No More Learning

[Illustration: QUI LEGIT REGIT. ]




The following lines by Mr. Lear were written for a young lady of his
acquaintance, who had quoted to him the words of a young lady not of his
acquaintance,

"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "

"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! "
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.

He sits in a beautiful parlor,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.

He has many friends, lay men and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.

When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, "He's come out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh! "

He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

* * * * *




INTRODUCTION.

Edward Lear, the artist, Author of "Journals of a Landscape Painter" in
various out-of-the-way countries, and of the delightful "Books of
Nonsense," which have amused successive generations of children, died on
Sunday, January 29, 1888, at San Remo, Italy, where he had lived for twenty
years. Few names could evoke a wider expression of passing regret at their
appearance in the obituary column; for until his health began to fail he
was known to an immense and almost a cosmopolitan circle of acquaintance,
and popular wherever he was known. Fewer still could call up in the minds
of intimate friends a deeper and more enduring feeling of sorrow for
personal loss, mingled with the pleasantest of memories; for it was
impossible to know him thoroughly and not to love him. London, Rome, the
Mediterranean countries generally, Ceylon and India, are still all dotted
with survivors among his generation who will mourn for him affectionately,
although his latter years were spent in comparatively close retirement. He
was a man of striking nobility of nature, fearless, independent, energetic,
given to forming for himself strong opinions, often hastily, sometimes
bitterly; not always strong or sound in judgment, but always seeking after
truth in every matter, and following it as he understood it in scorn of
consequence; utterly unselfish, devoted to his friends, generous even to
extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes
or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not
without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability
to which such temperaments are liable.

Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly succeeded
in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His work was
frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in pictures for
the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished
landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold
in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.