Not but that I was forced to go somewhat warily when originally recording the famous incident of du Maurier and the peccant illustration of the “Two Apprentices” in _Trilby_, for was I not thereby involving myself with another, and greater, artist (very much alive indeed!), whose pen was only not mightier than his pencil because the latter was unsurpassable, but who might in turn pillory me in his gallery of artfully constructed Enemies? It was indeed a topsy-turvy world which found the “Butterfly,” which is popularly supposed to end its life wriggling upon the pin of the “soaring human boy,” revenging itself upon humanity with epigrams that “stick for ever.” Sad to relate, Whistler could never be brought to see du Maurier’s rather caustic “retaliation,” particulars of which are given below, in its proper proportions. Indeed, when I asked him to allow me to reproduce, as a pictorial curiosity, the {164} suppressed print of the “Two Apprentices,” which only the owners of _Trilby_, as it appeared in serial form, are now destined to possess, he informed me in the politest manner possible that my doing so would involve me in an expensive and uncomfortable correspondence with his solicitors. And what could not be done then cannot be done now, for reasons into which I need not enter. Nevertheless, to treat seriously a hyperbolical and exaggerated caricature as anything more than a legitimate response to a not altogether kindly sarcasm on the part of Mr. Whistler himself, appears to me now, as it appeared to me then, well-nigh incredible. No one looked upon “Joe Sibley” as a true likeness, either pictorially or verbally. It was written and read as a joke, part true, but mostly false, and so would have stood had it not been given undue importance by the correspondence in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. As a result, in book form “Joe Sibley” is wanting in that delightful gallery which contains “Durier,” Pygmalion to Trilby’s Galatea—a Galatea whose marble heart would never beat for him; “Vincent,” the great American oculist, “whose daughters are {165} so beautiful and accomplished that they spend their autumn holiday in refusing the matrimonial offers of the British aristocracy”; “The Greek,” who was christened Poluphoisboiospaleapologos Petrilopetrolicoconose “because his real name was thought much too long”; “Carnegie,” who “is now only a rural dean, and speaks the worst French I know, and speaks it wherever and whenever he can”; “Antony, the Swiss” (substituted for “Joe Sibley”); “Lorrimer,” who was so thoroughgoing in his worship of the immortals, Veronese, Tintoret and Co., and was “so persistent in voicing it, that he made them quite unpopular in the Place St. Anatole des Arts”; not to speak of “Dodor” and “l’Zouzou,” who were distinguished for being “_les plus mauvais garniments_ of their respective regiments,” and the rest of Trilby’s delightful adorers. Why, it seems to me that to have