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In strict order of time, Mr. Thomson’s next important effort should have preceded the books of Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell. The novels of Jane Austen–to which we now come–if not the artist’s high-water mark, are certainly remarkable as a tour de force. To contrive some forty page illustrations for each of Miss Austen’s admirable, but–from an illustrator’s standpoint–not very palpitating productions,–with a scene usually confined to the dining-room or parlour,–with next to no animals, and with rare opportunities for landscape accessory,–was an “adventure”–in Cervantic phrase–which might well have given pause to a designer of less fertility and resource. But besides the figures there was the furniture; and acute admirers have pointed out that a nice discretion is exhibited in graduating the appointments of Longbourn and Netherfield Park,–of Rosings and Hunsford. But what is perhaps more worthy of remark is the artist’s persistent attempt to give individuality, as well as grace, to his dramatis persona;. The unspeakable Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet, the horsy Mr. John Thorpe, Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Norris, the Eltons–are all carefully discriminated. Nothing can well be better than Mr. Woodhouse, with his “almost immaterial legs” drawn securely out of the range of a too-fierce fire, chatting placidly to Miss Bates upon the merits of water-gruel; nothing more in keeping than the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, “in the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind” of her indignation, superciliously pausing to patronise the capabilities of the Longbourn reception rooms. Not less happy is the dumbfounded astonishment of Mrs. Bennet at her toilet, when she hears–to her stupefaction–that her daughter Elizabeth is to be mistress of Pemberley and ten thousand a year. This last is a head-piece; and it may be observed, as an additional difficulty in this group of novels, that, owing to the circumstances of publication, only in one of the books. Pride and Prejudice, was Mr, Thomson free to decorate the chapters with those ingenious entetes and culs-de-lampe of which he so eminently possesses the secret.[C]

[Note:

C: That eloquence of subsidiary detail, which has had so many exponents in English art from Hogarth onwards, is one of Mr. Thomson’s most striking characteristics. The reader will find it exemplified in the beautiful book-plate at page 111, which, by the courtesy of its owner, Mr. Ernest Brown, I am permitted to reproduce.]

By this time his reputation had long been firmly established. To the Jane Austen volumes succeeded other numbers of the so-called “Cranford” series, to which, in 1894, Mr. Thomson had already added, under the title of Coridon’s Song and other Verses, a fresh ingathering of old-time minstrelsy from the pages of the English Illustrated. Many of the drawings for these, though of necessity reduced for publication in book form, are in his most delightful and winning manner,–notably perhaps (if one must choose!) the martial ballad of that “Captain of Militia, Sir Bilberry Diddle,” who

–dreamt, Fame reports, that he cut all the throats
Of the French as they landed in flat-bottomed boats

–or rather were going to land any time during the Seven Years’ War. Excellent, too, are John Gay’s ambling Journey to Exeter., the Angler’s Song from Walton (which gives its name to the collection), and Fielding’s rollicking “A-hunting we will go.” Other “Cranford” books, which now followed, were James Lane Allen’s Kentucky Cardinal, 1901; Fanny Burney’s Evelina, 1903; Thackeray’s Esmond, 1905; and two of George Eliot’s novels– Scenes of Clerical Life, 1906, and Silas Marner, 1907. In 1899 Mr. Thomson had also undertaken another book for George Allen, an edition of Reade’s Peg Woffington,–a task in which he took the keenest delight, particularly in the burlesque character of Triplet. These were all in the old pen-work; but some of the designs for Silas Marner were lightly and tastefully coloured. This was a plan the author had adopted, with good effect, not only in a special edition of Cranford (1898), but for some of his original drawings which came into the market after exhibition. Nothing can be more seductive than a Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately tinted in sky-blue, rose-Du Barry, and apple-green (the vert-pomme dear–as Gautier says–to the soft moderns)–a treatment which lends them a subdued but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a pedigree, and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm of the phrase-maker who described their inventor as the “Charles Lamb of illustration.”