points that may be scored against the laugher himself to-morrow. His
pictures were a running commentary upon the refinements of our manners
and upon the quick changes of moral costume that fresh situations in the
social comedy demand.

One thing peculiarly fitted the artist to be the satirist of English
Society--his love of the comedy of people by nature honest finding
themselves only able to get through the day with decent politeness by
the aid of "the lie to follow." English people, Puritan by ancestry and
by inclination, are nevertheless driven into frequent subterfuge by
their good nature, and having pared their language and gesture of that
extravagance in expression which they despise in the foreigner, they are
thrown back upon a naturalness that betrays them in delicate
situations. The consequence is that it is in Anglo-Saxon Society at its
best that the art of delicate fence in conversation has been brought to
its highest pitch. There the _clairvoyance_ is so great that words can
be used economically in relation to the realities of life, and are
consequently often adopted merely as a screen before the feelings.

We have to realise how much more than any one preceding him in graphic
satire du Maurier was able to dispense with exaggeration. Nevertheless,
the studied avoidance of exaggeration has not had the happiest effect as
a precedent in the art of _Punch_. Without du Maurier's sensitive
response to the whole comedy of drawing-room life the tendency has been
to lapse into the merely photographic.

The similitude we have already described between du Maurier's art with
the pencil and the art of the modern novel is not complete until we have
extended it further in the direction of a comparison with novels of
George Meredith and Henry James in particular. Like these two writers du