one of the characters in a story that everyone
is reading, he brings himself more conspicuously before the public than
by painting a new picture. Moreover, in sending to an English newspaper
a letter in which he vituperates his quondam friend and fellow-artist,
he interrupts himself for but a moment in the pursuit of his legitimate
calling as a painter.

In America, at least, few readers of "Trilby" would have known that, in
Joe Sibley, Mr. du Maurier had hit off some of the most salient
"peculiarities" of the immensely talented etcher, who, when he takes the
newspapers into his confidence, dips his pen in the corrosive acid with
which he bites his plates. Joe Sibley is not an engaging character; he
is a Bohemian of the Bohemians, clever, witty, penniless and presuming.
In taking his sibilant surname as a pseudonym for Whistler, we have the
endorsement of the artist himself, though he does not expressly declare
himself to be the archetype of this particular character. Sibley is the
only man in the book who _could_ have been drawn from Whistler--the
Whistler of a generation ago; and no one but Sibley could have written
the following letter, in which the creator of the character is so
wittily vilified:--

"TO THE EDITOR--SIR: It would seem, notwithstanding; my boastful
declaration, that, after all, I had not, before leaving England,
completely rid myself of the abomination--the 'friend '! One solitary,
unheeded one--Mr. George du Maurier--still remained, hidden in
Hampstead. On that healthy heath he has been harboring, for nearly half
a life, every villainy of good fellowship that could be perfected by the
careless frequentation of our early intimacy and my unsuspecting
_camaraderie_. Of this pent-up envy, malice and furtive intent he never
at any moment during all that time allowed me, while affectionately
grasping his honest Anglo-French fist, to detect the faintest
indication. Now that my back is turned, the old _marmite_ of our
_pot-au-feu_ he fills with the picric acid of 30 years' spite, and, in
an American magazine, fires off his bomb of mendacious recollection and
poisoned rancour. The lie with which it is loaded _a mon intention_ he
proposes for my possible 'future biographer'--but I fancy it explodes,
as is usual, in his own waistcoat, and he furnishes, in his present
unseemly state, an excellent example of all those others who, like
himself, have thought a foul friend a finer fellow than an open enemy.

"PAR