SPECIMENS FROM MR. PUNCH’S SCAMP-ALBUM.

No.  III.—­The biographer.

We will ask you, reader, this week, to compel your fancy to take a further flight, and kindly imagine yourself a worthy merchant, who has exchanged the turmoil of City-life for the elegant leisure of a suburban villa—­let us say at Norwood.  You are in your dining-room, examining the sky, and thinking that, if the weather holds up, you will take your big dog out presently for a run before lunch, when you are told that a gentleman is in the study who wishes to see you “on particular business.”  The very word excites you, not unpleasantly, nor do you care whether it is Churchwarden’s business, or the District Board, or the County Council—­it is enough that your experience and practical knowledge of affairs are in request—­and, better still, it will give you something to do.  So, after a delay due to your own importance, you march into your study, and find a brisk stranger, with red whiskers and a flexible mouth, absorbed in documents which he has brought with him in a black bag.

[Illustration:  “Your Visitor has his Note-book out.”]

“I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Mark Lane, I think?” he says.  “Just so.  Well, Mr. Mark Lane, I consider myself extremely fortunate in finding you at home, I assure you, and a very charming place you have here—­abundant evidence of a refined and cultivated mind, excellent selection of our best-known writers, everything, if I may say so, elegant in the extreme—­as was to be expected!  Even from the cursory glimpse I have had, I can see that your interior would lend itself admirably to picturesque description—­which brings me to the object of my visit.  I have called upon you, Mr. Lane, in the hope of eliciting your sympathy and patronage for a work I am now compiling—­a work which will, I am confident, commend itself to a gentleman of your wide culture and interest in literary matters.” (Here you will look as judicial as you can, and harden your heart in advance against a new Encyclopaedia, or an illustrated edition of SHAKSPEARE’s works.) “The work I allude to, Mr. Lane, is entitled, Notable Nonentities of Norwood and its Neighbourhood.” (Here you will nod gravely, rather taken by the title.) “It will be published very shortly, by subscription, Mr. Lane, in two handsome quarto volumes, got up in the most sumptuous style.  It is a work which has been long wanted, and which, I venture to predict, will be very widely read.  It is my ambition to make it a complete biographical compendium of every living celebrity of note residing at Norwood at the present date.  It will be embellished with copious illustrations, printed by an entirely new process upon India and Japanese paper; everything—­type, ink, paper, binding, will be of the best procurable; the publishers