ctures, pell-mell
in the corner, covered with dust; broken casts of plaster; a lay-figure
battered in its basket-work arms, with its doll-like face all smudged
and besmeared. A pot of porter and a noggin of gin on a stained deal
table, accompanied by two or three broken, smoke-blackened pipes, some
tattered song-books, and old numbers of the "Covent Garden Magazine,"
betrayed the tastes of the artist, and accounted for the shaking hand
and the bloated form. A jovial, disorderly, vagrant dog of a painter was
Tom Varney. A bachelor, of course; humorous and droll; a boon companion,
and a terrible borrower. Clever enough in his calling; with pains and
some method, he had easily gained subsistence and established a name;
but he had one trick that soon ruined him in the business part of his
profession. He took a fourth of his price in advance; and having once
clutched the money, the poor customer might go hang for his picture.
The only things Tom Varney ever fairly completed were those for which
no order had been given; for in them, somehow or other, his fancy became
interested, and on them he lavished the gusto which he really possessed.
But the subjects were rarely salable. Nymphs and deities undraperied
have few worshippers in England amongst the buyers of "furniture
pictures." And, to say truth, nymph and deity had usually a very
equivocal look; and if they came from the gods, you would swear it was
the gods of the galleries of Drury. When Tom Varney sold a picture,
he lived upon clover till the money was gone. But the poorer and less
steady alumni of the rising school, especially those at war with the
Academy, from which Varney was excluded, pitied, despised, yet liked
and courted him withal. In addition to his good qualities of blithe
song-singer, droll story-teller, and stanch Bacchanalian, Tom Varney was
liberally good-natured in communicating instruction really valuable to
those who knew how to avail themselves of a knowledge he had made almost
worthless to himself. He was a shrewd, though good-natured critic, had
many little secrets of colouring and composition, which an invitation to
supper, or the loan of ten shillings, was sufficient to bribe from him.
Ragged, out of elbows, unshaven, and slipshod, he still had his set
amongst the gay and the young,--a precious master, a profitable set for
his nephew, Master Honore Gabriel! But the poor rapscallion had a heart
larger than many honest, painstaking men. As soon as Ga