oft, monstrously, like one of those grotesque actual shadows
which a candle may cast athwart walls and ceiling. Whose shadow is it?
we wonder, and, wondering, become sure that it is Mr.
Thompson's--Papa's.

The papa of Georgian children! We know him well, that awfully massive
and mysterious personage, who seemed ever to his offspring so remote
when they were in his presence, so frighteningly near when they were
out of it. In Mrs. Turner's Cautionary Stories in Verse he occurs again
and again. Mr. Fairchild was a perfect type of him. Mr. Bennet, when
the Misses Lizzie, Jane and Lydia were in pinafores, must have been
another perfect type: we can reconstruct him as he was then from the
many fragments of his awfulness which still clung to him when the girls
had grown up. John Ruskin's father, too, if we read between the lines
of Praeterita, seems to have had much of the authentic monster about
him. He, however, is disqualified as a type by the fact that he was 'an
entirely honest merchant.' For one of the most salient peculiarities in
the true Georgian Papa was his having apparently no occupation
whatever--his being simply and solely a Papa. Even in social life he
bore no part: we never hear of him calling on a neighbour or being
called on. Even in his own household he was seldom visible. Except at
their meals, and when he took them for their walk, and when they were
sent to him to be reprimanded, his children never beheld him in the
flesh. Mamma, poor lady, careful of many other things, superintended
her children unremittingly, to keep them in the thorny way they should
go. Hers the burden and heat of every day, hers to double the roles of
Martha and Cornelia, that her husband might be left ever calmly aloof
in that darkened room, the Study. There, in a high armchair, with one
stout calf crossed over the other, immobile throughout the long hours
sate he, propping a marble brow on a dexter finger of the same
material. On the table beside him was a vase of flowers, daily
replenished by the children, and a closed volume. It is remarkable that
in none of the many woodcuts in which he has been handed down to us do
we see him reading; he is always meditating on something he has just
read. Occasionally, he is fingering a portfolio of engravings, or
leaning aside to examine severely a globe of the world. That is the
nearest he ever gets to physical activity. In him we see the static
embodiment of perfect wisdom and perfect righte