r
charm of suggestion; but, at the hour I speak of, the old Parisian quay,
the belittered print-shop, the pleasant afternoon, the glimpse of the
great Louvre on the other side of the Seine, in the interstices of the
sallow _estampes_ suspended in window and doorway--all these elements
of a rich actuality availed only to mitigate, without transmuting, that
general vision of a high, cruel pillory which pieced itself together as
I drew specimen after specimen from musty portfolios. I had been passing
the shop when I noticed in a small _vitrine_, let into the embrasure of
the doorway, half a dozen soiled, striking lithographs, which it took no
more than a first glance to recognize as the work of Daumier. They were
only old pages of the _Charivari_, torn away from the text and rescued
from the injury of time; and they were accompanied with an inscription
to the effect that many similar examples of the artist were to be seen
within. To become aware of this circumstance was to enter the shop and
to find myself promptly surrounded with bulging; _cartons_ and tattered
relics. These relics--crumpled leaves of the old comic journals of the
period from 1830 to 1855--are neither rare nor expensive; but I happened
to have lighted on a particularly copious collection, and I made the
most of my small good-fortune, in order to transmute it, if possible,
into a sort of compensation for my having missed unavoidably, a few
months before, the curious exhibition "de la Caricature Moderne" held
for several weeks just at hand, in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Daumier was said to have appeared there in considerable force; and it
was a loss not to have had that particular opportunity of filling one's
mind with him.

There was perhaps a perversity in having wished to do so, strange,
indigestible stuff of contemplation as he might appear to be; but the
perversity had had an honorable growth. Daumier's great days were in the
reign of Louis-Philippe; but in the early years of the Second Empire
he still plied his coarse and formidable pencil. I recalled, from a
juvenile consciousness, the last failing strokes of it. They used to
impress me in Paris, as a child, with their abnormal blackness as well
as with their grotesque, magnifying movement, and there was something in
them that rather scared a very immature admirer. This small personage,
however, was able to perceive later, when he was unfortunately deprived
of the chance of studying them, that there