s of art don't satisfy me, and, as I write, I see
before me something very different from the latest photograph by Messrs.
Paul and Reynard.

I see a large-featured, broad-browed English face, a trifle
heavy-looking when in repose, yet a thorough, honest, manly face, with
a complexion neither dark nor fair, with brown hair and moustache, and
with light hazel eyes that look out on the world quietly enough. You
might talk to him for long in an ordinary way and never suspect that he
was a genius; but when you have him to yourself, when some consciousness
of sympathy rouses him, he all at once becomes a different being. His
quiet eyes kindle, his face becomes full of life--you wonder that you
ever thought it heavy or commonplace. Then the world interrupts in some
way, and, just as a hermit-crab draws down its shell with a comically
rapid movement, so Derrick suddenly retires into himself.

Thus much for his outer man.

For the rest, there are of course the neat little accounts of his
birthplace, his parentage, his education, etc., etc., published with the
list of his works in due order, with the engravings in the illustrated
papers. But these tell us little of the real life of the man.

Carlyle, in one of his finest passages, says that 'A true delineation of
the smallest man and his scene of pilgrimage through life is capable of
interesting the greatest men; that all men are to an unspeakable degree
brothers, each man's life a strange emblem of every man's; and that
human portraits faithfully drawn are of all pictures the welcomest on
human walls.' And though I don't profess to give a portrait, but merely
a sketch, I will endeavour to sketch faithfully, and possibly in the
future my work may fall into the hands of some of those worthy people
who imagine that my friend leapt into fame at a bound, or of those
comfortable mortals who seem to think that a novel is turned out as
easily as water from a tap.

There is, however, one thing I can never do:--I am quite unable to
put into words my friend's intensely strong feeling with regard to the
sacredness of his profession. It seemed to me not unlike the feeling
of Isaiah when, in the vision, his mouth had been touched with the
celestial fire. And I can only hope that something of this may be read
between my very inadequate lines.

Looking back, I fancy Derrick must have been a clever child. But he was
not precocious, and in some respects was even decidedly backward. I can