in this direction, I might by now have blossomed into a Rembrandt or a Landseer.
Amongst other incidents which occurred during this period of my life was one which it now almost makes me shudder to think of. I was commissioned by no less a personage than the late Mr. Pigott, of Parnell Commission notoriety, to illustrate for him a story of the broadest Irish humour. Little did I think when I entered his office in Abbey Street, Dublin, and had an interview with the genial and pleasant-looking little man with the eye-glass, that he would one day play so prominent a rôle in the Parliamentary drama, or that the weak little arm he extended to me was destined years afterwards to be the instrument of a tragedy. I can truly say, at all events, my recollection as a boy of sixteen of the great Times forger is by no means unfavourable, and he dwells in my memory as one of the most pleasant and genial of men. I ought, perhaps, to say that in feeling I was anything but a Nationalist, because in Ireland, generally speaking, you must be either black or white. But like a lawyer who takes his brief from every source, I never studied who my clients were when they required my juvenile services.
Although I was not of Irish parentage and did not lean towards Nationalism in politics, it was necessary to sympathise now and then with the down-trodden race. For instance, I remember that one evening a respectable-looking mechanic called at my fathers house and requested to see me. His manner was strange and mysterious, and as he wanted to see me alone, I took him into an anteroom, where, with my hand on the door handle and the other within easy distance of the bell, I asked the excitable-looking stranger the nature of his business. Pulling from his pocket a roll of one-pound Irish bank-notes, he thrust them into my hand, and besought me at the same time not to refuse the request he was about to make. An idea flashed through my mind that perhaps he had seen me coming out of the offices of the National Press, and had jumped to the conclusion that I could therefore be bought over to perpetrate some terrible political crime. I even imagined that in the roll of notes I should find the knife with which the fell deed had to be done. Seeing that I shrank from him, he seized hold of my arm, and, in a most pitiable voice, said:
"Don't, young sorr, refuse me what I am about to ask you. I'm only a working man, but here are all my savings, which you may take if you will just dhraw me a picter to be placed at the top of a complete set of photographs of our Irish leaders. I want Britannia at the head of the group, a bastely dhrunken old hag, wid her fut on the throat of the beautiful Erin, who is to be bound hand and fut wid chains, and being baten and starved. Thin I want prisons at the sides, showing the grand sons of Ould Oireland dying in their cells by torture, whilst a fine Oirish liberator wid dhrawn sword is just on the point of killing Britannia outright, and so saving his disthressful country."
About this time someone had been good enough to inform me that all black and white artists are in the habit of engraving their own work, and, religiously believing this, I duly provided myself with some engraving tools, bought some boxwood, a jeweller's eye-glass, and a sand bag, without which no engraver's table can be said to be complete.
Then, setting to work to practise the difficult art, I struggled on as best I could, until one fine day a professional engraver enlightened me upon the matter. I need scarcely say he went into fits of laughter when I told him that every artist was expected to be a Bewick, and he pointed out to me that not only do artists as a rule know very little about engraving, but in addition they have often only a limited knowledge of how to draw for engravers.
However, thinking I should better understand the difficulties of drawing for publishers if I first mastered the technical art of reproduction, with the assistance of the engraver aforesaid I rapidly acquired sufficient dexterity with the tools to engrave my own drawings, and this I continued to do until I left Dublin, at the age of nineteen. Since then I have never utilised one of my gravers, except to pick a lock or open a box of sardines. Nor is this to be wondered at, considering that one can make a drawing in an hour which takes a week to engrave, and that an engraver may take five guineas for his share of the work whilst an artist may get fifty. There is very little doubt, therefore, as to the reason why artists who can draw refrain from engraving their own work.
SKETCHES IN GALWAY.
Republished by permission of the proprietors of the "Illustrated London News."
In the studio of the engraver to whom I have above referred there hung a huge map of London, and as I used to pore over it I took many an imaginary walk down Fleet Street, many a canter in the Row, and many a voyage to Greenwich on a penny steamboat, before I bade adieu to "dear dirty Dublin" in the year 1873, and, as many have done before me, arrived in the "little village" in search of fame and wealth.
Just prior to my leaving Ireland for the land of my parents I met no less an editor than Tom Taylor, who was then the presiding genius of the Punch table, and he gave me every encouragement to hasten my migration. He, however, had just returned from the wilds of Connemara, and before setting my face in the direction of Holyhead he strongly advised me also to pay a visit to the trackless wastes of the Western country, for the purpose of committing to paper the lineaments of the natives indigenous to the soil. This I did a week or so before quitting the land of my birth, and the sketches I made upon that occasion formed part of my stock-in-trade when I arrived in London.
After making the accompanying page of studies, I strolled along the bank of the river; and while sketching some men breaking stones an incident happened which first aroused me to the fact that the lot of the sketching artist is not always a happy one. A fiend in human shape—an overbearing overseer—came up at the moment, and roundly abused the poor labourers for taking the "base Saxon's" coin. Inciting them to believe that I was a special informer from London, he laughed on my declaring that I was merely a novice, and informed me that I ought to be "dhrounded." He was about to suit the action to the word and pitch me into the salmon-stuffed river when he was stopped by the mediation of my models, and I escaped from the grip of the agitator. In due course I found myself in the Claddagh, a village of mud huts, which formed the frontispiece by John Leech to "A Little Tour in Ireland" by "An Oxonian," "a village of miserable cabins, the walls of mud and stone, and for the most part windowless, the floors damp and dirty, and the roofs a mass of rotten straw and weeds." Pigs and fowls mixed up with boats and fish refuse. Women old, dried and ugly; girls young, dark, of Spanish type, scantily dressed in bright-coloured short garments, all tattered and torn; and children grotesque beyond description. I sketch three members of one family clothed (!) in the three articles of attire discarded by their father—one claimed the coat, another the trousers, whilst the third had only a waistcoat. No doubt Leech had seen the same sixteen years before, when he was there; and if "the Oxonian," who survives him—Canon Hole, of Rochester—were to make another little tour in Ireland, he would find the Claddagh still a spot to give an Englishman "a new sensation." All I can say is, that having escaped a "dhrouning" in the river when in Galway in 1873, I have visited many countries and seen much filth and misery, but I have seen nothing approaching the sad squalor of the wild West of Ireland.
The majority of those I sketched were hardly human. Tom Taylor was right—"I would find such characters there not to be found in all the world over," and I haven't. The people got on my overstrung youthful nerves. I left the country the moment I had sufficient material for my sketches. I had shaken off the unpleasant feeling of being murdered in the river. I had survived living a week or two in the worst inns in the world. I had risked typhoid and every other disease fostered by the insanitary surroundings—for I had to hide myself in narrow turnings and obnoxious corners so as to sketch unseen, as the religion of the natives opposed any attempt to have themselves "dhrawn," believing that the destruction of their "pictur'" would be fatal to their souls! I had sketched the famous house in Deadman's Lane—and listened as I sketched it, in the falling shades of night, to the old, old story of Fitz-Stephen the Warden, who had lived there, and had in virtue of his office to assist at the hanging of his own son. And, when in the dark I was strolling back to my hotel, my reflections were suddenly interrupted by something powerful seizing
