ssion at all--something halfway between
literature and art--yet potentially combining all that is best and
most essential in both, and appealing as effectively as either to some
of our strongest needs and most natural instincts.

It has no school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few
masters have been pretty much self-taught. But I think that a method
and a school will evolve themselves by degrees--are perhaps evolving
themselves already.

The quality of black and white illustrations of modern life is
immeasurably higher than it was thirty or forty years ago--its average
and artistic quality--and it is getting higher day by day. The number
of youths who can draw beautifully is quite appalling; one would think
they had learned to draw before learning to read and write. Why
shouldn't they?

Well, all we want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among
these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a
Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony
Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily
as other men can spell, that he can express himself, and all that he
hears and sees and feels, more easily, more completely, in that way
than in any other, will devote himself heart and soul to that form of
expression--as I and others have tried to do--but with advantages of
nature, circumstances, and education that have been denied to us!

[Illustration: THINGS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE EXPRESSED DIFFERENTLY

HE. "The fact is I never get any wild fowl shooting--never!"

SHE. "Oh, then you ought to come down to our Neighborhood in the
Winter. It would just suit you, there are such a lot of Geese about--
a--a--I mean _Wild_ Geese of course!"--_Punch_, November 21, 1891.]

Hogarth seems to have come nearer to this ideal pictorial satirist
than any of his successors in _Punch_ and elsewhere. For he was not
merely a light humorist and a genial caricaturist; he dealt also in
pathos and terror, in tragic passion and sorrow and crime; he often
strikes chords of too deep a tone for the pages of a comic periodical.

But the extent of his productiveness was limited by the method of his
production; he was a great painter in oils, and each of his life
scenes is an important and elaborate picture, which, moreover, he
engraved himself at great cost of time and labour, after the original
time and labour spent in painting it. It is by these engravings, far
more than by his