When I asked Corbould what first turned his attention to Art, he said—

“I was always for the Arts. Charles S. Keene, my mother’s brother, took me in hand, saying ‘sketch from Nature,’ so I am altogether self-taught. I never went to any Art school. Keene’s idea was that I should eventually step into a ‘staff appointment on Punch.’ I began under Shirley Brooks, then Tom Taylor, and later under F. C. Burnand. Tom Taylor promised me the first vacancy at ‘The Punch Table,’ but he died, and F. C. Burnand took on Furniss. I began with Punch in the early ’seventies; later I worked for the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, the Daily Graphic (1890), etc. I have always loved ‘gee-gees.’”

John Hassall is a universally popular man, and certainly one of the most capable artists of the day. One cannot be sure to what heights he will rise. He was not much more than a boy when he first came to our house, and he was not much more than a boy when he first got into Punch. As he is a brilliant caricaturist, with a strong political sense, he could be the Conservative F.C.G. whenever he chooses. Probably he would dislike the drudgery of producing constant political cartoons—all work done against time. G. R. H., the famous cartoonist of the Pall Mall Gazette, found the work too exacting, and Hassall, the most popular poster designer of the day, has many irons in the fire which require attending to. But he is a born caricaturist of the unexaggerating kind which the future will demand.

Joseph Pennell, the artist, and his charming wife, one of the best travel-writers in America, have been friends of ours for many years. They live in an old house in Buckingham Street, Strand, near the gate, which now does nothing on the Thames Embankment but is, I suppose, the last of the water-gates of the Thames. Pennell conferred one of the great pleasures of our lives on us by making us go to Le Puy, at the source of the Loire, which he had been drawing for some periodical. The statues of saints and tiny chapels standing up on needle rocks against the sky, which look so fascinating in his sketches, are not a whit less fantastic in real life, and, until quite lately, you could see from the plain High Mass being celebrated in the cathedral, which was at the western end of the rock. The great west doors were flung open for the purpose, until the mortality among the priests became too great. At Le Puy the old market-women wear their hats over their caps, and frogs are as cheap as dirt—real edible frogs.

I went to a banquet given by the town to its most famous son, M. Dupuy, who was then Prime Minister of France, and was, as it happened, a native, though he did spell the Puy in his name with a small p. We paid three francs a head—less than half-a-crown—for the banquet, including wine, and an introduction to the Premier.

INDEX

of the leading people about whom Personal Reminiscences or New Facts are related.