wrinkled, pimpled face, wicked as old Lord Methuselah's in Thackeray. Alas! I fear that in Mr. Gibson's mind this person is only too often a fellow-countryman of mine. But I will not charge him with national jealousy. I applaud and beg leave to share an indignation so well warranted and so true an evidence of reverence for that whose betrayal it rebukes; and to be more indignant in proportion as the lady is more beautiful, though, indeed, it may not be logic, is surely mere humanity. Why, but for these unworthy motives, one of ourselves might have been the man! Mr. Gibson is as convinced a prophet of love as any romancer of them all; neither wealth nor splendor nor even (as the tragic figure in his "Nothing but Fame" reminds us) glory can be allowed to fill its place. When Mr. Gibson deals with love, his pictures, closely as they reflect modern and every-day life, are in fact on the plane and in the temper of romance. We have the simple, joyous, intense love of well-conditioned and comely young people for one another, a love that is sound and abides; this he extracts from the complexities of society and exhibits with the simplicity of romance, almost with the single-heartedness of poetry. It is a very sunny corner of the world's landscape, and the sunshine gleams brightly in these sketches of it.
PICTURES OF ENGLISH LIFE.
But to stop here would be to do sore injustice to the range and versatility of Mr. Gibson's talent, and in an Englishman would betray a special ingratitude; for he has crossed the seas to tell us what we are like, and has carried out his task in many drawings of very remarkable acuteness. I have before me the drawing entitled "In a London Theatre." A man and his wife sit in the back row of the stalls; behind them is the crowded and ebullient front bench of the pit. Here we have an admirable variety of types; but to my mind the cream of the picture is the man and woman in the stalls. The man is of the professional classes, probably a lawyer; he is not handsome, but he's very clean; he has practical ability, but the play does not quite appeal to him; his solidity, just bordering on stolidity, makes him an admirable specimen of a large and very valuable class of his fellow-countrymen. Yet the woman is, as it seems to me, even a greater triumph. In her there is no touch at all of caricature; and I feel that I have known thousands of her. She is pleasing to look at, not pretty; capable in her way as her husband is in his, but very little more poetic than he; she holds strongly the received opinions of her sex, position, and time; she is very orderly; even dress is with her not an unscrupulous passion, but only a preoccupation necessarily and properly very engrossing. Really, I do not think that any other single figure could cover and sum up more that is characteristic of English life and society and of what is perhaps the prevailing temper of mind in England. Then look at the picture of the "Drawing-Room" ("Her First Glimpse of Royalty"). My duty has never called me to a Drawing-Room, and consequently I have not been; but obviously it must be just like that. I will not give any reasons for this opinion, but content myself with remarking how effectively the artist, again with nothing that can be called caricature, indeed with an obvious fidelity, yet brings out and exhibits the humor of the scene and extorts smiles from the loyalest lips. It is no flattery to say that Mr. Gibson's inspiration and skill enable him to interpret to us in England the society that we know, even as he reveals to us the society of his own land; he catches the spiritual essence of a Lord Chamberlain with no less certainty than that with which he sets before us the hard-bitten man of dollars whose pretty daughter is his only apology to a world out of which he has grown monstrously rich.
ANTHONY HOPE'S JUDGMENT OF MR. GIBSON'S WORK.
It is not for me to pass any judgment on Mr. Gibson; and even if it were, there is a danger (not always enough apprehended) in trying to "size up" men who are still in the early days of their career. Up to the present Mr. Gibson has devoted himself mainly to what are called the lighter sides of life; it is, perhaps, probable that the brightness and beauty to be found here will always prove the things most attractive to a man of his temperament. But a part of his merit lies in the fact that, while dealing mainly with the apparently superficial, he has contrived to get into his work and to convey to the minds of those who study it so much of what is really true and fundamental in human life and character, and to develop, in a series of sketches often fanciful in design and by no means ethical or didactic in intention, a view of the world so broad and so consistent. I do not accuse him of the solemn deliberateness which these words may seem to imply; it is not
