places
and people at a given time. Up to the day when the artist came to London
to seek employment from the publishers he seems to have had
disheartening times. In the last years of his life, when he went over
the ground of these early experiences in his books, it was, as is
evident from the style, in the mood of one who had survived danger by
flood and field to recount his tales in an atmosphere of peace he had
hardly hoped to realise.

[Illustration: Illustration for "The Adventures of Harry Richmond"

_The Cornhill_, 1870.]

It is evident from his books that he had many inward experiences of a
dramatic kind; that his life was only uneventful upon the surface, and
in appearance. In each of his novels, as we have seen, the rather crude
machinery of his plot secures the revelation of a curious, but a not at
all uncommon state of mind. He experimented empirically in psychology,
interesting himself in the processes of his own mind. No one can doubt
that in more than in outward incident his novels were autobiographical;
that also he drew upon the resources of his personal history for some of
the less usual and partly religious frames of mind in which his
"Heroes," each in his own way, outwit the apparently ugly intentions of
destiny towards themselves.

Section 6

Du Maurier's literary contributions to _Punch_ were bound up in the
volume _A Legend of Camelot, &c._, issued from the _Punch_ office in
1898. Besides the title-piece, a satire of some length upon the
mediaevalism of the pre-Raphaelites, the book contains shorter
pieces--"Flirts in Hades," "Poor Pussy's Nightmare," "The Fool's
Paradise, or Love and Life," "A Lost Illusion," "Vers Nonsensiques,"
"L'Onglay a Parry," "Two Thrones," "A Love-Agony," "A Simple Story," "A
Ballad of Blunders" (after Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens"), and then a
story in prose, "The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts: A tale of Modern
Art and Fashion." All the poetry is in the ballad strain, and by its
monotony the reader is put into the right condition to receive a shock
from some felicitous twist at the end of a line. Thus it is almost
impossible to quote from them. The humour rests in each case with the
whole of the skit; and in the case of one of the best of the whole
series, "A Love-Agony," a poem for a picture by Maudle, given, there
must be understanding on the reader's part, of the art "cult" against
which it is directed.

"The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts" is du Maur