II. MR HUGH THOMSON

In virtue of certain gentle and caressing qualities of style, Douglas
Jerrold conferred on one of his contributors--Miss Eliza Meteyard--the
pseudonym of "Silverpen." It is in the silver-pensive key that one would
wish to write of Mr. HUGH THOMSON. There is nothing in his work of
elemental strife,--of social problem,--of passion torn to tatters. He
leads you by no _terribile via_,--over no "burning Marle." You cannot
conceive him as the illustrator of _Paradise Lost_, of Dante's
_Inferno_--even of Dore's _Wandering Jew_. But when, after turning over
some dozens of his designs, you take stock of your impressions, you
discover that your memory is packed with pleasant fancies. You have been
among "blown fields" and "flowerful closes"; you have passed quaint
roadside-inns and picturesque cottages; you are familiar with the
cheery, ever-changing idyll of the highway and the bustle of animal
life; with horses that really gallop, and dogs that really bark; with
charming male and female figures in the most attractive old-world
attire; with happy laughter and artless waggeries; with a hundred
intimate details of English domesticity that are pushed just far enough
back to lose the hardness of their outline in a softening haze of
retrospect. There has been nothing more tragic in your travels than a
sprained ankle or an interrupted affair of honour; nothing more
blood-curdling than a dream of a dragoon officer knocked out of his
saddle by a brickbat. Your flesh has never been made to creep: but the
cockles of your heart have been warmed. Mechanically, you raise your
hand to lift away your optimistic spectacles. But they are not there.
The optimism is in the pictures.

It must be more than a quarter of a century since Mr. Hugh Thomson,
arriving from Coleraine in all the ardour of one-and-twenty, invaded the