and the Album"--

"I am my master's faithful old gold pen.
I've served him three long years, and drawn since then
Thousands of funny women and droll men ..."

[Illustration: THE HEIGHT OF IMPROPRIETY

MISS GRUNDISON, JUNIOR. "There goes Lucy Holyroyd, all alone in a Boat
with young Snipson as usual. So impudent of them!"

HER ELDER SISTER. "Yes; how shocking if they were Upset and Drowned--
without a Chaperon, you know!"--_Punch_, August 8, 1891.]

Now conceive--it is not an impossible conception--that the marvellous
gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been changed by
some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by means of
the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously as he
cultivated the other, and finally that he had exercised it as
sedulously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in
black and white all the wit and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep
knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the
tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable
perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has
written--what a pictorial record that would be!

Think of it--a collection of little wood-cuts or etchings, with each
its appropriate legend--a series of small pictures equal in volume and
in value to the whole of Thackeray's literary work! Think of the
laughter and the tears from old and young, rich and poor, and from the
thousands who have not the intelligence or the culture to appreciate
great books, or lack time or inclination to read them.

All there was in the heart and mind of Thackeray, expressed through a
medium so simple and direct that even a child could be made to feel
it, or a chimney-sweep! For where need we draw the line? We are only
pretending.

Now I am quite content with Thackeray as he is--a writer of books,
whose loss to literature could not be compensated by any gain to the
gentle art of drawing little figures in black and white--"thousands of
funny women and droll men." All I wish to point out--in these days
when drawing is pressed into the service of daily journalism, and with
such success that there will soon be as many journalists with the
pencil as with the pen--is this, that the career of the future social
pictorial satirist is full of splendid possibilities undreamed-of yet.

It is a kind of hybrid profession still in its infancy--hardly
recognised as a profe