In the smallest trunk there were back numbers of _Punch_. Pencils and paper were there also. When the steps sounded no more on the stairs, and I had stopped my stage crying, I would take out my drawing materials and an issue of _Punch_ and start to copy the easiest drawings I could find. Among the artists there was none that I liked better than Phil May. His sense of the comic and his economy of line appealed to me and my lack of ability to draw. His Cockney folk gave me more pleasure than any of the staid humans I knew. He.... But I forget myself. I started out to write of Neil Lyons.... All the words I have spun for the prelude are merely to say that during my re-reading of the work of Neil Lyons in the past few months I have been struck again and again by its likeness to the drawings of Phil May: the same joy, the same delight was there in the reading as there was in the contemplation of the drawings. Now, this likeness not only existed in the handling of the subject, but also in the choice thereof. The Cockney men, women and children that Phil May has drawn Neil Lyons has written about. The pictures of the peasantry that May has left are alike in line and spirit to those Lyons has drawn verbally in _Cottage Pie_ and _Moby Lane_. If you know Phil May’s work think of one of his drawings of a fat middle-aged woman, and then listen to this drawing of another, by Neil Lyons: “She was forty years old at a venture. She had lots of mouth and a salmon-coloured face and a pretence of a nose and small watery eyes. All these amenities were built up on a triple foundation of chin, which was matched by an exceeding amplitude of bosom and waist.” Don’t you recognize the same swift, sure lines? But I must get away from this parallel. Never at his best is the artist as great as the writer. There is no line or collection of lines in May’s work to match this in Lyons’: “Mrs. Godge, who was lately the mother of twin babies, is now the mother of memories.” That sentence is only a shadow of the quiet poignancy of the tale that follows it. Oh, the wonder of the man who can see every side of the common people and set them down with such verve, such relish, such keen poignancy and hilarious joy! Let me quote from the story of blind Unity Pike, “the wanton”: “I imagine poor old Unity at this period of her life as having been a little, fresh, dark-haired maiden of Quaker habit. I know she must have been beautiful because ALL young things are beautiful. I imagine this poor bound soul in the dark with its toil and its thoughts—half-formed thoughts, half-formed memories, half-formed wishes. Nothing real about her or within her save the darkness. And I can imagine how it was, therefore, that——