THE PICTURES OF RICHARD DOYLE.
An inhabitant of Florence, in Dante's time, pointed out the poet as "the man who had been in hell." Richard Doyle might well enjoy the more pleasing designation of the man who had been in Elfland. He spent much of his time there, and has brought away a great deal of information about the manners and customs of its inhabitants. Excepting Mr Lemuel Gulliver, nobody has been keener in observing and describing the features of a strange country and state of society. These we find recorded in many of Doyle's delightful sketches and pictures, of which, from our recollections of them at the present and other exhibitions and elsewhere, we shall endeavour to give a chronicle and brief abstract.
In the first place, he amply confirms the common notion that fairies, sprites, elves, and goblins are not troubled with a pressing sense of the responsibilities of existence, but take life in a desultory, devil-may-care sort of fashion. Nothing like settled business casts its shadow over them. None of them appears ever to have kept a shop or a counting-house, or to have contributed in the least degree to the cultivation of the soil. The utilitarian doctrines not only do not prevail, but do not exist among them. Their state affairs are entirely ceremonial. They never had a legislative assembly, though the waste of time, idle talk, foolish jest, and absence of common-sense, which prevail in such places, would not be foreign to their habits. Trades must have existed among them, since they are generally (though not always) clothed, the upper classes in robes, and the multitude in the fashions preserved since Elizabeth's time – doublets, tight hose, short cloaks, pointed caps, and long-toed shoes. Weavers, men's tailors and women's tailors, shoemakers, &c., must therefore have existed somewhere, possibly as slaves immured in workshops. But as the whole population was always ready to swarm forth at a moment's notice, for sport or mischief, as if bank holiday were perpetual, their occupations could never have been of an exacting kind. Thus (we learn) a venturous equestrian having come on a party of them revelling on the sea-shore, and snatched up one of their goblets, all Elfland, male and female, old and young, is represented as in pursuit of the marauder. The only sprite (according to Doyle) that has ever evinced a steady purpose, is one clad in white, who makes it her business to haunt a particular bridge, and allows no one to cross who does not kneel to her. Forming the only bright spot in the picture, except her own reflection in the water, she sits in the midst of an admirably painted piece of woodland which frames an arched passage for the course of the stream. This sprite has evidently suffered some great wrong, most likely from a male sprite, leading her to follow the example of the misanthrope mentioned by Mr Weller, who "kept a 'pike and rewenged himself on society by taking tolls." But in general they seem to have no object beyond the impulse of the moment. Thus a fairy encountering an owl, on turf or in tree, is impelled to fondle the solemn bird, who, as might be expected from his imperturbable
