Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/507

 step, the Catholic writer and ourselves are wholly at variance. "We are inclined to believe," continues the former, "that apart from the respect he earned by his noble sacrifice, Mr. Doyle achieved a higher reputation in consequence of his retirement from comic journalism, than if he had continued to employ his pencil in its services all his life through. It is true that his name was not, towards the end of his life, so familiar to the popular mind of England as was that of John Leech at the end of his career, and as that of Du Maurier at the present time, but the work which he did in his later life was more lasting and more world-wide. Punch is an English periodical; you must be an Englishman to understand the allusions. The humour is essentially and almost exclusively English; it would never attain any great popularity in other English-speaking nations, in spite of its undoubted claim to be the first comic journal in the world. If Doyle had confined himself to the pages of Punch, or directed his energies mainly to the weekly issue of some design in its numerous columns, the limnings of his pencil would scarcely be known outside of England, whereas all over the continent of America, and in the English colonies, the old Colonel Newcome, and the Marquis of Farintosh, Lady Kew, and Trotty Veck meet us with their familiar faces as we turn over the Transatlantic editions of Thackeray and Dickens, not to mention the exquisite paintings, of which we shall have more to say presently, exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery, and to be found in many a country mansion as a lasting memorial of Dicky Doyle." Does the writer seriously mean to tell us that Doyle could not illustrate Thackeray and Dickens at the same time and side by side with his illustrations for Punch or any other serial of a satirical character? Granted that Punch is a periodical appealing to English tastes and sympathies, yet it was through the introduction obtained by means of its pages that the artist probably obtained employment upon the very works to which the writer refers, and upon which (as he claims) his reputation will rest.

Nor do we, nor can we, admit that, out of the circle of his co-religionists, or the still narrower circle of educated unbiassed minds,