ebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how
many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late,
and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic
papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books.
One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with
having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr.
Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one
year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was
sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy
Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes
Drolatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was
done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments
of their art. We all know the books that followed.

Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while
flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at
great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would
not accept them, were hugely admired in the Dore Gallery of London.
Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to
Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to
the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out
with excessive production--a great name, but an unsatisfied man.

Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with
Dore the illustrator, and then with Dore the painter and sculptor. It
is an eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at
Dore's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.

Dore's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a
quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and
caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold
himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not
hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher
qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were
vastly his superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a
recklessness of exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier
work, up to and including the Rabelais, is not really funny--to many
minds it is even painful--but it is unmistakably caricature of a
dashing, savage sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that
by which he is most likely to live. At least i