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EDWARD LEAR--Angus Davidson-- Dutton ($3.75)

To limerick lovers the name Edward Lear has long (and incorrectly) meant the inventor of the limerick. To painters it has meant a third-rate landscapist of the second-rate British school. But when grandfather was a little boy, Edward Lear meant a big fat Book of Nonsense with a gilt cat bowing a bull fiddle on the cover. Inside were such "queery Leary" drawings and poems as the Owl and the Pussy-Cat,/- The Moppsikon Floppsikon Bear, The Dong with the Luminous Nose. Last week Author Angus Davidson took this nonsensical Englishman seriously enough to publish his first biography.

The youngest son in a family of 21 children, shy, shrinking, nearsighted, epileptic Edward Lear was coddled by a sister 21 years older, who never let him attend school. As a young man his painstakingly realistic illustrations of a book on parrots got him a job sketching the private menagerie of the Earl of Derby. His first meals were taken with the Earl's steward, but Lear's charm and humor soon won him a chair in the dining room.

Though this six-foot, bearded, spinsterish Englishman never married, he was fortunate in the young men on whom he sometimes girlishly innocent crushes. Frank Lushington became an important judge. Chichester Fortescue (Lear liked to write his name "40scue") became Lord Carlingford. Thomas George Baring became the Earl of Northbrook and Viceroy of India. Evelyn Baring became the Earl of Cromer, the "Maker of Modern Egypt." To these playful satraps of the expanding British Empire, Lear liked to write such pre-Joycean letters as this one to Evelyn Baring:

THRIPPY PILLIWINN

Inkly tinky pobblebockle ablesquabs? Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky! Okul scratch abibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, jerry moyassity amsky flamsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flinky wisty pomm

SLUSHYPIPP

For a while Lear was a Pre-Raphaelite. With Painters Holman Hunt and J. E. Millais (whom Lear called "Uncle" when he didn't call him "Aunt"), Lear once shared a farmhouse studio. Close friends of Lear were Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and his wife, with whom Lear had his closest feminine friendship. But Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is so carefully unmentioned in Lear's long letters and diary that Author Davidson thinks Lear may have been jealous of the author of Alice in Wonderland.

Lear was a professional expatriate of the Robert Browning-Walter Savage Landor school. Most of his life was spent in Rome, Corfu, San Remo. His travels through Europe, Asia and Africa look like a map of the Barbarian Invasions. He saw Petra before Doughty, was nearly killed there by the Arabs, muddled through with superb British calm. Fanatics tried to assassinate the author of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat in India, in Turkey. At last Lear settled down in his San Remo villa with an Albanian servant and his cat Foss, "his daily companion for nearly 17 years." There he worked on his illustrations for Tennyson's poems (his musical setting to Tennyson's Tears, Idle Tears, sung in a high thin voice, was long a tear-jerker). He was a prodigious letter writer, in Rome used to rise at four or five o'clock, write 35 letters before breakfast. In his Villa Tennyson at San Remo he died: age 75.

English youngsters still burst their Eton jackets giggling at Lear's Book of Nonsense. The U. S. breed find Lear's nonsense nonsensical. But Lear is essentially grownups' Mother Goose. Limericks like the Young Girl of Majorca still wow big-wigged British judges:

There was a young girl of Majorca,

Whose aunt was a very fast walker,

She walked seventy miles,

And leaped fifteen stiles,

Which astonished that girl of Majorca.

The non sequiturs of Lear's Nonsense Alphabets leave laughing Lear addicts in tears. Sample:

G was Papa's new gun,

He put it in a box;

And then he went and bought a Bun,

And walked about the Docks.

She sat upon her Dobie jerks retired majors from the India service out of their club chairs. But to most people, big and little, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and many punny funny drawings remain Lear's tag to fame.

/- The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat: They took some honey, and plenty of money Wrapped up in a five-pound note. . . .

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