round of seaside scenes perhaps more than any other
watering-place. Du Maurier nearly always drew upon it for seaside
pictures and the humour of the summer holidays. He formed his first
acquaintance with it in illustrating _Sylvia's Lovers_. The scene of
that tale is Whitby under another name. Thus he started his connection
with the town in circumstances that seemed to him to give it a glamour.
Not only did he confess an immense liking for Mrs. Gaskell's novel, but,
as we have seen, he scored in the illustration of it the first of his
great successes with the general public. The gift of illustration, after
all, is a very rare one. Nothing is to be understood more easily than
the value the public began to put upon du Maurier's gift. In a response
of that sort the public display true discrimination. The ascendency of
du Maurier as a _Punch_ artist was more than anything due to the fact
that for his work in that paper he drew upon the sentiment of family
life from the resources of his own experience. And nothing that we
could write here would so entirely reveal the happy character of his own
family life as the reigning atmosphere of the "seaside" and "nursery"
pictures which he contributed to _Punch_.

[Illustration]

Section 7

Many people remembering du Maurier's satires entertained a little fear
of him in Society, and of what he might be thinking about them. An
instance of this was shown on one occasion when he was dining alone with
Sir John Millais at the latter's splendid residence. "I suppose," said
Millais, waving his hand in the direction of the disappearing flunkeys
after dinner, "you think all this very _Sir Gorgius Midas-y_? To me it
is merely respectable." As a matter of fact there is everything to show
that du Maurier entertained the same sort of notions of "respectability"
as his host, though he did things on a less magnificent scale. By
temperament he was not quite a Bohemian, although he was convivial. It
was the convivial side of the weekly _Punch_ dinner that appealed to
him. He abstained from these meetings, or came in late, when a tendency
prevailed to make them too much, as he thought, the pretext of business.
He was regarded as singular in ordering an immense cup of tea to be put
before him immediately after dinner. He sat over his cup of tea with a
bent back, always with a cigarette, fuming whilst the business part
of the proceedings went forward. When that was over he entered into his
own, rega