widely known, while he is famous,
too, as the gifted author of a series of brilliant and popular
hairwashes. He is accustoming his clients to address him as
"Professor"--a title which he has actually had conferred upon him from a
quarter in which he is, perhaps, the most highly appreciated--for
prosperity has not exactly lessened his self-esteem.

Mr. Jauncy, too, is a married man, although he does not respond so
heartily to congratulations. There is no intimacy between the two
households, the heads of which recognise that, as Leander puts it,
"their wives harmonise better apart."

To the new collection of Casts from the Antique, at South Kensington,
there has been recently added one which appears in the official
catalogue under the following description:--

"_The Cytherean Venus._--Marble statue. Found in a grotto in the Island
of Cerigo. Now in the collection of Sir Peter Purbecke, at Wricklesmarsh
Court, Black-heath.

"This noble work has been indifferently assigned to various periods; the
most general opinion, however, pronounces it to be a copy of an earlier
work of Alkamenes, or possibly Kephisodotos.

"The unusual smallness of the extremities seems to betray the hand of a
restorer, and there are traces of colour in the original marble, which
are supposed to have been added at a somewhat later period."

Should Professor Tweddle ever find himself in the Museum on a Bank
Holiday, and enter the new gallery, he could hardly avoid seeing the
magnificent cast numbered 333 in the catalogue, and reviving thereby
recollections he has almost succeeded in suppressing.

But this is an experience he will probably spare himself; for he is
known to entertain, on principle, very strong prejudices against
sculpture, and more particularly the Antique.

THE END.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Tinted Venus, by F. Anstey

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