Of late years Reynolds’ pen-and-ink drawings have been a familiar feature of the pages of Punch.  His gentle satires therein have been at the expense of all classes of the community.  But his most successful and best remembered jokes have perhaps been those which depicted the unconscious humours of Cockney low life.  His illustration of “Precedence at Battersea,” in which one small gutter-snipe struggles with another for a cricket bat, indignantly declaring that “The Treasurer goes in before the bloomin’ Seketery,” is by way of becoming a classic.  Equally clever is the study of a small boy, (reproduced on page 27) whose “pomptiousness” on attaining the dignity of knickers forms the subject of admiring comment from his mother to a friendly curate:  the mother herself being a wonderful study of low life.  In “Going It” (page 59) the artist harks back to the theme of “freak-study,” if such a term is permissible, the expressions on the faces of the two figures exhibiting well his acute powers of observation.

[Illustration]

As an illustrator of stories of a certain type, Frank Reynolds is without an equal.  On a tale of mere incident his talent is wasted:  but into the spirit of a writer who takes human nature for his text, the artist enters with the keenest sympathy.  One is tempted to think that the author who is so fortunate as to have Frank Reynolds for a collaborator, must on occasion be startled at the clear vision with which the artist materialises the private conceptions of his mind.  It would hardly be possible to find a more sympathetic series of illustrations than those which Frank Reynolds drew for Keble Howard’s idyll of Suburbia, entitled “The Smiths of Surbiton.”  The author constructed out of the petty doings and humdrum habits of suburban life a charming little story of simple people, and with equal cleverness the artist built up, out of these slight materials, a series of exquisitely natural pictures, which revealed the almost incredible fact that semi-detached villadom is not all dulness.

Illustrators of Charles Dickens are legion, but when one thinks of the opportunities for character-study, without that exaggeration into which previous illustrators have been too prone to indulge, which the works of the great novelist afford, one is inclined to think that until we see that wonderful gallery of fanciful personalities which began with Mr. Pickwick and his companions portrayed by the pencil of Frank Reynolds, we shall have to wait still for the perfect edition of Dickens.  One niche in that gallery has already been filled, and a study of the water-colour drawing of “Tony Weller at the Belle Sauvage,” which is reproduced in the present volume, only increases our desire, like the immortal Oliver, to ask for more.

[Illustration:  “THE DES(S)ERTS OF BOHEMIA”. From “Dinners with Shakespeare"]