How often have I wished that characters of my own creating might be sketched as faultily, if with the same appreciation of the intended purpose.

Let anyone look at the "plates," as they are called in _Vanity Fair_, and compare each with the scenes and the characters intended to be displayed, and there see whether the artist,--if we may call him so,--has not managed to convey in the picture the exact feeling which he has described in the text.

I have a little sketch of his, in which a cannon-ball is supposed to have just carried off the head of an aide-de-camp,--messenger I had perhaps better say, lest I might affront military feelings,--who is kneeling on the field of battle and delivering a despatch to Marlborough on horseback.

The graceful ease with which the duke receives the message though the messenger's head be gone, and the soldier-like precision with which the headless hero finishes his last effort of military obedience, may not have been portrayed with well-drawn figures, but no finished illustration ever told its story better.

Dickens has informed us that he first met Thackeray in 1835, on which occasion the young artist aspirant, looking no doubt after profitable employment, "proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book." It is singular that such should have been the first interview between the two great novelists.