admirable compared with the designs to "The Virginians," which may safely be reckoned amongst the worst in the entire range of English illustrative art. Contrast them with illustrations confessedly not up to the severe standard of excellence required by the art critic, but admirably adapted for their purpose, Mr. Doyle's etchings to "The Newcomes," and remark the immeasurable superiority of the latter.

And yet, in justice to the great humourist of the nineteenth century, let us hear what another great writer has to say upon the very illustrations which seem to us to call for such severe animadversion. After telling us that Thackeray studied drawing at Paris, affecting especially Bonnington (the young English artist who died in 1828), Mr. Anthony Trollope goes on to say, "He never learned to draw, perhaps never could have learned. That he was idle and did not do his best, we may take for granted. He was always idle, and only on some occasions, when the spirit moved him thoroughly, did he do his best even in after life. But with drawing-or rather without it he did wonderfully well, even when he did his worst. He did illustrate his own books, and every one knows how incorrect were his delineations. But as illustrations they were excellent. How often have I wished that characters of my creating might be sketched as faultily, if with the same appreciation of the intended purpose. Let any one look at the 'plates,' as they are called, in Vanity Fair,' and compare each with the scenes and the characters intended to be displayed, and then see whether the artist -if we may call him so-has not managed to convey in the picture the exact feeling which he has described in the text. I have a little sketch of his, in which a cannon-ball is supposed to have just carried off the head of an aide-de-camp,-messenger I had perhaps better say, lest I might affront military feelings,-who is kneeling on the field of battle and delivering a despatch to Marlborough on horseback. The graceful ease with which the duke receives the message though the messenger's head be gone, and the soldierlike precision with which the headless hero finishes his last effort of military obedience, may not have been portrayed with well-drawn

figures, but no finished illustration ever told its story better." We read these remarks with profound astonishment, and can only ask in reply: If, as Mr. Trollope has admitted, Thackeray "never learned to draw,-perhaps never could have learned," how he could manage "to convey" in any of his pictures "the exact feeling he has described in the text "?-how, in the face of the admitted incorrectness of "his delineations," he could be in any way fitted to illustrate a novel of such transcendent excellence as "Vanity Fair"?

It has been assumed, without any sort of authority, that it was only when Thackeray found he could not succeed as an artist that he turned to literature. The statement is altogether unwarranted. At or about the very time he was engaged in drawing the cuts for "Figaro in London," he was-if we are to judge of the sketch of "the Fraserians" in the "Maclise Portrait Gallery," in which young Thackeray may easily be recognised-writing for "Fraser's Magazine." Be this, however, as it may, it seems tolerably certain that the rebuff he received from Dickens had no hand in turning him into the path of letters, towards which his genius and unerring judgment alone most fortunately guided him.

Thackeray," by Anthony Trollope, in “English Men of Letters," p. 7.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CONTEMPORARIES OF JOHN LEECH: RICHARD DOYLE AND JOHN TENNIEL.

WE gather from the article in "The Month" which followed his death, and to which we have to acknowledge materials of which we have availed ourselves in the revision of the present chapter,* that Richard Doyle's first work was The Eglinton Tournament, or the Days of Chivalry Revived, which was published when he was only fifteen years old. Three years later he produced A Grand Historical, Allegorical, and Classical Procession, a humorous pageant which the same authority tells us combined "a curious medley of men and women who played a prominent part on the world's stage, bringing out into good-humoured relief the characteristic peculiarities of each." Apart from his talent, it was no doubt the fact of his being his father's son-the son of John Doyle, the once famous and eminent HB-which first attracted the attention of the promoters of Punch, and he was only nineteen when, in 1843, he was taken on the regular pictorial staff of that periodical. It was to the cheery, delightful pencil of Richard Doyle that the paper owed much of the popularity which it subsequently achieved.

"It was from his father that he not only inherited his artistic talent, but received, and that almost exclusively, his artistic training" The writer in "The Month" goes on to tell us that John Doyle would not allow his son "to draw from models; his plan was to teach the

* The present chapter was written before the artist's death; but I have to acknowledge the great assistance I have derived in its revision from the authority indicated.

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boy to observe with watchful eye the leading features of the object before him, and then some little time after reproduce them from memory as nearly as he could. . . . He had no regular training in academy or school of art; he painted in the studio of no master save his father; and it is curious to see how his genius overleapt what would have been serious disadvantages to an ordinary man.

. . He attached himself to no school; he was not familiar, strange to say, with the masterpieces of foreign artists. He had never been in Paris, or Rome, or Vienna." It will be well for the reader to bear this in mind, because Doyle is one of the few book illustrators or etchers whom the professional art critic has condescended to notice, and it will enable him the better to understand and appreciate the soundness of his criticism. No one, we are told, owed less than Richard Doyle "did to those who had gone before him; and if this rendered his works less elaborate and conventional, it gave them a freshness and originality which might have been hampered if he had been forced into conformity with the accepted canons of the professional studio." The writer of the article from which we have quoted would seem to have read what Mr. Holder has told us respecting his friend Kenny Meadows, for the following is certainly not new to us: "He was not a self-taught artist, for he was trained by one who had a genius kin to his own, but he was an artist who had never forced himself into the observance of those mechanical rules and canons which to ordinary men are necessary to their correct painting (just as rules of grammar are necessary to correct writing), but hamper and trammel the man of genius, who has in himself the fount whence such rules proceed, and instinctively follows them in the spirit, though not in the letter. So far as they will forward the end he has in view, and no farther." It will be seen by the above that the kindly writer gives Doyle credit for genius, and we who are strictly impartial will cheerfully admit that if he had not positive genius,-which we somewhat doubt, he was certainly one of the most genial and graceful of comic designers.

The Month, a Catholic Magazine, No. 237 (March, 1884), p. 315. + Ibid., page 317.