Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/433

 and disorderly. The character of my books for uproarious people and incident I owe mainly to Master Phiz." When Samuel Lover was sent over to Brussels by McGlashan, the publisher, to take a likeness of the novelist, he was accompanied by Browne, the object of whose visit was to confer with the author on the subject of these very illustrations. Lever was so anxious to restrain him from caricaturing his countrymen, that he even begged Browne to accompany him to Dublin for the purpose of seeing the natives, instead of the wretched specimens of Milesian humanity to be met with in London.

Another fault of this artist, which will be apparent to any one acquainted with his work, is the weakness of his outline, and the singular absence of solidity, stability, and even of vitality in his figures. There is no lack of powerful situations in Frank Smedley's novel of "Lewis Arundel," but Browne's illustrations are characterised by an utter absence of vitality, while shadow usurps the place of substantial bone and muscle. There are the usual thread-paper men in tall hats, with trousers so tightly strapped to their feet that they must go through the tedium of existence in intolerable discomfort. In one picture he shows us a fragile, attenuated man holding another fragile, attenuated man over the well of a staircase by the waistband of his trousers, a feat which, difficult of performance to a Hercules, would be absolutely beyond the power of a person so fragile, so absolutely destitute of bone and muscle, as the hero of this particular episode.

The weakness of which we now speak becomes strikingly apparent when he enables us to compare him with either of the distinguished trio to which he himself belonged. Such an opportunity offers itself in Mr. R. W. Surtees' [sic] novel of "Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds." Compare John Leech's illustration, Fresh as a Four-Year Old (the last he executed for the novelist before his firm, free hand was paralysed by death), with Hablot Knight Browne's first etching in the same book. A better subject, surely, could scarcely