PUNCH,
OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

Vol. 101.

November 28, 1891.

LETTERS TO ABSTRACTIONS.

No. VII.—TO VANITY.

DEAR VANITY,

Imagine my feelings when I read the following letter. It lay quite innocently on my breakfast-table in a heap of others. It was stamped in the ordinary way, post-marked in the ordinary way, and addressed correctly, though how the charming writer discovered my address I cannot undertake to say; in fact, there was nothing in its outward appearance to distinguish it from the rest of my everyday correspondence. I opened it carelessly, and this is what I read:—

RIDICULOUS BEING,—In the course of a fairly short life I have read many absurd things, but never in all my existence have I read anything so absurd as your last letter. I don't say that your amiable story about HERMIONE MAYBLOOM is not absolutely true; in fact, I knew HERMIONE very slightly myself when everybody was raving about her, and I never could understand what all you men (for, of course, you are a man; no woman could be so foolish) saw in her to make you lose your preposterous heads. To me she always seemed silly and affected, and not in the least pretty, with her snub nose, and her fuzzy hair. So I am rather glad, not from any personal motive, but for the sake of truth and justice, that you have shown her up. No; what I do complain of is, your evident intention to make the world believe that only women are vain. You pretend to lecture us about our shortcomings, and you don't seem to know that there is no vainer creature in existence than a man. No peacock that ever strutted with an expanded tail is one-half so ridiculous or silly as a man. I make no distinctions—all men are the same; at least, that's my experience, and that of every woman I ever met.

How do you suppose a woman like HERMIONE succeeds as she does? Why she finds out (it doesn't take long, I assure you) the weak points of the men she meets; their wretched jealousies, affectations and conceits, and then artfully proceeds to flatter them and make each of them think his particular self the lord of creation, until she has all the weak and foolish creatures wound round her little finger, and slavishly ready to fetch and carry for her. And all the time you go about and boast of your conquest to one another, and imagine that you have subjugated her. But she sits at home and laughs at you, and despises you all from the flinty bottom of her heart. Bah! you're a pack of fools, and I've no patience with you. As for you personally, if you must write any more, tell your fellow men something about their own follies. It won't be news to us, but it may open their eyes. If you can't do that, you had better retire into your tub, and cease your painful barking altogether. I've got my eye on you, so be careful. I remain (thank goodness)

A WOMAN.

Now that was not altogether an agreeable breakfast dish. And the worst of it was that it was so supremely unjustifiable. Had my indignant correspondent honoured me with her address, I should have answered her at once. "Madam," I should have said, "your anger outstrips your reason. I always intended to say something about men. I had already begun a second letter to my friend VANITY on the subject. I can therefore afford to forgive your hard words, and to admit that there is a certain amount of truth in your strictures on us. But please don't write to me again so furiously. Such excessive annoyance is quite out of keeping with your pretty handwriting, and besides, it takes away my appetite to think I have even involuntarily given you pain. Be kind enough to look out for my next letter, but don't, for goodness' sake, tell me what you think about it, unless it should happen to please you. In that case I shall, of course, be proud and glad to hear from you again."

I now proceed, therefore, to carry out my intention, and, as usual, I address myself to the fountain head. My dear VANITY, I never shall understand why you take so much trouble to get hold of men. They are not a pleasing sight when you have got them, and after a time it must cease to amuse even you to see yourself reproduced over and over again, and in innumerable ridiculous ways. For instance, there is Dr. PEAGAM, the celebrated author of Indo-Hebraic Fairy Tales: a new Theory of their Rise and Development, with an Excursus on an Early Aryan Version of "Three Blind Mice." Dr. PEAGAM is learned; he has the industry of a beaver; he is a correspondent of goodness knows how many foreign philosophical, philological, and mythological societies; his record of University distinctions has never been equalled; his advice has been sought by German Professors. Yet he carries all this weight of celebrity and learning as lightly as if it were a wideawake, and seems to think nothing of it. But he has his weak point, and, like Achilles, he has it in his feet.

This veteran investigator, this hoary and venerable Doctor, would cheerfully give years off his life if only the various philosophers who from time to time sit at his feet would recognise that those feet are small, and compliment him on the fact. They are small, there is no doubt of it, but not small enough to be encased without agony in the tiny, natty, pointed boots that he habitually wears. Let anybody who wants to get anything out of Dr. PEAGAM lead the conversation craftily on to the subject of feet and their proper size. Let him then make the discovery (aloud) that the Doctor's feet are extraordinarily small and beautiful, and I warrant that there is nothing the Doctor can bestow which shall not be freely offered to this cunning flatterer. That is why Dr. PEAGAM, a modest man in most respects, always insists on sitting in the front row on any platform, and ostentatiously dusts his boots with a red silk pocket-handkerchief.

Then, again, who is there that has not heard of Major-General WHACKLEY, V.C., the hero who captured the ferocious Ameer of Mudwallah single-handed, and carried him on his back to the English camp—the man to whose dauntless courage, above all others, the marvellous victory of Pilferabad was due? Speak to him on military matters, and you will find the old warrior as shy as a school-girl; but only mention the word poetry, and you'll have him reciting his ballads and odes to you by the dozen, and declaiming for hours together about the obtuseness of the publishing fraternity.

I don't speak now of literary men who value themselves above LAMB, DICKENS, and THACKERAY, rolled into one; nor of artists who sneer at TITIAN; nor of actors who hold GARRICK to be absurdly overrated. Space would fail me, and patience you. But let me just for a brief moment call to your mind ROLAND PRETTYMAN. Upon my soul, I think ROLAND the most empty-headed fribble, the most affected coxcomb, and the most conceited noodle in the whole world. He was decently good-looking once, and he had a pretty knack of sketching in water-colours.

But oh, the huge, distorted, overweening conceit of the man! I have seen him lying full length on a couch, waving a scented handkerchief amongst a crowd of submissive women, who were grovelling round him, while he enlarged in his own pet jargon on the surpassing merits of his latest unpublished essay, or pointed out the beauties of the trifling pictures which were the products of his ineffective brush. He will never accomplish anything, and yet to the end of his life, I fancy, he will have his circle of toadies and flatterers who will pretend to accept him as the