I wish I had known about Augustus five years ago. I should like to have celebrated the centenary of an _egg_ somewhere else than in a London tea-shop. Augustus Leopold Egg seems to have spent a life in keeping with his name. He was taught drawing by Mr Sass, and in later years was a devotee of amateur theatricals, making a memorable appearance, as we should expect of an Egg, in a play called _Not so Bad as We Seem_. He also appears to have devoted a great part of his life to painting bad eggs, if we may judge by the titles of his most famous pictures--_Buckingham Rebuffed, Queen Elizabeth discovers she is no longer young, Peter the Great sees Catherine for the First Time_, and _Past and Present, a Triple Picture of a Faithless Wife_. She was a lady, no doubt, who could not submit to the marriage yolk. Anyhow, she had a great fall, and Augustus did his best to put her together again. "Egg," the _Encyclopædia_ tells us finally, "was rather below the middle height, with dark hair and a handsome, well-formed face." He seems to have been a man, take him for all in all: we shall not look upon his like again.

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