Lady and the Painter, The

( A solan do : 1889.) A lady visiting an artist who has a picture on his easel of a nude female figure, protests against the irreverence to womanhood involved in his inducing a young woman to strip and stand stark-naked as his model. Before replying, he asks the lady what it is that clings half-savage-like around her hat. She, thinking he is admiring her headgear, tells him they are “wild-bird wings, and that the Paris fashion-books say that next year the skirts of women’s dre es are to be feathered too. Owls, hawks, jays and swallows are most in vogue.” Asking if he may speak plainly, and having been answered that he may, he tells Lady Blanche that it would be more to her credit to strip off all her bird-spoils and stand naked to help art, like his poor model, as a type of purest womanhood. “ You , clothed with murder of His best of harmle beings, what have you to teach?” The poem is directed against the savage and wicked custom of wearing the plumage of birds, by which millions of God’s beautiful creatures are doomed annually to slaughter; by wearing gloves made of skins stripped from the living bodies of animals (if report be true); and by the use of sealskin and other animal coverings, which nece itates the wholesale slaughter of countle you sands of happy creatures in Arctic seas. I recently asked Mi Frances Power Cobbe—the noble lady who was a friend of Mr. Browning, and who has devoted her life and splendid literary talents to befriending dumb animals and protesting against cruelty in high places—to furnish me with some account of the agitation against the foolish habit of wearing bird-plumage in women’s bonnets. I have received from Mi Cobbe the following particulars: “The Plumage League began December 1885. It started with a letter in the Times , December 18th, 1885 (quoted in extenso in the Zoophilist , January 1886, p. 164), by the Rev. F. O. Morris, embodying one from Lady Mount Temple. Before May 1886 a long list of names (given in the Zoophilist ) were given as patrons of the League, including Lady Mount Temple, Duche of Sutherland, Lady Londesborough, Lady Sudeley, Hon. Mrs. R. C. Boyle, Louisa Marchione of Water ford, Prince Christian, Lady Burdett Coutts, Lady East lake, Lady John Manners, Lady Tennyson, Lady Herbert of Lea, and about forty other ladies of rank. I should say that the League was originated by Lady Mount Temple and the Rev. F. O. Morris. There is another society in existence for the same purpose, working in London—the Birds’ Protection Society—one of whose local secretaries lately applied to me for a subscription.”