he world over as the most
astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he
wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor,
and because the artists and critics of France never seriously
recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim
of the mania of persecution, and his naturally sunny nature was
over-clouded with moroseness and suspicion. Hailed by some as the
emulator and equal of the great names of the Italian Renaissance, and
considered a great moral force--a "preacher painter"--by others he has
been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a
man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful
power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard
Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the
first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Dore's
own countrymen have never accepted either. Just where, between them,
the truth lies, as we see it, we shall endeavor to show in this
article.

The main facts of Dore's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was
born with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg,
near the Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the
Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the
department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to
account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery
which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in
life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil
in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he
might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an
engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was
of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes,
and of an athletic temperament. Theophile Gautier afterward called him
a "gamin de genie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in
Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and
showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and
sent a letter to Dore's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to
remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once
and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began
his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of
work, and was a cel