orgina Bowers--Mr.
Walter Crane.

[Illustration: GEORGE DU MAURIER.

(_From a Photograph by W. and D. Downey._)]

When, in 1860, Mr. George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier contributed
his first drawing to _Punch_, he had little suspicion that he would be
counted, together with John Leech, John Tenniel, and Charles Keene, as
one of the four great pillars on which would rest the artistic
reputation of the paper. In that first drawing, himself and two of his
friends were represented entering the "studio" of a photographer,
smoking, as the manner of artists is; and they are coldly requested by
the deity of the place to leave their tobacco outside, as "they are in
an artist's studio" (p. 150, Vol. XXXIX.). It was a poor sketch enough,
showing some straining after comicality, and lacking every trace of the
grace and beauty the draughtsman was so soon to develop. He was Parisian
born, and after studying with a view to a scientific career, he became
convinced, through Dr. Williamson's amiable assurance that he would make
a "shocking bad chemist," that art and not science was his
destiny--more especially as his professors had been delighted with such
little caricatures of his as they had seen; but, as Mr. du Maurier
suggestively put it in his lecture on "Social Pictorial Satire," "they
had not seen them _all_." He studied art at Antwerp and Paris in company
with several notabilities of the day; but when, through an accident in
the laboratory, he lost the sight of one eye, and found the other
seriously imperilled, his chances of success in life seemed small. It
was when lying, during his long illness, in the Antwerp Hospital, in
1858, that he first saw "Punch's Almanac"--a delight which he never
forgot. When he recovered his ordinary health, he returned to England,
though with little improvement of sight to cheer him. With a courage,
however, equal to that of Sir John Tenniel, he girded himself against
fate; he worked hard in London, where he lived in humble lodgings at 85,
Newman Street, which he shared with his life-long friend, the late
Lionel Henley, afterwards R.B.A.--"the dearest fellow that ever was." He
sometimes wondered, he has told me, if he would eat a dinner that day;
and as becomes the impecunious, he was a tremendous democrat. He "hated
the bloated aristocracy, without knowing much about it; and, to do it
justice, the bloated aristocracy did not go out of its way to pester him
with its attentions." But i