Page:Fitzgerald - Pickwickian manners and customs (1897).djvu/108

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98
PLATES OF PICKWICK.

plish his task. Of Phiz's unused designs there was "Mr. Winkle's first shot" and two for the Gabriel Grub story, also one for "the Warden's room." Most interesting of all was his "original study" for the figure of Mr. Pickwick.

Mr. Grego, himself an excellent artist, placed at the door of the society a very telling figure of Mr. Pickwick displayed on a poster and effectively coloured. It was new to find our genial old friend smiling an invitation to us—in Bond Street. This—which I took for a lithographed "poster"—was Mr. Grego's own work, portrayed in water colours.

There have been many would-be illustrators of the chronicle, some on original lines of their own; but these must be on the whole pronounced to be failures. On looking at them we somehow feel that the figures and situations are wholly strange to us; that we don't know them or recognize them. The reason is possibly that the artists are not in perfect sympathy or intelligence with the