magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear. A few years back there were
eagles alive in the Zoölogical Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could
point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to
beak fifty years before. He united with this kind of work the more
unpleasant occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in
hospitals. One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in
the Zoölogical Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his shoulder,
entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must come and draw
my birds at Knowsley." Lear did not know where Knowsley was, or what it
meant; but the old gentleman was the thirteenth Earl of Derby. The
successive Earls of Derby have been among Lear's kindest and most generous
patrons. He went to Knowsley, and the drawings in the "Knowsley Menagerie"
(now a rare and highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's
hand. At Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he
composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of
utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun seriously
to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten his health, Lord
Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go to Rome as a student
and artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman
society which laid the foundations of a numerous _clientèle_. It was in the
Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial
wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious
note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate
drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy,"
published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.

Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful comrade
he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his own. It was not
everybody who could travel with him; for he was so irrepressibly anxious
not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal for gathering into his