ill health and solitude; cheered by his constant trust in the love
and sympathy of those who knew him best, however far away,--such
was the life of Edward Lear.

--_The London Saturday Review,_ Feb. 4, 1888.

Among the writers who have striven with varying success during the last
thirty or forty years to awaken the merriment of the "rising generation" of
the time being, Mr. Edward Lear occupies the first place in seniority, if
not in merit. The parent of modern nonsense-writers, he is distinguished
from all his followers and imitators by the superior consistency with which
he has adhered to his aim,--that of amusing his readers by fantastic
absurdities, as void of vulgarity or cynicism as they are incapable of
being made to harbor any symbolical meaning. He "never deviates into
sense;" but those who appreciate him never feel the need of such deviation.
He has a genius for coining absurd names and words, which, even when they
are suggested by the exigencies of his metre, have a ludicrous
appropriateness to the matter in hand. His verse is, with the exception of
a certain number of cockney rhymes, wonderfully flowing and even
melodious--or, as he would say, _meloobious_--while to all these
qualifications for his task must finally be added the happy gift of
pictorial expression, enabling him to double, nay, often to quadruple, the
laughable effect of his text by an inexhaustible profusion of the quaintest
designs. Generally speaking, these designs are, as it were, an idealization
of the efforts of a clever child; but now and then--as in the case of the
nonsense-botany--Mr. Lear reminds us what a genuine and graceful artist he
really is. The advantage to a humorist of being able to illustrate his own
text has been shown in the case of Thackeray and Mr. W.S. Gilbert, to
mention two familiar examples; but in no other instance of such a
combination have we discovered such geniality as is to be found in the
nonsense-pictures of Mr. Lear. We have spoken above of the melodiousness of
Mr. Lear's verses, a quality which renders them excellently suitable for
musical setting, and which has not escaped the notice of the author
himself. We have also heard effective arrangements, presumably by other
composers, of the adventures of the Table and the Chair, and of the cruise
of the Owl and the Pussy-cat,--the latter introduced into the "drawing-room
entertainment" of one of the followers of John Parry. Indeed, in these days