fancy is here much less striking than sureness of touch, outlined
figures drawn between the age of five and ten displaying remarkable
precision and point, each line of the silhouette telling. At six he
celebrated his first school prize with an illustrated letter, two
portraits and a mannikin surmounting the text.

[Footnote: See his life by Blanch Roosevelt, Sampson Low & Co. 1885;
also the French translation of the same, 1886.]

His groups of peasants and portraits, made three or four years later,
possess almost a Rembrandt strength, unfortunately passion for the
grotesque and the fanciful often lending a touch of caricature.
Downright ugliness must have had an especial charm for the future
illustrator of the _Inferno_, his unconscious models sketched by the
way being uncomely as the immortal Pickwick and his fellows of Phiz. A
devotee of Gothic art, he reproduced the mediaeval monstrosities adorning
cornice and pinnacle in human types. Equally devoted to nature out of
doors, the same taste predominated. What he loved and sought was ever
the savage, the legend-haunted, the ghoulish, seats and ambuscades of
kelpie, hobgoblin, brownie and their kind.

[Illustration: SKETCH BY GUSTAVE DORE, AETAT EIGHT YEARS]

From the nursery upwards, if the term can be applied to French children,
his life was a succession of artistic abnormalities and _tours de
force_. The bantling in petticoats who could astound his elders with
wonderfully accurate silhouettes, continued to surprise them in other
ways. His memory was no less amazing than his draughtsmanship. When
seven years of age, he was taken to the opera and witnessed _Robert le
Diable_. On returning home he accurately narrated every scene.