The artist’s bitterness against his employers was not unnatural. At the same time, we must remember that the fact that they had on the spur of the moment to decide upon an artist, without consulting Dickens, puts the matter in a very different light. The fortunes of the venture were at stake. The author, at all hazards, must be humoured. His will was paramount, and when he insisted upon Buss’s supersession by H. K. Browne, there was practically an end of the matter. Happily Buss’s labour was not all lost, and it was with much pleasure that I seized the opportunity offered me by the editor of the {32} _Magazine of Art_ in June 1902, to point out in that publication how perverse has been the fate which has made the name of an artist of no mean order more familiar by his few failures than by his many successes. It is not generally known that there are in existence two etched plates by Buss showing that he contemplated a series of extra illustrations to _Pickwick_. The one is a title-page with Mr. Pickwick being crowned; the other is rather a poor rendering of “The Break-down.” But to return to the plates themselves: only about seven hundred copies were published when plates by Browne were substituted for them. “The Cricket Match” was wholly suppressed, and the subject of “Tupman and Rachel” was etched over again, considerably altered, but evidently founded upon the Buss plate. The latter is here reproduced for the purpose of comparison. [Illustration: The “Pickwick” suppressed plate “Tupman and Rachel.” (_By R. W. Buss_)] [Illustration: “Tupman and Rachel.” (_By H. K. Browne_)] That every Dickens collector desires to possess one of the seven hundred copies of the first issue of the first edition which contain the Buss plates, is a matter of course, and enough has been said to make clear the reason of such desire. Should any of my readers fail to sympathise, he must take {33} it as an incontrovertible sign that he is immune from that most delightful of all diseases, bibliomania.