Enter ARNOLD and his mother BERTHA. Bert. OUT, Hunchback!

[The Three Brothers, by Joshua Pickersgill, junior, was published in 1803. There is no copy

of The Three Brothers in the British Museum. The following extracts are taken from a copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (vol. 4, cap. xi. pp. 220-350):

Arnaud, the natural son of the Marquis de Souvricour, was a child "extraordinary in Beauty and Intellect." When travelling with his parents to Languedoc, Arnaud being 8 years old, he was shot at by banditti, and forsaken by his parents. The Captain of the band nursed him. "But those perfections to which Arnaud owed his existence, ceased to adorn it. The ball had gored his shoulder, and the fall had dislocated it; by the latter misadventure his spine likewise was so fatally injured as to be irrecoverable to its pristine uprightness. Injuries so compound confounded the Captain, who sorrowed to see a creature so charming, at once deformed by a crooked back and an excrescent shoulder." Arnaud was found and taken back to his parents. "The bitterest consciousness of his deformity was derived from their indelicate, though, perhaps, insensible alteration of conduct. Of his person he continued to speak as of an abhorrent "Were enemy." a blessing submitted to my choice I would say, [said Arnaud] be it my immediate dissolution." "I think," said his mother, . . . "that you