s and added interest as he
himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and
culture he will owe to them, who can say?

Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can
hold close to the eyes like a book--not even a song or poem--for in
the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than
that of the ear--its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen.
And then there is the immense variety, the number!

[Illustration: "READING WITHOUT TEARS"

TEACHER. "And what comes after S, Jack?"

PUPIL. "T!"

TEACHER. "And what Comes after T?"

PUPIL. "For all that we have Received," &c., &c.--_Punch_, February
17, 1869.]

Our pictorial satirist taking the greatest pains, doing his very best,
can produce, say, a hundred of these little pictures in a twelvemonth,
while his elder brother of the brush bestows an equal labour and an
equal time on one important canvas, which will take another
twelvemonth to engrave, perhaps, for the benefit of those fortunate
enough to be able to afford the costly engraving of that one priceless
work of art, which only one millionaire can possess at a time. Happy
millionaire! happy painter--just as likely as not to become a
millionaire himself! And this elder brother of the brush will be the
first to acknowledge his little brother's greatness--if the little
brother's work be well done. You should hear how the first painters of
our time, here and abroad, express themselves about Charles Keene!
They do not speak of him as a little brother, I tell you, but a very
big brother indeed.

Thackeray, for me, and many others, the greatest novelist, satirist,
humorist of our time, where so many have been great, is said to have
at the beginning of his career wished to illustrate the books of
others--Charles Dickens's, I believe, for one. Fortunately, perhaps,
for us and for him, and perhaps for Dickens, he did not succeed; he
lived to write books of his own, and to illustrate them himself; and
it is generally admitted that his illustrations, clever as they are,
were not up to the mark of his writings.

It was not his natural mode of expression--and I doubt if any amount
of training and study would have made it a successful mode: the love
of the thing does not necessarily carry the power to do it. That he
loved it he has shown us in many ways, and also that he was always
practising it. Most of my hearers will remember his beautiful ballad
of "The Pen