of amusing cuts of the punning order, after
Seymour's designs. After the quarrel with A Beckett, the artist withdrew
his assistance from its pages, and the illustrations show a fearful
falling off after 1833. Many of the wretched designs which follow bear
the signature of "Dank," and so destitute are they of merit that the
"embellishments" (as they are termed) for 1834, are altogether below
criticism.

At the opening of the present chapter we said that Robert Seymour was
_almost_ a genius. Genius, however, he never absolutely touched; he was
destitute of the inventive faculties which distinguished John Leech, and
lacked the vivid imagination which enabled George Cruikshank to realize
any idea which occurred to him, whether comical, grave, realistic, or
terrible. His talents as an artist, though undoubtedly great, ran in a
narrow groove, and their bent is shown by the well-known "Humorous
Sketches," and the less known but far more admirable designs which he
executed for the "Comic Magazine." He always had a fancy for depicting
and satirizing cockneys and cockney subjects, and had conceived the by
no means new or ambitious idea of producing a series of such pictures
with an appropriate letterpress to be furnished by a literary coadjutor,
whose work, however, was to be subservient to his own. The idea was not
perhaps a very definite one, but the pictorial part of the work was
commenced, and four plates actually etched at the time the artist was
retained to execute the illustrations to the "Book of Christmas." Out
of this undeveloped idea, and out of the four apparently unimportant
drawings to which we have alluded, was destined to evolve the strange
and melancholy story which will be associated for all time with the
mirth-inspiring novel of the "Pickwick Papers."

ORIGIN OF "PICKWICK."

The difficulty at the outset was to find an author to carry out the
artist's idea, indefinite as it was. In this direction there was in
1836, a very _embarras de richesses_, for, if comic artists were few,
there was on the other hand no lack of humourists of the highest order
of merit. Theodore Hook, Clark (the author of "Three Courses and a
Dessert")--probably many others were suggested by the publishers who
were taken into consultation by Seymour; but all were rejected. He
himself seems to have inclined towards Mayhew, with whom it will be
recollected he was associated at this time on "Figaro in London." The
man of all others most