drollery, little Browne's adventure at
Verona is sufficiently possible to remind one of personal vicissitudes
encountered off the track or on the frontiers, which might almost match
the experiences of this personally uninteresting little sketcher.

[Illustration:
RICHARD DOYLE. "_Brown, Jones & Robinson_," 1855.

Robinson (_solo_): "I stood in Venice--," etc. Jones and Brown, having
heard something like it before, have walked on a little way.

_Face p. 392._]

Besides _Punch_, Mr. Doyle's hand will be found in the following:--"The
Fairy Ring," Leigh Hunt's "Jar of Honey," Professor Ruskin's "King of
the Golden River," Montalba's "Fairy Tales from all Nations," "Jack and
the Giants," "The Cornhill Magazine," "Pictures from the Elf World,"
"The Bon Gaultier Ballads," Thackeray's "Rebecca and Rowena," Charles
Dickens's "Battle of Life," "The Family Joe Miller," Mr. Tom Hughes'
"Scouring of the White Horse," "Pictures of Extra Articles and Visitors
to the Exhibition," Laurence Oliphant's "Piccadilly," "Puck on Pegasus,"
PLanche's "Old Fairy Tales," A Beckett's "Almanack of the Month,"
"London Society," and Mr. Thackeray's "Newcomes." Writing of this last,
Mr. Hamerton says, "I never regretted the hard necessity which forbids
an art critic to shut his eyes to artistic shortcomings more heartily
than I do now in speaking of Richard Doyle. Considered as commentaries
on human character, his etchings are so full of wit and intelligence, so
bright with playful satire and manly relish of life, that I scarcely
know how to write sentences with a touch at once light enough and keen
enough to describe them";[190] and then the critic goes on to expose the
glaring faults which characterize Mr. Doyle's performances from a purely
artistic point of view, his feeble attempts of light, his undeveloped
"sense of the nature of material," and his absence of imitative study.
It is somewhat singular that whilst Mr. Hamerton is silent on the
subject of the book etchings of Leech and Phiz, he should have selected
for criticism those of Doyle, who never intended to claim for these
sketches the dignity of _etchings_. The critic, however, is not only
just, but remarkably fair. With reference to the illustrations to the
"Newcomes," he acknowledges "their all but inestimable dramatic value."
"Illustrations to imaginative literature," he continues, "are too
frequently an intrusion and an impertinence, but these really added to
our enjoyment o