ed with brain in singular harmony, and all three
improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most
interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social
pictures from the beginning.

He has no doubts or hesitations--no bewildering subtleties--no seeking
from twelve to fourteen o'clock--either in his ideas or technique,
which very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to
his ideas--rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and
movement--troubling itself little about details that will not help the
telling of his story--for before everything else he has his story to
tell, and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you--and he
tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes,
although it is often a complicated story!

For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting
out their little drama in the foreground--there is the scene in which
they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the
sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes,
winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and
cloud--all the poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his
little people are being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all.
He is a king of impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the
spot--never to be forgotten! It is all so quick and fresh and strong,
so simple, pat, and complete, so direct from mother Nature herself! It
has about it the quality of inevitableness--those are the very people
who would have acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them
every day--the expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in
anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation,
triumph.... Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted
otherwise--it is life itself. An optimistic life in which joyousness
prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to
us who look on--like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache
after a Greenwich banquet--which are about the most tragic things he
has dealt with.

(I am speaking of his purely social sketches. For in his admirable
large cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often
bitter and biting indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)

Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and no
doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy
cont