lar results will reward a more extended
search.

Thackeray's own opinion of his powers as a draughtsman is not easy to
determine. We know, of course, from his own lips, his (? affected)
surprise at Dickens not finding his art good enough to illustrate
"Pickwick" _vice_ Seymour, deceased. But in the interval between this
application in 1836 and his later work he probably came to a more
critical estimate of the real value of his draughtsmanship--that work
which had been so laboriously and earnestly evolved from his studies in
the Louvre and elsewhere. When Vizetelly was engraving Thackeray's
designs to "Mrs. Perkin's Ball," which on account of their
unsophisticated artistic character, were re-touched by a clever young
draughtsman, the artist wrote that there was a "je ne sais quoi" in his
"vile drawing" which was worth retaining. "Somehow," he said, "I prefer
my Nuremberg dolls to Mr. Thwaites's superfine wax models." After Edmund
Yates had started that brilliant little journal or magazine, which was
not destined, however, to live as long as it deserved, Thackeray wrote
to him: "You have a new artist on 'The Train,' I see, my dear Yates. I
have been looking at his work, and I have solved a problem. I find there
_is_ a man alive who draws worse than myself!" Yet he continued to draw
for _Punch_ with zeal; but when an acquaintance told him, probably in
all sincerity, "but you _can_ draw," Thackeray brusquely put down the
compliment to the toadyism of a "snob." Trollope declares that Thackeray
"never learned to draw--perhaps, never could have learned;" but he did
not see that in the art of illustration, especially of a humorous
character, there is something more important than academic correctness
and technical mastery. He moved his pencil slowly, with a deliberate
broad touch, without haste, and with no more attempt at refinement than
was natural to him. Yet his hand was capable of astonishing delicacy of
touch; and I have seen the Lord's Prayer written by him one day at the
_Punch_ Table, within the space of a threepenny-piece, which is a marvel
of legibility. There is a character about Thackeray's work--his "je ne
sais quoi"--that makes us forgive him his glaring faults--indeed, we
almost come to love him for them--when once we have frankly recognised
that it was in great measure his facility in drawing that was his
artistic ruin. There is always something of the caricaturist in his most
serious and important sketches--mo