ohn Tenniel was only sixteen years old when his first oil picture was
exhibited at the Suffolk Street Galleries, and he soon became
recognised, not only as a painter, but as a book and magazine
illustrator of unusual skill. But he and Keene had already proclaimed
themselves the humorists they were by the production of the "Book of
Beauty," to which much public attention was drawn when the sketches
contained in it were exhibited and sold. They had been fellow-students
at the life class, and in the year 1844 were both intimate visitors at
the house of their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Barrett. After dinner, when the
lamp was brought in, the two young artists would amuse themselves,
together with their host, by making drawings in coloured chalks. Mr.
Barrett, it may be said, was a thin man, signing himself "5-12ths," in
recognition of the nobler proportions of Mrs. Barrett, unquestionably
his "better half." Keene chose the "Signs of the Zodiac," to begin with,
as the subject of his admirable burlesques, Tenniel having already
selected quotations from Shakespeare, history, poetry, and so forth, the
humour which he infused into them being equal to anything he afterwards
produced in _Punch_. But it may interest the present owners of these
highly-prized productions to know that those who produced them thought
very little of them as art, while Sir John expressed the greatest
surprise that in their rubbed condition they should attract any notice
whatever. As early proofs, however, of the comic faculty of two of
_Punch's_ giants, they were interesting and valuable designs; while, so
far as Sir John's work was concerned, they were the forerunners of the
extremely humorous illustrations of Shakespearian quotations with which
he advanced his reputation and his position on the paper.

No sooner had the severe young classicist determined to accept the
position offered him in _Punch's_ band, than Mr. Swain was requested to
wait upon him in Newman Street, and instruct him in the art of drawing
upon wood. But he found that Tenniel, the illustrator of the Rev. Thomas
James's edition of AEsop's Fables, published by John Murray in 1848, was
already a brilliant expert. The accomplished young draughtsman soon took
keen delight in the smooth face of a block, and at once began--and
ever continued--to demand a degree of smoothness that was the
despair of Swain to procure. Tenniel, indeed, always drew with a
specially-manufactured six-H pencil--which ap