PHIZ.


Mr. Hablot K. Browne, better known as Phiz, was an artist of a departed
school to whom we all owe a great deal of amusement. He was not so
versatile nor so original as Cruickshank; he had not the genius, nor the
geniality, still less the sense of beauty, of John Leech. In his later
years his work became more and more unequal, till he was sometimes almost
as apt to scribble hasty scrawls as Constantin Guys. M. Guys was an
artist selected by M. Baudelaire as the fine flower of modern art, and
the true, though hurried, designer of the fugitive modern beauty. It is
recorded that M. Guys was once sent to draw a scene of triumph and
certain illuminations in London, probably about the end of the Crimean
War. His sketch did not reach the office of the paper for which he
worked in time, and some one went to see what the man of genius was
doing. He was found in bed, but he was equal to the occasion. Snatching
a sheet of paper and a pencil he drew a curve. "There," said he, "is the
triumphal arch, and here"--scribbling a number of scratches like
eccentric comets--"here are the fireworks." Mr. Browne's drawings
occasionally showed a tendency to approach the rudimentary sort of
"pictograph" rather than give what a dramatic critic calls "a solid and
studied rendering" of events. But many of Mr. Browne's illustrations of
Dickens are immortal. They are closely bound up with our earliest and
latest recollections of the work of the "incomparable Boz." Mr.
Pickwick, we believe, was not wholly due to the fancy of Mr. Browne, but
of the unfortunate Seymour, whom death prevented from continuing the
series. Every one has heard how Mr. Thackeray, then an unknown man,
wished to illustrate one of Mr. Dickens's early stories, and brought Mr.
Dickens examples of his skill. Fortunately, his offer was not accepted.
Mr. Thackeray's pencil was the proper ally of his pen. He saw and drew