Mr. Richard Doyle, the artist to whom the world owes
the admirable cover of Punch, was seized at the Athennium Club on Monday by a fit of apoplexy, and died at four o'clock on Tuesday morning. He was the son of the famous caricaturist, " H. B.," and was, till the days of " the Papal aggression," one of the chief contributors to Punch, but retired in consequence of the violent anti-Catholic line taken by Punch in 1851. He was a great friend of Thackeray's, and illustrated "The Newcomes" for him,—the famous old "Lady Kew" was Richard Doyle's offspring, as well as Thackeray's,—and he also illustrated the earlier issues of the Cornhill Magazine. Middle-aged men will easily recall the pictures which he drew some forty or more years ago in Punch of " ye manners and ye customs of ye Euglishe." Mr. Doyle was not an old man,—fifty-seven at the time of his death,—but he was, perhaps unfortunately for the world, independent of his pro- fession, and latterly had not added much to those playful studies of the grotesque, which constituted the charm of his various illustrations of fairy legend. That well-known procession of Punch riding on a donkey, and heralded by a comic Fame, while the hero himself clasps with a fatherly arm a young maiden who somewhat reluctantly attends him, two of her com- panions pulling him back by the hays which circle his reverend head, and a harp-playing nymph preluding some half-senti- mental air as she follows in the train, will immortalise Mr. Doyle's genius as long as Punch continues to attract English readers.
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