He was a welcome guest in nearly all of the great country-houses in England, and yet he preserved to the end a strange boyishness and shyness of manner, beneath which, however, there lurked a constant sense of kindly humour.
I met him first as a fellow-guest of Sir Coutts Lindsay at Balcarres, and I remember his telling me that he had such a horror of his modest wardrobe being overhauled by the footman who valeted him that it was his habit, on retiring for the night, to lock his clothes securely in a drawer, and then to watch with half-opened eyes in the morning, and with a chuckle which he could not always conceal beneath the bed-clothes, the wild despair of the footman in his fruitless search for the secreted garments.
When the Grosvenor was established, Doyle became a constant contributor to the exhibitions, sending every year some delightful specimens of his fanciful treatment of fairy subjects.
But it is perhaps mainly by his earlier drawings on the wood that he will be best remembered, drawings which display the fecundity of his inventions exhibited in countless forms and faces, which he could multiply apparently without effort or trouble. One of the best of these drawings is that representing the Custom-House at Cologne, where he shows in a supreme degree his extraordinary power of granting individual character to every diminutive face that is introduced into the design.
A younger artist, who had perhaps something of the personal charm of Du Maurier, was Randolph Caldecott, whom I got to know soon after the publication of his hunting scenes.
He had been ordered to the South for the sake of his health, and at the suggestion of his friend and mine, Mr. Thomas Armstrong, who so greatly aided him in those earlier days in securing public recognition, he undertook to make the illustrations for a book written by my wife called North Italian Folk.
In manner Caldecott was as gentle as Du Maurier, and even more reserved, yet this reserve could yield on occasion to the wildest high spirits, when the humour that is never absent from his drawings found delightful utterance. Poor Caldecott always had about him the shadow of failing health, and yet it never, I think, disturbed the deep tenderness of his nature that was revealed even in his most buoyant moods.
Perhaps the quaintest figure among the draughtsmen of that day was the Italian caricaturist Carlo Pellegrini, whose cartoons in Vanity Fair brought him prominently before the public.
Although he was a dweller among us for many years, he never acquired the slightest command of our tongue. Indeed, I rather think that as time went on his English grew persistently worse, but in his brave endeavour to express himself he forged a dialect of his own that was sometimes richly entertaining.
One day at a private view at the Dudley Gallery he went down on his knees to examine and to admire a drawing by Arthur Severn, and then, with sudden enthusiasm, he cried out so that all might hear, “Capital, capital! But why, the blast, he stipple?”