to and including the seventh volume; and
(some time afterwards) its able opponent "The Man in the Moon" (now
exceedingly scarce).[177] In these and very many other works we find him
associated not only with George Cruikshank, John Leech, Hablot Knight
Browne, and Richard Doyle, but with artists occupying the position of
Sir John Gilbert, Frank Stone, Maclise, Clarkson Stanfield, Creswick, E.
M. Ward, Elmore, Frost, Sir J. Noel Paton, Frederick Goodall, Thomas
Landseer, F. W. Popham, Fairholt, Harrison Weir, Redgrave, Corbould, and
Stephanoff. He was a thoroughly useful man; and a thousand examples of
quaint imaginings--oftentimes of graceful workmanship--might be culled
from the various works and serials in which his hand may be readily
recognised.

But the merits of Kenny Meadows as an illustrator of books are very
unequal. His friend, Mr. Hodder, who gives us in his pleasant "Memories"
an occasional note of some of the artists with whom he was thrown in
contact, says of him: "The quiet, unostentatious way in which he worked
at his art, too often under the most adverse and discouraging
circumstances, and the pride which he displayed when he felt he had made
a 'happy hit,' was somewhat like the enthusiasm of a youth who had first
attained the honour of a prize. As a draughtsman he never cared to be
guided by those practical laws which regulate the academic exercise of
the pictorial art; for he contended that too strict an adherence to
nature only trammelled him, and he preferred relying upon the thought
conveyed in his illustrations, rather than upon the mechanical
correctness of his outline or perspective." George Cruikshank showed, as
we know, a tolerable contempt for nature when he undertook the
delineation of a horse, a woman, or a tree; but it was one of the
conditions of his _genius_ that it should be left free and untrammelled
to follow the dictates of its own inspiration, and the quaint effect
which somehow or other he managed to impart to a design which, in its
details might offend the educated taste of the art critic, made us
forget the contempt too often displayed for those "practical laws" to
which Mr. Hodder refers. To constitute a good comic artist, not only is
it necessary that he should be a good draughtsman, but certain special
gifts are indispensable,--a keen sense of the ridiculous, an inherent
appreciation of humour, a quick and ready invention, qualities which no
amount of artificial training will b