s a marriage portion for his daughter.
But when Jerrold's fiat went forth, "We don't want Rubens on _Punch_"
young Gilbert turned his attention to the newly-started "Illustrated
London News," on which his services were warmly welcomed and
continuously employed, with such brilliant results to itself and to the
black-and-white art in England. I was one day conversing with a
distinguished foreign artist on the comparative merits of Gilbert and
Dore, whose fecundity in their art was equal, and I ventured to assert
the great artistic superiority of Gilbert. "You are right!" cried my
enthusiastic friend, with more judgment of art than accuracy of English
idiom; "Gilbert cocks Dore into a top-hat!"

Not for twenty-one years did he reappear in the pages of the London
Charivari, until after an interval in which he built up his reputation
as the greatest draughtsman on wood that England, and perhaps any
country, has produced. Then he contributed the first illustration, in an
admirable spirit of caricature, to Mr. Burnand's "Mokeanna," and then
again, after another nineteen years, he made a full-page drawing for
the Almanac of 1882, representing the unhappy plight of a knight who,
summoned hastily to the wars, cannot induce his new suit of armour to
come together over his fattened frame, even with the combined assistance
of female relations and muscular retainers.

[Illustration: HABLOT K. BROWNE.]

In this same year of 1842 Hablot Knight Browne, overcoming his former
reluctance, began to draw for the paper. He drew its second wrapper
(_see_ p. 42)--an enormous improvement on Henning's--as well as some
beautiful little comic cuts exquisitely engraved (used to illustrate "A
Shillingsworth of Nonsense"), and a couple of "Punch's Valentines." In
one of these--the Lawyer--the original of Mr. Squeers may be seen in the
character of an orthodox pettifogging attorney perched upon a stool. But
_Punch_ could not support such twin stars as Leech and "Phiz," and the
latter left in 1844 for "The Great Gun," whose leading draughtsman he
became. In the pages of "The Great Gun" he illustrated Maxwell's
"Memoirs of a London Latch-key;" and then, in 1850, he drew for "Life,
the Mirror of the Million." In the _Punch_ volumes for 1842, 1844, and
1852, his hand may be traced; and again in 1861, after his great
illness, he turned once more to _Punch_. The brave worker, who would not
admit his stroke of paralysis, but called it rheumatism, could stil