TRAIT OF SIR A. GUINNESS (NOW LORD IVEAGH) IN CENTRE.]

Early in my teens, however, I was invited to join the Life School of the
Hibernian Academy, as there happened to be a paucity of students at that
institution, and in order to secure the Government grant it was
necessary to bring them up to the required number. But here also there
was no idea of proper teaching. Some fossilised member of the Academy
would stand about roasting his toes over the stove. A recollection of a
fair specimen of the body still haunts me. He used to roll round the
easels, and you became conscious of his approaching presence by an
aroma of onions. I believe he was a landscape painter, and saw no more
beauty in the female form divine than in a haystack. It was his custom
to take up a huge piece of charcoal and come down upon one of your
delicately drawn pencil lines of a figure with a terrible stroke about
an inch wide.

"There, me boy," he would exclaim, "that's what it wants," and walk on,
leaving you in doubt upon which side of the line you had drawn he
intended his alteration to come.

I soon decided to have my own models and study for myself, and this
practice I have maintained to the present day. I really don't know what
Mrs. Grundy would have said if she had known that at this early age I
was drawing Venuses from the life, instead of tinting the illustrations
to "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's Travels" in my playroom at home.

Few imagine that a caricaturist requires models to draw from. Although I
will not further digress at this point, I may perhaps be pardoned if I
return later on in this book to the explanation of my _modus
operandi_--a subject which, if I may judge from the number of letters I
receive about it, is likely to prove of interest to a large number of my
readers.

It was when I was still quite a boy that my first great chance came.
Being in Dublin, I was asked one day by my friend the late Mr. A. M.
Sullivan to make some illustrations for a paper called _Zozimus_, of
which he was the editor and founder. As a matter of fact, _Zozimus_ was
the Irish _Punch_. Mr. Sullivan, who was a Nationalist, and a man of
exceptional energy and ability, began life as an artist. He came to
Dublin, I was told, as a very young man, and began to paint; but the
sails of his ships were pronounced to be far too yellow, the seas on
which the vessels floated were derided as being far too green, while the
skies above them were scoffed at as b