[Illustration:  GEORGE DU MAURIER

From an unpublished photograph by Fradelle and Young, London.]

And now, in fulfilment of my contract, I must speak of myself—­a difficult and not very grateful task.  One’s self is a person about whom one knows too much and too little—­about whom we can never hit a happy medium.  Sometimes one rates one’s self too high, sometimes (but less frequently) too low, according to the state of our digestion, our spirits, our pocket, or even the weather!

In the present instance I will say all the good of myself I can decently, and leave all the rating to you.  It is inevitable, however unfortunate it may be for me, that I should be compared with my two great predecessors, Leech and Keene, whom I have just been comparing to each other.

When John Leech’s mantle fell from his shoulders it was found that the garment was ample to clothe the nakedness of more than one successor.

John Tenniel had already, it is true, replaced him for several years as the political cartoonist of Punch.  How admirably he has always filled that post, then and ever since, and how great his fame is, I need not speak of here.  Linley Sambourne and Harry Furniss, so different from each other and from Tenniel, have also, since then, brought their great originality and their unrivalled skill to the political illustrations of Punch—­Sambourne to the illustration of many other things in it besides, but which do not strictly belong to the present subject.

I am here concerned with the social illustrators alone, and, besides, only with those who have made the sketches of social subjects in Punch the principal business of their lives.  For very many artists, from Sir John Millais, Sir John Gilbert, Frederick Walker, and Randolph Caldecott downward, have contributed to that fortunate periodical at one time or another, and not a few distinguished amateurs.

Miss Georgina Bowers, Mr. Corbould, and others have continued the fox-hunting tradition, and provided those scenes which have become a necessity to the sporting readers of Punch.

To Charles Keene was fairly left that part of the succession that was most to his taste—­the treatment of life in the street and the open country, in the shops and parlours of the lower middle class, and the homes of the people.

And to me were allotted the social and domestic dramas, the nursery, the school-room, the dining and drawing rooms, and croquet-lawns of the more or less well-to-do.

I was particularly told not to try to be broadly funny, but to undertake the light and graceful business, like a jeune premier.  I was, in short, to be the tenor, or rather the tenorino, of that little company for which Mr. Punch beats time with his immortal baton, and to warble in black and white such melodies as I could evolve from my contemplations of the gentler aspect of English life, while Keene, with his magnificent, highly trained basso, sang the comic songs.