when failure of eyesight compelled him to rest. This is not the sort
of activity that leaves a man much time for independent adventures, and
Daumier was essentially of the type, common in France, of the specialist
so immersed in his specialty that he can be painted in only one
attitude--a general circumstance which perhaps helps to account for
the paucity, in that country, of biography, in our English sense of the
word, in proportion to the superabundance of criticism.

Honore Daumier was born at Marseilles February 26th, 1808; he died
on the 11th of the same month, 1879. His main activity, however,
was confined to the earlier portion of a career of almost exactly
seventy-one years, and I find it affirmed in Vapereau's _Dictionnaire
des Contemporains_ that he became completely blind between 1850 and
1860. He enjoyed a pension from the State of 2400 francs; but what
relief from misery could mitigate a quarter of a century of darkness
for a man who had looked out at the world with such vivifying eyes? His
father had followed the trade of a glazier, but was otherwise vocal
than in the emission of the rich street-cry with which we used all to be
familiar, and which has vanished with so many other friendly pedestrian
notes. The elder Daumier wrought verses as well as window-panes, and M.
Champfleury has disinterred a small volume published by him in 1823.
The merit of his poetry is not striking; but he was able to transmit the
artistic nature to his son, who, becoming promptly conscious of it, made
the inevitable journey to Paris in search of fortune.

The young draughtsman appeared to have missed at first the way to this
boon; inasmuch as in the year 1832 he found himself condemned to six
months' imprisonment for a lithograph disrespectful to Louis-Philippe.
This drawing had appeared in the _Caricature_, an organ of pictorial
satire founded in those days by one Philipon, with the aid of a band of
young mockers to whom he gave ideas and a direction, and several others,
of whom Gavarni, Henry Monnier, Decamps, Grandville, were destined to
make themselves a place. M. Eugene Montrosier, in a highly appreciative
article on Daumier in _L'Art_ for 1878, says that this same Philipon
was _le journalisme fait homme_; which did not prevent him--rather
in fact fostered such a result--from being perpetually in delicate
relations with the government. He had had many horses killed under
him, and had led a life of attacks, penalties, supp