Thackeray, for me, and many others, the greatest novelist, satirist, humorist of our time, where so many have been great, is said to have at the beginning of his career wished to illustrate the books of others—­Charles Dickens’s, I believe, for one.  Fortunately, perhaps, for us and for him, and perhaps for Dickens, he did not succeed; he lived to write books of his own, and to illustrate them himself; and it is generally admitted that his illustrations, clever as they are, were not up to the mark of his writings.

It was not his natural mode of expression—­and I doubt if any amount of training and study would have made it a successful mode:  the love of the thing does not necessarily carry the power to do it.  That he loved it he has shown us in many ways, and also that he was always practising it.  Most of my hearers will remember his beautiful ballad of “The Pen and the Album”—­

      “I am my master’s faithful old gold pen. 
      I’ve served him three long years, and drawn since then
      Thousands of funny women and droll men ...”

[Illustration:  THE HEIGHT OF IMPROPRIETY

MISS GRUNDISON, JUNIOR.  “There goes Lucy Holyroyd, all alone in a Boat with young Snipson as usual.  So impudent of them!”

HER ELDER SISTER.  “Yes; how shocking if they were Upset and Drowned—­ without a Chaperon, you know!”—­Punch, August 8, 1891.]

Now conceive—­it is not an impossible conception—­that the marvellous gift of expression that he was to possess in words had been changed by some fairy at his birth into an equal gift of expression by means of the pencil, and that he had cultivated the gift as assiduously as he cultivated the other, and finally that he had exercised it as sedulously through life, bestowing on innumerable little pictures in black and white all the wit and wisdom, the wide culture, the deep knowledge of the world and of the human heart, all the satire, the tenderness, the drollery, and last, but not least, that incomparable perfection of style that we find in all or most that he has written—­what a pictorial record that would be!

Think of it—­a collection of little wood-cuts or etchings, with each its appropriate legend—­a series of small pictures equal in volume and in value to the whole of Thackeray’s literary work!  Think of the laughter and the tears from old and young, rich and poor, and from the thousands who have not the intelligence or the culture to appreciate great books, or lack time or inclination to read them.

All there was in the heart and mind of Thackeray, expressed through a medium so simple and direct that even a child could be made to feel it, or a chimney-sweep!  For where need we draw the line?  We are only pretending.

Now I am quite content with Thackeray as he is—­a writer of books, whose loss to literature could not be compensated by any gain to the gentle art of drawing little figures in black and white—­“thousands of funny women and droll men.”  All I wish to point out—­in these days when drawing is pressed into the service of daily journalism, and with such success that there will soon be as many journalists with the pencil as with the pen—­is this, that the career of the future social pictorial satirist is full of splendid possibilities undreamed-of yet.