Chairs and tables minister to our physical comforts, and we cannot do without them.  But pictures have not this practical hold upon us; the sense to which they appeal is not always on the alert; yet there they are hanging on the wall, morning, noon, and night, unchanged, unchangeable—­the same arrested movement—­the same expression of face—­the same seas and trees and moors and forests and rivers and mountains—­the very waves are as eternal as the hills!

Music will leave off when it is not wanted—­at least it ought to!  The book is shut, the newspaper thrown aside.  Not so the beautiful picture; it is like a perennial nosegay, for ever exhaling its perfume for noses that have long ceased to smell it!

But little pictures in black and white, of little every-day people like ourselves, by some great little artist who knows life well and has the means at his command to express his knowledge in this easy, simple manner, can be taken up and thrown down like the book or newspaper.  They are even easier to read and understand.  They are within the reach of the meanest capacity, the humblest education, the most slender purse.  They come to us weekly, let us say, in cheap periodicals.  They are preserved and bound up in volumes, to be taken down and looked at when so disposed.  The child grows to love them before he knows how to read; fifty years hence he will love them still, if only for the pleasure they gave him as a child.  He will soon know them by heart, and yet go to them again and again; and if they are good, he will always find new beauties and added interest as he himself grows in taste and culture; and how much of that taste and culture he will owe to them, who can say?

Nothing sticks so well in the young mind as a little picture one can hold close to the eyes like a book—­not even a song or poem—­for in the case of most young people the memory of the eye is better than that of the ear—­its power of assimilating more rapid and more keen.  And then there is the immense variety, the number!

[Illustration:  “READING WITHOUT TEARS”

TEACHER.  “And what comes after S, Jack?”

PUPIL.  “T!”

TEACHER.  “And what Comes after T?”

PUPIL.  “For all that we have Received,” &c., &c.—­Punch, February 17, 1869.]

Our pictorial satirist taking the greatest pains, doing his very best, can produce, say, a hundred of these little pictures in a twelvemonth, while his elder brother of the brush bestows an equal labour and an equal time on one important canvas, which will take another twelvemonth to engrave, perhaps, for the benefit of those fortunate enough to be able to afford the costly engraving of that one priceless work of art, which only one millionaire can possess at a time.  Happy millionaire! happy painter—­just as likely as not to become a millionaire himself!  And this elder brother of the brush will be the first to acknowledge his little brother’s greatness—­if the little brother’s work be well done.  You should hear how the first painters of our time, here and abroad, express themselves about Charles Keene!  They do not speak of him as a little brother, I tell you, but a very big brother indeed.