hackeray himself,--then
tells us of the secession of himself from the board of brethren.
"Another member of Mr. Punch's cabinet, the biographer of _Jeames_, the
author of _The Snob Papers_, resigned his functions, on account of Mr.
Punch's assaults upon the present Emperor of the French nation, whose
anger Jeames thought it was unpatriotic to arouse." How hard it must be
for Cabinets to agree! This man or that is sure to have some pet
conviction of his own, and the better the man the stronger the
conviction! Then the reviewer went on in favour of the artist of whom he
was specially speaking, making a comparison which must at the time have
been odious enough to some of the brethren. "There can be no blinking
the fact that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet John Leech is the right-hand man.
Fancy a number of _Punch_ without Leech's pictures! What would you give
for it?" Then he breaks out into strong admiration of that one
friend,--perhaps with a little disregard as to the feelings of other
friends.[3] This _Critical Review_, if it may properly be so called,--at
any rate it is so named as now published,--is to be found in our
author's collected works, in the same volume with _Catherine_. It is
there preceded by another, from _The Westminster Review_, written
fourteen years earlier, on _The Genius of Cruikshank_. This contains a
descriptive catalogue of Cruikshank's works up to that period, and is
interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that
these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,--and in both
he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being,
in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in power to
either of them.

We now come to a phase of Thackeray's life in which he achieved a
remarkable success, attributable rather to his fame as a writer than to
any particular excellence in the art which he then exercised. He took
upon himself the functions of a lecturer, being moved to do so by a hope
that he might thus provide a sum of money for the future sustenance of
his children. No doubt he had been advised to this course, though I do
not know from whom specially the advice may have come. Dickens had
already considered the subject, but had not yet consented to read in
public for money on his own account. John Forster, writing of the year
1846, says of Dickens and the then only thought-of exercise of a new
profession; "I continued to oppose, for reasons to be sta