personal regard for the friend we had lost, the attendance
seemed very large indeed; and all of us, I think, in our affectionate
remembrance of one of the most singularly sweet-natured,
sweet-tempered, and simple-hearted men that ever lived, forgot for the
time that a very great artist was being laid to his rest.

[Illustration: GEORGE DU MAURIER

From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.]

And now, in fulfilment of my contract, I must speak of myself--a
difficult and not very grateful task. One's self is a person about
whom one knows too much and too little--about whom we can never hit a
happy medium. Sometimes one rates one's self too high, sometimes (but
less frequently) too low, according to the state of our digestion, our
spirits, our pocket, or even the weather!

In the present instance I will say all the good of myself I can
decently, and leave all the rating to you. It is inevitable, however
unfortunate it may be for me, that I should be compared with my two
great predecessors, Leech and Keene, whom I have just been comparing
to each other.

When John Leech's mantle fell from his shoulders it was found that the
garment was ample to clothe the nakedness of more than one successor.

John Tenniel had already, it is true, replaced him for several years
as the political cartoonist of _Punch_. How admirably he has always
filled that post, then and ever since, and how great his fame is, I
need not speak of here. Linley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so
different from each other and from Tenniel, have also, since then,
brought their great originality and their unrivalled skill to the
political illustrations of _Punch_--Sambourne to the illustration of
many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to
the present subject.

I am here concerned with the social illustrators alone, and, besides,
only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in
_Punch_ the principal business of their lives. For very many artists,
from Sir John Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and
Randolph Caldecott downward, have contributed to that fortunate
periodical at one time or another, and not a few distinguished
amateurs.

Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould, and others have continued the
fox-hunting tradition, and provided those scenes which have become a
necessity to the sporting readers of _Punch_.

To Charles Keene was fairly left that part of the succession that was
mos