3-065-725 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The late Mr. Shirley Brooks, 1874. Portrait of an '...accomplished and amiable man of letters, who had been many years connected with the Illustrated London News...Among his fellow-workers Shirley's habit of throwing down his dessert-knife when the work was done and the cartoon settled became proverbial...He wrote rapidly and without effort. His memory was prodigious, and his power of happily applying quotations to the incident of the moment was a matter of constant admiration, even to those who were necessarily brought into almost daily intercourse with him. He seemed to read everything, and, what is more, could make use of anything. Shirley Brooks was undoubtedly a brilliant epigrammatist, but in spite of an affectation of cynicism-which, after all, hurt no one-he was at all times and in any company a genial and excellent companion...To the public Shirley Brooks leaves the legacy of his literary labours - his plays, his novels, and abundance of his wit, both in verse and prose, in the pages of twenty-two volumes of Punch'. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.