A Rogues Life | Page 6

we gave
ourselves, and of the dinners which people in our rank of life gave to us,
that I now bitterly complain.
Have you ever observed the remarkable adherence to set forms of
speech which characterizes the talkers of arrant nonsense! Precisely the
same sheepish following of one given example distinguishes the
ordering of genteel dinners.
When we gave a dinner at home, we had gravy soup, turbot and
lobster-sauce, haunch of mutton, boiled fowls and tongue, lukewarm
oyster-patties and sticky curry for side-dishes; wild duck,
cabinet-pudding, jelly, cream and tartlets. All excellent things, except
when you have to eat them continually. We lived upon them entirely in
the season. Every one of our hospitable friends gave us a return dinner,
which was a perfect copy of ours--just as ours was a perfect copy of
theirs, last year. They boiled what we boiled, and we roasted what they

roasted. We none of us ever changed the succession of the courses--or
made more or less of them--or altered the position of the fowls opposite
the mistress and the haunch opposite the master. My stomach used to
quail within me, in those times, when the tureen was taken off and the
inevitable gravy-soup smell renewed its daily acquaintance with my
nostrils, and warned me of the persistent eatable formalities that were
certain to follow. I suppose that honest people, who have known what it
is to get no dinner (being a Rogue, I have myself never wanted for one),
have gone through some very acute suffering under that privation. It
may be some consolation to them to know that, next to absolute
starvation, the same company-dinner, every day, is one of the hardest
trials that assail human endurance. I date my first serious determination
to throw over the medical profession at the earliest convenient
opportunity, from the second season's series of dinners at which my
aspirations, as a rising physician, unavoidably and regularly
condemned me to be present.
CHAPTER II.
THE opportunity I wanted presented itself in a curious way, and led,
unexpectedly enough, to some rather important consequences.
I have already stated, among the other branches of human attainment
which I acquired at the public school, that I learned to draw caricatures
of the masters who were so obliging as to educate me. I had a natural
faculty for this useful department of art. I improved it greatly by
practice in secret after I left school, and I ended by making it a source
of profit and pocket money to me when I entered the medical
profession. What was I to do? I could not expect for years to make a
halfpenny, as a physician. My genteel walk in life led me away from all
immediate sources of emolument, and my father could only afford to
give me an allowance which was too preposterously small to be
mentioned. I had helped myself surreptitiously to pocket-money at
school, by selling my caricatures, and I was obliged to repeat the
process at home!
At the time of which I write, the Art of Caricature was just approaching

the close of its colored and most extravagant stage of development. The
subtlety and truth to Nature required for the pursuit of it now, had
hardly begun to be thought of then. Sheer farce and coarse burlesque,
with plenty of color for the money, still made up the sum of what the
public of those days wanted. I was first assured of my capacity for the
production of these requisites, by a medical friend of the ripe critical
age of nineteen. He knew a print-publisher, and enthusiastically showed
him a portfolio full of my sketches, taking care at my request not to
mention my name. Rather to my surprise (for I was too conceited to be
greatly amazed by the circumstance), the publisher picked out a few of
the best of my wares, and boldly bought them of me-- of course, at his
own price. From that time I became, in an anonymous way, one of the
young buccaneers of British Caricature; cruising about here, there and
everywhere, at all my intervals of spare time, for any prize in the shape
of a subject which it was possible to pick up. Little did my
highly-connected mother think that, among the colored prints in the
shop-window, which disrespectfully illustrated the public and private
proceedings of distinguished individuals, certain specimens bearing the
classic signature of "Thersites Junior," were produced from designs
furnished by her studious and medical son. Little did my respectable
father imagine when, with great difficulty and vexation, he succeeded
in getting me now and then smuggled, along with himself, inside the
pale of fashionable society--that he was helping me to study likenesses
which were destined under my reckless treatment to make the public
laugh at some of