medical practitioner (or leech, as they
preferred to call him); their only sickness to speak of had arisen from
once feasting mediaevally on an old roast peacock, in company with the
trusty friends, who had also been taken very bad on that occasion; and
they ever afterwards avoided that dish, but at their banquets would
have the peacock's head and what was left of its tail tacked on to some
more digestible bird...."

"As staunch Radicals, they hated the aristocracy, whose very existence
they ignored; shunned the professional class, which they scorned, on
account of its scientific and utilitarian tendency; and loathed the
middle class, from which they had sprung, because it was Philistine; and
although they professed to deeply honour the working man, they very
wisely managed to see as little of him as they possibly could."

Owing to the sudden success of a picture--which scandalised his trusty
friends--and the beauty of his wife, the model for the picture, Jack
woke up one morning and found himself famous. They were lionised. Mrs.
Spratt's deep-rooted dislike to the female dress of the present day did
not last much longer than her life-long prejudice against the
aristocracy; she discarded the mediaeval garments she had hitherto worn
with such disdain for the eccentricities of modern fashion, and put
herself into the hands of the best dressmaker in town. And thus
snubbing, and being snubbed, dressing and dancing and feasting and
flirting, did she soar higher and higher in her butterfly career. The
denouement comes when they are cut out by "Ye rising Minnows"--an
American sculptor--one Pygmalion F. Minnow--whose wife was twice as
beautiful as Mrs. Spratt.

Another shorter prose skit of du Maurier's which is included in the same
book satirises the splendid sort of hero, who conceals beneath a mask of
indifference the power to do anything on earth better than anybody else.

These prose skits show the neat irony that _Punch_ was willing to
encourage by attaching du Maurier to the literary, as well as to the
artistic, staff. But we think it may be said that du Maurier hadn't the
heart to go on with a class of writing in which his great tendency to
sentimentalise would have been out of place.

Section 7

In 1890 du Maurier contributed two papers to the _Art Journal_ entitled
"The Illustrating of Books from the Serious Artist's Point of View." It
was an attempt to write down the ideas that had controlled him in book
ill