AUTHOR'S NOTE ON ILLUSTRATION No. VII.
I earnestly implore my benevolent publishers to suppress at all events this illustration—as much for the sake of Mr Birnadhur Pahtridhji (who, if it appears, will be the jesting-stock of every cultivated young Indian with any acquaintance at all with English life) as on my own poor account.
I ask anyone endowed with common sense—could there be a more preposterously grotesque misrepresentation than this of such a well-known scene as the annual pilgrimage to the Derby Race?
It is true that I wrote "every description of conveyance"—but how was I, being "Davus non Œdipus," to anticipate that Mr Pahtridhji would interpret the phrase as including such nondescript vehicles as a hansom cab propelled by a bullock, and a kind of palkee borne by two members of the flunkey caste?
He further displays his colossal ignorance by the introduction of a snake charmer—a character who, even assuming that he ever made his début on a London roadway, would be speedily run in, with all his serpents, for obstructing traffic.
Moreover, where is his authority for representing an adjutant bird as an ordinary London fowl?
Time and patience fail me to indicate the countless and howling croppers which Mr Pahtridhji has achieved in the space of this single picture.
But I say once more: unless it is possible to provide a novel of this calibre with congenial and appropriate drawings by an artist who is acquainted with what is what, it is infinitely preferable to dispense with illustrations altogether than to disfigure such a work with mediocre and puerile pictures!
H. B. J.
