left the room. Frank continued
reading Mike's manuscript, now and then stopping to praise a
felicitous epithet.

At last he said--"Harding, what do you think of this?--'The Sphynx is
representative of the grave and monumental genius of Egypt, the Faun
of the gracious genius of Rome, the Pierrot of the fantastic genius
of the Renaissance. And, in this one creation, I am not sure that
the seventeenth does not take the palm from the earlier centuries.
Pierrot!--there is music, there is poetry in the name. The soul of an
epoch lives in that name, evocative as it is of shadowy trees, lawny