Illustrations to the surprising adventures of three men : for presentation only.

The lithographic plates include the text of Thackeray's ballad of "The three sailors", or "Little Billie" for which he made the drawings. The ballad was improvised from an old Breton original at a dinner in Rome during the winter of 1844. It was first published in Samuel Bevan's Sand and canvas (1849) p. 340-342 under the title "Three sailors".--cf. G.N. Ray's Thackeray: the uses of adversity (1955) p. 298-300. A part of the poem in the author's autograph is in the Morgan Library.