d 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_[125] 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 drawing to which HB was a
stranger; and further, that by reason of the absence of such knowledge
and practice, he falls far behind Hogarth, Gillray, Bunbury, Rowlandson,
or the Cruikshanks. With these artists indeed, as we have endeavoured to
show, John Doyle has nothing in common, and he evidently designed that
no comparison should ever be instituted between any one of them and
himself. His chief merits are to be found in the facility with which he
grasped an idea; the harmlessness and playfulness of his satire, which
wrought a complete revolution in the style and manner of caricaturists;
and above all in the excellence of his likenesses. The best and most
graceful of the series was produced just after the wedding of he