Schiedam! Then there were the solemn state dinners, at most of which the
writer of this biography had a corner.

Clive had a tutor--Cirindey of Corpus--whom we recommended to him, and
with whom the young gentleman did not fatigue his brains very much; but
his great forte decidedly lay in drawing. He sketched the horses, he
sketched the dogs; all the servants from the blear-eyed boot-boy to the
rosy-cheeked lass, Mrs. Kean's niece, whom that virtuous housekeeper
was always calling to come downstairs. He drew his father in all
postures--asleep, on foot, on horseback; and jolly little Mr. Binnie,
with his plump legs on a chair, or jumping briskly on the back of the
cob which he rode. He should have drawn the pictures for this book, but
that he no longer condescends to make sketches. Young Ridley was his
daily friend now; and Grindley, his classics and mathematics over in
the morning, and the ride with father over, this pair of young men would
constantly attend Gandish's Drawing Academy, where, to be sure, Ridley
passed many hours at work on his art, before his young friend and patron
could be spared from his books to his pencil.

"Oh," says Clive, "if you talk to him now about those early days, it was
a jolly time! I do not believe there was any young fellow in London so
happy." And there hangs up in his painting-room now, a head, painted at
one sitting, of a man rather bald, with hair touched with grey, with
a large moustache, and a sweet mouth half smiling beneath it, and
melancholy eyes; and Clive shows that portrait of their grandfather to
his children, and tells them that the whole world never saw a nobler
gentleman.

CHAPTER XVII. A School of Art

British art either finds her peculiar nourishment in melancholy, and
loves to fix her abode in desert places; or it may be her purse is but
slenderly furnished, and she is forced to put up with accommodations
rejected by more prosperous callings. Some of the most dismal quarters
of the town are colonised by her disciples and professors. In walking
through streets which may have been gay and polite when ladies' chairmen
jostled each other on the pavement, and linkboys with their torches
lighted the beaux over the mud, who has not remarked the artist's
invasion of those regions once devoted to fashion and gaiety?
Centre windows of drawing-rooms are enlarged so as to reach up into
bedrooms--bedrooms where Lady Betty has had her hair powdered, and where
the painter