him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting
Providence!

If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice,
have become a funny man myself--though I do not suppose that my fun
would have ever been of the broadest.

Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at
caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one
change of profession, and _Punch_ as the final goal of my wanderings
in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be
a man of science.

Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told
me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty
years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of
Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and
reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed,
he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a
very bad chemist.

I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was
free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went
back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become
an artist in M. Gléyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there
is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than
Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but
misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was
the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very
good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved