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 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!