There is a good deal of dressing up in this scene, and a neat ploy of
dressing down, and a man's soul comes into being all over an affair of a
looking-glass. Which makes a pretty piece of work.
Alice knows Hogarth through the--shall we say?--nicer prints, and Austin
Dobson through the daintiest of Ballads. This scene is a sort of mixture to
her of early reading, and visits with her Uncle to the National Gallery,
and old bits of China, and dumpy little leather-bound volumes of "The
Spectator", the real "Spectator", which she can just remember on the fourth
shelf from the top near the window.
You may add, for your own personal satisfaction, when you are sitting and
looking on, all that tense excitement the very words "Eighteenth Century"
awaken in the properly balanced mind. Wigs and coaches and polite
highwaymen, and lonely gibbets on still more lonely moors, and the Bath
road with its chains and posts, all come into the background. Pedlars and
cries of Pottles of Cherries, Puppet Showmen, and Clowns on stilts and
French watergilders, and the sound of swords early in the morning in
Leicester Fields: the touch of them all should be there.
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