A few months after Clive and J. J. had entered at Gandish’s, that academy began to hold its own against its rival. The silent young disciple was pronounced to be a genius. His copies were beautiful in delicacy and finish. His designs were for exquisite grace and richness of fancy. Mr. Gandish took to himself the credit for J. J.’s genius; Clive ever and fondly acknowledged the benefit he got from his friend’s taste and bright enthusiasm and sure skill. As for Clive, if he was successful in the academy he was doubly victorious out of it. His person was handsome, his courage high, his gaiety and frankness delightful and winning. His money was plenty and he spent it like a young king. He could speedily beat all the club at Lundy’s at billiards, and give points to the redoubted F. B. himself. He sang a famous song at their jolly supper-parties: and J. J. had no greater delight than to listen to his fresh voice, and watch the young conqueror at the billiard-table, where the balls seemed to obey him. Clive was not the most docile of Mr. Gandish’s pupils. If he had not come to the studio on horseback, several of the young students averred, Gandish would not always have been praising him and quoting him as that professor certainly did. It must be confessed that the young ladies read the history of Clive’s uncle in the Book of Baronets, and that Gandish jun., probably with an eye to business, made a design of a picture, in which, according to that veracious volume, one of the Newcomes was represented as going cheerfully to the stake at Smithfield, surrounded by some very ill-favoured Dominicans, whose arguments did not appear to make the least impression upon the martyr of the Newcome family. Sandy M’Collop devised a counter picture, wherein the barber-surgeon of King Edward the Confessor was drawn, operating upon the beard of that monarch. To which piece of satire Clive gallantly replied by a design, representing Sawney Bean M’Collop, chief of the clan of that name, descending from his mountains into Edinburgh, and his astonishment at beholding a pair of breeches for the first time. These playful jokes passed constantly amongst the young men of Gandish’s studio. There was no one there who was not caricatured in one way or another. He whose eyes looked not very straight was depicted with a most awful squint. The youth whom nature had endowed with somewhat lengthy nose was drawn by the caricaturists with a prodigious proboscis. Little Bobby Moss, the young Hebrew artist from Wardour Street, was delineated with three hats and an old-clothes bag. Nor were poor J. J.’s round shoulders spared, until Clive indignantly remonstrated at the hideous hunchback pictures which the boys made of his friend, and vowed it was a shame to make jokes at such a deformity.