It was a note of Mr. Thackeray's art, and probably one among other proofs
that the higher fields of art were closed to him, that his success by no
means corresponded to the amount of pains he took with his work. His
drawings which appeared as steel engravings, were not unfrequently weak,
while his sketches on the wood and his lithographs were much more free
and masterly. There is, indeed, a sketch on the steel of poor Pen
tossing feverishly in his mother's comforting arms, which is full of
passion and life and sentiment. But it was rare that success attended
his ambition, and, indeed, another drawing of Pen and his mother admiring
a sunset might have come out of a book of fashions of that remote period.
It was in his initial letters and slight designs that Thackeray showed
his best powers. There is much wistful tenderness in the little
Marquise's face as she trips down a rope-ladder in an initial letter of
_Vanity Fair_. The bewigged shepherds and powdered shepherdesses of his
favourite period are always reproduced with grace, and the children of
his drawings are almost invariably charming. In the darker moods, when
"man delighted him not, nor woman either," children did not fail to
please him, and he sketched them in a hundred pathetic attitudes. There
are the little brother and sister of the doomed House of Gaunt, sitting
under the ancestral sword that seems ready to fall. There is little
Rawdon Crawley, manly and stout, in his great coat, watching the thin
little cousin Pitt, whom he was "too big a dog to play with." There is
the printer's devil, asleep at Pen's door; and the small boy in "Dr.
Birch," singing in his nightgown to the big boy in bed. There is
Betsinda dancing with her plum-bun in "The Rose and the Ring." The
burlesque drawings of that delightful child's book are not its least
attraction. Not arriving at the prettiness of Mr. Tenniel, and the
elegance of Mr. Du Maurier, and falling far short of their ingenious
fantasy, they are yet manly delineations of great adventures. The count
kicking the two black men into space is a powerful design, full of