drawings which came into the market after exhibition. Nothing can be
more seductive than a Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately tinted in
sky-blue, _rose-Du Barry_, and apple-green (the _vert-pomme_ dear--as
Gautier says--to the soft moderns)--a treatment which lends them a
subdued but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a pedigree,
and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm of the phrase-maker who
described their inventor as the "Charles Lamb of illustration."

From the above enumeration certain omissions have of necessity been
made. Besides the books mentioned, Mr. Thomson has contrived to prepare
for newspapers and magazines many closely-studied sketches of
contemporary manners. Some of the best of his work in this way is to be
found in the late Mrs. E.T. Cook's _Highways and Byways of London Life_,
1902. For the _Highways and Byways_ series, he has also illustrated,
wholly or in part, volumes on Ireland, North Wales, Devon, Cornwall and
Yorkshire. The last volume, Kent, 1907, is entirely decorated by
himself. In this instance, his drawings throughout are in pencil, and he
is his own topographer. It is a remarkable departure, both in manner and
theme, though Mr. Thomson's liking for landscape has always been
pronounced. "I would desire above all things," he told an interviewer,
"to pass my time in painting landscape. Landscape pictures always
attract me, and the grand examples, Gainsboroughs, Claudes, Cromes, and
Turners, to be seen any day in our National Gallery, are a source of
never-failing yearning and delight." The original drawings for the Kent
book are of great beauty; and singularly dexterous in the varied methods
by which the effect is produced. The artist is now at work on the county
of Surrey. It is earnest of his versatility that, in 1904, he
illustrated for Messrs. Wells, Darton and Co., with conspicuous success,
a modernised prose version of certain of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_,
as well as _Tales from Maria Edgeworth_, 1903; and he also executed, in