satirized or the scenes in which they figure likely to interest the general reader. Thackeray said of them at the time they were appearing, "You never hear any laughing at HB, his pictures are a great deal too genteel for that,—polite points of wit which strike one as exceedingly clever and pretty, and cause one to smile in a quiet, gentlemanlike kind of way." Forty-two years have elapsed since this was written;—the sketches fail now almost to provoke the "gentlemanlike kind" of smile mentioned by the humourist, for the events and the persons which caused it and to which they relate have alike passed away out of sight and out of memory.
Faults of the "Sketches."The number which they attained is due no doubt in a large measure to the facility with which they were produced. They were all drawn on stone, and exhibit the faults so often to be found in the productions of artists who confine themselves to this material, which, owing to the comparative facility of the process, has a tendency to induce a slovenliness in execution unusual with artists accustomed to the careful discipline under which a successful etching on steel or copper can alone be produced. A writer in Blackwood[1] says with much truth that HB "would have been a greater artist had he worked on the same material and with the same tools as Gillray and Cruikshank, but we should probably not have possessed so complete a gallery of portraits, comprising all the men of note who took part in political affairs from before the passing of the Catholic Relief Bill until after the repeal of the Corn Laws, a period more eventful than any of a similar length since the Revolution of 1688." John Doyle, too, had no great powers of sarcasm, and he was timid in design, contenting himself with as few figures as were possible for the purposes of his drawings. Robert William Buss, himself a comic artist of ability, in his brief notice of him charges him with a certain feebleness in the attitude of the persons who figure in his sketches, and gives us to understand that to balance a figure properly requires a knowledge and practice in
- ↑ Vol. xciv., August, 1863.
