Three things may be said to have brought Leech's powers as a humorous draughtsman prominently before the public—his illustrations to the "Comic Latin Grammar," the skit on the Mulready envelope (the most successful of all the versions published), and his early Punch work. Mr. Frith tells of Mulready's indignation at Leech's drawing—not at the caricature itself, but at the leech in a bottle, by which the Academician took it for granted that the draughtsman meant to designate him by innuendo as a "blood-sucker;" and of Leech's surprise and pain at being so suspected, and how the two men became fast friends ever after. Once a regular Punch man, Leech immediately expanded, and as quickly hit the taste and fancy of the public; and from that day forward rarely did his hand or his humorous or tragic faculty play him false; nor did the people falter in its praise or its allegiance.

Although he expanded, he yet took some time to settle down. Not until the sixth volume (1844) could he be considered paramount in what was esteemed the higher walk of cartooning—a department which he subsequently shared, first with Doyle, and then with Tenniel. But it was in the social cuts that he excelled—in his pictures of low life that are never low; in his great mastery in the delineation of character and his gift of seeing humour in most scenes of everyday happening, and his power of recording comic conceptions, unfailingly and irresistibly. It is true that as Mr. Punch went up in the social scale Leech accompanied him in the rise—if, indeed, it was not Leech, together with Thackeray's powerful help, who elevated Punch. At the same time he sympathised profoundly with the horrors of poverty and oppression, and looked kindly on gutter-children and on honest dirt and misery; and to the end he regarded the "snob," the 'Arry of his day, with the genial contempt he had lavished on him at the beginning. Thackeray appreciated the change in the paper, and recorded it, too; though he credits Jerrold with a policy which was nought but the policy of a comic paper softened in its asperities by time, and encouraged by the greater refinement of its Staff and of its more cultivated public.

"Mr. Leech," said Thackeray, "surveys society from the gentleman's point of view. In old days, when Mr. Jerrold lived and wrote for that famous periodical, he took the other side; he looked up at the rich and great with a fierce, a sarcastic aspect, and a threatening posture, and his outcry or challenge was: 'Ye rich and great, look out! We, the people, are as good as you. Have a care, ye priests, wallowing on a tithe pig and rolling in carriages and four; ye landlords, grinding the poor; ye vulgar fine ladies, bullying innocent governesses, and what not—we will expose your vulgarity; we will put down your oppression; we will vindicate the nobility of our common nature,' and so forth. A great deal was to be said on the Jerrold side, a great deal was said—perhaps, even a great deal too much." And now, says Thackeray in effect, Leech looks at all these people with a certain respect for their riches, with an amiable curiosity concerning their footmen's calves. Nevertheless, to the end he was not kinder to Dives' oppression, less sympathetic towards the troubles of Lazarus, nor more indulgent to the vulgarity of the snob; nor a whit more tolerant of viciousness, affectation, or meanness of any kind.

Of Leech's political work (for which at first he entertained so great a dislike) I say perhaps enough in dealing with what may be called Punch's Big Drum—the weekly cartoon. Taken together, those designs might be held to represent a life's good work; yet they represent but a fraction of what he executed during his seven-and-twenty years' hard labour. If after a close study of all his productions with pencil and etching-needle, you ask yourself what constitutes his real life's-work, you will probably choose to ignore his book plates—even those to the Comic Histories of Rome and England, to the sporting novels of "Mr. Sponge," and the rest—and point to his "Pictures of Life and Character," as given forth in one continuous stream from 1841 to 1864.

The "movements" and the "isms" and the creations of fashion, of nearly all of which we have a whole series spread over a long, but none too long a time, reflect in themselves alone the social history of our day—development of intellect and its antithesis, fashion in dress and language, art and literature, craze and affectation; in short, the whole national evolution during a quarter of a century. It is amusing to glance at some of them—a few out of the very many—and sample the journalistic wit with which Leech eyed and illustrated the passing hour.

The periodical wail of the British householder and his wife on the subject of the great "domestic difficulty" gave Leech a fund of anecdote that he was not slow to draw upon. He was himself a typical middle-class British householder, who liked to have everything nice and neat about him, including the pretty, amiable, zealous, h-less maidservant in nice white apron and clean print-dress. He closed his eyes and ears to Sydney Smith's discovery that all the virtues and most of the graces are not to be had for L7 a year. And so Leech gave us the series he entitles "Servantgalism," harshly illustrative for the most part of the comic side of what a later generation calls Slaveyism. And as Punch, chiefly under the influence of Thackeray, raised his eyes from Bloomsbury to Belgravia, and found equal fun and better sport in baiting the far more contemptible airs and graces of John Thomas, "Flunkeiana" became a fertile field from which he drew some of his most caustic productions. He made them the severer, too, that during the Crimean War and the dangers that threatened the land, Leech could not bear with patience the sight of "pampered menials" passing their time in relatively idle luxury, when they, together with linen-drapers' assistants and others engaged in what is really woman's work, ought rather to have been bearing arms, or at the very least drilling in the newly-formed force of Volunteers.

Yet the Volunteers had not to thank Leech for anything much but chaff during the early years of the movement. If anything could snuff out patriotism, "The Brook Green Volunteer," the laughable satire on the Militia, would have done it, and the square into which that warrior formed himself would assuredly have been broken and dispersed. And truly this series, famous and still appreciated as it is, lost a good deal of its force from the presence of a fault not often found in Leech's work—grotesqueness of invention and undue exaggeration. In time Charles Keene made us forget the unintentional injustice Leech had done to a noble movement; and as fate willed it, Mr. G. Haydon, who had greatly assisted the author of it, Sir J. C. Bucknill, became later an artistic contributor to Punch and a friend, not only of Leech, but of several of the most distinguished of the Staff.

And after the Crimean War was over, there was a social upheaval known as "the great beard movement." Leech was very keen upon all this question of moustaches, and held with many others that no one had a right to them save the crack cavalry regiments. One day it happened that Leech, Tenniel, and Pritchett were riding together, and, agreeing on the subject, they arrived at cross-roads, where, holding their crops together, they cried "We Swear!"—not to wear hair on lip or chin. In 1865 the unregenerate Mr. Pritchett went to Skye to practise water-colour and—to let his moustaches grow! Returning in due time to Tenniel's house, he said nothing, but merely opened the door, and thrust in his face with an air of defiant resignation, and waited. Tenniel started. "You scoundrel!" he exclaimed; "then I must!" And he did. But Leech was proof against this example of degeneracy, and to the end remained true to his views and his vow, although moustaches soon came into regular fashion.

Yet moustache, beard, and whiskers have been a mine of fun to Leech—from the little Eton boy who tells the hairdresser, when he has cut his curls, just to give him a close shave, and who ties the major's whisker to his sister's ringlet; to the snobs who, "giving to hairy nothings a local habitation and a name," flatter themselves that their stubbly chins will get them mistaken for "captings" at the very least; and to the military Adonises who may boast that their silken beards and fierce moustaches lead a beauty by each single hair. One of the most amusing results of Leech's drawings of whiskered swells was Sothern's creation of "Lord Dundreary"—as the actor was always ready to proclaim. But for the artist, this most comical character would have been nothing but the ordinary stage-fool as it was at first designed, and the playgoers of two generations would never have held their aching sides at one of the most mirthful of modern roles.

Then the series of hearty laughs that, in 1851, accompanied his handling of "Bloomerism"—that parent of our modern dress reform and the divided skirt, and certainly the ancestor of the lady-bicyclist's costume ("A skirt divided against itself cannot stand; it must sit upon a bicycle")—served to kill the thing that the natural modesty of Leech put down as unwomanly and his aesthetic sense as hideous. And the crinoline, to which the American invention was to afford an antidote, provides Leech with material for a hundred humorous points of view. For it grew and grew in monstrousness and outrageous proportions until 1861, when it began to dwindle, and by such refuge as a "hooped petticoat" can afford saved its dignity as it made its welcome exit from the scene.

And the Cochin-China Fancy, and the Table-Turning Craze (in respect to which Mark Lemon declared that if Hope, the spiritualist, would give a convincing seance in Whitefriars, Punch would recant), and the Racecourse, and the Great Exhibition, and Horsetaming, and a score of other subjects—whether pastime or fashion or phase—were all used by Leech with unfailing humour. The Chartist period of 1848 was a great opportunity, happily seized, and some of the artist's sketches were the result of his personal observation; for he was himself sworn in. "Only loyalty and extreme love of peace and order made me do it," he said; but none the more did he enjoy his nocturnal patrol from ten o'clock till one.

And all his types—his dramatis personae, so to speak—the gent and his vulgar associates; the Greedy Boy and the Comic Drunkard; the Enfant Terrible, soon, it is devoutly hoped, to be packed off to school, and the dreadful Schoolboy home for the holidays; the Choleric Old Gentleman and the comfortable Materfamilias; Miss Clara and the Heavy Dragoon; the Italian Organ-grinder, Frenchman, Irishman, and Hebrew (Leech's four betes noires); the Rising Generation; and all the rest—what a boxful of puppets they were for Mr. Punch's show! And besides them the two or three distinct personalities he created! There was Tom Noddy—the ridiculous little man who in real life was the estimable Mr. Mike Halliday, sometime clerk of the House of Lords, and latterly poet and successful artist, who was as pleased as Punch himself at the distinction conferred upon him and his doings by the artist, while all the time Leech was secretly flattering his kindly self that his model could not by any means discover himself in pictures in which the features were so carefully altered—for all personalities were hateful to the considerate, sensitive humorist. And Mr. Briggs, the Immortal! Of him whose creation is sufficient to render the year 1849 memorable in the annals of the land much has ere now been written—that type of a well-to-do British householder, delightful for his follies and endearing by his pluck, something of a lunatic, it must be admitted, yet more of a sportsman, and most of all a "muff"—Punch's "simple-minded Philistine paterfamilias." Many of his adventures, especially of house-keeping and its terrors, were based upon Leech's own experiences. For it was Leech who had those terrible builders, and who was taken for a burglar by a policeman when trying to get in at his own window. Mr. Briggs' never-to-be-forgotten sensations of a spill from his horse, as recorded by Leech, were the result of the artist's own bewildering experience—as he confessed to "Cuthbert Bede"—and many of his adventures in salmon-fishing, grouse and pheasant shooting, and deer-stalking were founded on his visits to Sir John Millais in Scotland. "All the pools on the Stanley Water," says one authority, "are sacred to the memory of Briggs, for it was Leech's favourite fishing-ground; and 'Hell's Hole,' 'Death's Throat,' 'Black Stones,' and many other cuts, may all be recognised from his humorous pictures, the originals of which are in the possession of Colonel Stuart Sandeman, the proprietor. The Stanley Water begins below Burnmouth." Many of his fishing-sketches were made at Whitchurch in Hampshire, when staying with Mr. Haydon aforesaid.

Half Leech's popularity came, probably, from his sketches in the Row and in the hunting-field. Even so hearty a hater of horse-flesh as Ruskin—so far as he could hate animals at all—has declared that the most beautiful drawing in all Punch is Miss Alice on her father's horse—"her, with three or four young Dians." Leech's sympathy for horses was natural to the man, and had no little influence in toning down those rampant ideas of Democracy and Socialism to which Thackeray referred. In the opinion of many, not all the Conservative party, landlords and House of Peers together, will, in the great coming struggle with "King Demos," exert against him and his Socialism a fraction of the power of resistance that will ultimately be found in the national love of horses and of sport, whether in the hunting-field, on the racecourse, or in the sporting column of the daily paper; and this belief John Leech himself entertained.

Leech, whose pecuniary resources were always being drained by relations other than those of his own immediate household, and on behalf of whom it is generally admitted that he worked himself to death, rode and hunted, as he said, not from extravagance, but in order that he might be fit and able to do his work. And his riding, which was a necessity to himself, was not less indispensable to Punch, for a very considerable amount of the Paper's support in the Country depends upon his "horsey sketches." Without them English life would not be properly represented, particularly in its most delightful and engaging of pastimes, and without them English support—from that prosperous class to which Punch specially appeals—would hardly be forthcoming.

But, for all his love of horses and the hunting-field, Leech was not a particularly good rider, and a friend of his tells how he laughingly insisted on buying from him a horse that was not sound in his wind, as he could not run away. Yet he poked good-natured fun at the riding of his friend Sir John Millais, and once told him that as he followed him in the field he had conceived the original idea of drawing some "triangular landscapes" as seen through Millais' legs. He satirised himself with equal good-temper in the drawing in which a Cockney horseman reins up at the edge of a steep hill—you might almost call it a hole—down the side of which the rest are scampering, with the words "Oh, if this is one of the places Charley spoke of, I shall go back!" Indeed, in spite of all his sport, he almost agreed with Hood—

"There's something in a horse That I can always honour, but never could endorse."

Yet, like his great rival "Phiz," who rode with the Surrey hounds, he loved the cover-side; but as time went on, and youthful ardour cooled, he would rather attend the meet than follow in the chase. As he favoured the Puckeridge hounds, it comes about that most of his landscape backgrounds are views in Hertfordshire. And when he preferred the more sober delights of the Row—not the same Row we now scamper along from Hyde Park Corner, but the old one along by the Serpentine, and, for a time, in Kensington Gardens—his tall graceful figure always attracted attention; and when he mounted his pony, which he called "Red Mullett," people who recognised him would turn and remark that Mr. Punch had come out for a ride upon dog Toby.



But it was not by his comic faculty alone that John Leech helped to make Punch great, nor even by his political work. It was also by his frank demonstration of that deep feeling which is often called "passion," whether love, or sympathy, or hot indignation. His love of children, even when he laughs at them, is surpassed by few other artists or writers, even by those of Mr. Punch—that adorer of first youth and green-apple and salad days. The enthusiasm with which he threw himself into all attacks upon abuses showed him a hot-blooded philanthropist. It was not for the first time that in his "Moral Lesson of the Gallows" he used his Hogarthian power against the scandal and brutalising horror of public executions. In the little "social" entitled "The Great Social Evil," which so electrified Punch's readers at the time, there appears the hand of the reformer, perhaps; but primarily a whole heartful of wide sympathy and pathos, from which, with true instinct, the artist has banished every suggestion of humour, retaining only with a few skilful strokes the sad and pathetic reality of the social problem. This drawing was made some time before, but Mark Lemon, with less courage than he showed in the publication of the "Song of the Shirt," hesitated to insert it; and it is traditionally asserted that it was at the time of the Editor's temporary absence through illness that Leech insisted upon its publication. And who can forget the contemptuous drawing of the brutalised dancers at Mabille (1847), or the other, made in full anger and disgust at the sight of a Spanish bullfight "with the gilt off," after he had attended one, when towards his life's end he visited Biarritz for a few days in fruitless search of health? It is a terrible page, and probably touches the limit of what is permissible in art. Shirley Brooks called it "a grim indictment of a nation pretending to be civilised;" and in England, at least, it met with a throb of responsive emotion and of cordial approval.

Passing from these things to a more pleasing one, we are struck with Leech's exceptional love of beauty. Never did Nature seem more delightful than in his cuts—in those dainty backgrounds in which the loveliest scenery is so skilfully reproduced. "What plump young beauties," cries Thackeray, "those are with which Mr. Punch's chief contributor supplies the old gentleman's pictorial harem!" It is true, they are nearly always the same girl, this ideal of Punch's—short in stature, simple and pouting and laughing, with big eyes and rounded chin, with bewitching dimples and pretty ringlets; but then this ideal, this "little dumpling," was none other than Mrs. Leech! The artist had seen her in the street in 1843, had fallen head over ears in love with her upon the spot, followed her to her home, looked up the directory to ascertain her name, obtained an introduction, and had straightway wooed and won her. "Now I'll bet ten to one," he wrote to Percival Leigh, as soon as he had been accepted, "that your reverence will think me the oddest person in the world, at a moment like the present, to think of writing to a friend; but I can't help sending you a line or two to say that I have been made a 'happy man'.... Never laugh again at the union of 2 soles (i.e., two flats); at any rate, don't expect me to join in the guffaw." And so Miss Annie Eaton became Mrs. John Leech, the object of her husband's devotion and of his inspired pencil. It is true that his young ladies and his servants are all much of the same type; but, in spite of Mr. Henry James' curious judgment that Leech had no great sense of beauty, he has usually been otherwise adjudged, as in the "poem" by Albert Smith and Edmund Yates—assuredly in harmony with most men's views—where he is spoken of as

"'Handsome Jack,' to whose dear girls and swells his life Punch owes."

And so it comes about that Punch's pages are eloquent with portraits of Mrs. Leech, who, with her children, became the very "orchard" of Leech's eye. The last block of all on which the artist was engaged was one to be called "An Afternoon on the Flags;" it represented a complimentary dog-fancier comparing the points of beauty in a dog with those of the lady before him, but it was still unfinished when he fell back in his bed, dead from the fatal breast-pang.

Leech would never employ artists' models—partly because his chic drawing, like Sir John Tenniel's, came natural to his genius, and his memory was extraordinarily retentive, and partly because when he began to draw for Punch, and for a long while after, it was unheard-of for black-and-white men on comic papers to do anything so seriously academic. But though he said that he had not in his life made half-a-dozen drawings from Nature, he was always sketching "bits" for use, and trusted to his memory and imagination for the rest. On one or two occasions he would ask Mrs. Hole, the wife of the Dean of Rochester, to sit for him in her riding-habit—but this was the nearest approach he ever made to the "model." He would make his first sketch and then trace it on to the block, finishing his rapid drawing with considerable deliberation, yet so quickly that he would often send off three drawings before dinner-time. He was extremely particular about the drawing, and the engraving, too, of his boots and feet, and expressed boundless admiration of Tenniel's power in that direction. "Talk of drawing!" he exclaimed to Mr. Frith; "what is my drawing compared to Tenniel's? Look at the way that chap can draw a boot; why, I couldn't do it to save my life!" Like all other artists, he was constantly asked by friends what paper was the best and what pencils he used. "H.B.," he would reply; "if you can't put it down with that, you can't put it down at all." His simplicity of means matched the simplicity of his art, and both the transparent simplicity of his character. His views relative to private persons' privacy prevented him from including portraiture in his drawings other than that of public men. But to get these, and especially members of the House of Commons, he would take considerable trouble. I have seen an extremely cordial letter addressed to him by Mr. Speaker Denison, in which special facilities were accorded him to witness the opening of Parliament.



As a draughtsman Leech has been admirably placed by Mr. du Maurier, who calls him a perfect ballad-writer as compared with the more scientific counterpointing of Charles Keene. And I would remark that it was above all as a pencil and wood draughtsman that he excelled; his etchings—of which he made two-score for the Pocket-Books—are not, technically considered, up to the sustained level of either Cruikshank or "Phiz." But his sense of freedom on the block he makes us feel; he revels in it, and thereby imparts spontaneity to his drawings far beyond what we see in his plates. Yet his composition is almost uniformly excellent, whether in line or light and shade, and apparently as carefully thought out as though an oil picture and not a Punch cut was the work he had in hand. The relation between his landscapes and his figures has often been applauded; and a foreign critic has exclaimed, with unfeigned surprise and admiration, "Leech and Keene could not only draw light—they could even draw the wind!" And with all this he told his story in his drawings more completely than any man of his day; he appealed to every class of society, and touched them all with equal facility, with equal good-humour, brightness, and beauty. His power of legend-writing, too, was remarkable—his explanatory lines beneath the drawings being as concise and happy as what they described. Says Mr. Silver: "As brevity is the soul of wit, he always made his 'legends' as terse as possible, first jotting them down hastily, and condensing while he drew. I have, for instance, a slight drawing of a heavy pig-faced farmer admiring with his wife a fat pig in its stye. Beneath the sketch is scribbled 'There now; that's my style! I call him a perfect love!' As the joke lay in the likeness of the owner to the pig, the last phrase seemed redundant, and therefore was suppressed before the drawing went to Punch." It is curious that with this gift, he should have contributed only once, so far as I can ascertain, to the literary portion of Punch, and then merely some mock "Verses for Pantomime Music"—strictly speaking, for the harlequinade—(January 4th, 1845), designed to show the fatuous idiotcy of those compositions.

Contrary to what might have been expected in so prolific an artist, Leech never for a moment entertained the sentiment not unusual among comic artists—"je prends mon bien la ou je le trouve." He was even diffident about accepting a suggestion for a joke. His own observation gave him the vast majority of his "pictures of life and character," but he would occasionally accept with a quiet undemonstrative smile some of the many proposals that were submitted to him. You might find it in Punch next week, or next year; but if the giver were an artist too, he would hesitate to make use of it, lest he might wrong a brother-pencil. He often figures in his own cuts, as in "The Dismay of Mr. Jessamy on being told that he will spoil the whole thing [private theatricals] if he doesn't Shave off his Whiskers" (Almanac, 1854—his own whiskers which he always regarded with a sort of mock-tender pride.) To his own little son we owe the delightful cut of the child who reminds the new nurse that he is one of those children who can only be managed by kindness, "so please get me a cake and an orange;" like that other Punch youngster who, aping mamma, faintly asks, "Is there such a thing as a bun in the house?" "Astonishingly quick Leech was," says Mr. Silver, "to seize on any sight or subject that seemed to have some humour in it. I can call to mind, for instance, how I chanced to see a chimney-sweep with his hand held to his eyes, as he was passing a street-door while the mat was being shaken. I told Leech of the incident; for, covered as he was with soot, the sweep seemed over-sensitive. In a very few minutes the scene was sketched most funnily, and was then drawn on the wood. The sketch hangs in my billiard-room, and they who please may turn to Punch and see the drawing. Another time I recollect we noticed some big buoys which were just the shape of fishing-floats, and which I said that Gulliver might have seen so used in Brobdingnag. 'Not a bad idea,' said Leech, and he made a hasty sketch then. Next morning the result appeared upon the wood, and soon afterwards in Punch, with a 'legend' which I quote from memory only:—'I s'pose you sometimes catch some biggish fish here, eh, old Cockywax?' 'Why, yes; and them's the floats we uses; see, young Cockywax'?"

From Millais he had many a joke; and when the two close friends were separated, the former would send him sketches of the idea. Several of these Leech left behind him, having only taken advantage of two—the protection that plaid is supposed to afford in the Highlands, when the unhappy novice who puts it on wrestles with it in a high wind; and the device of a couple of artists for defying the Scotch midges—a comic, balloon-like envelope for the head. From Dean Hole came that immortal joke of the yokel at a great country dinner, who on tossing off his liqueur-glass of Curacoa, the first he has ever tasted, calls to the waiter that he'll "tak' some o' that in a moog;" and it was from a passage in one of the Dean's letters to the effect that in a long run he had only had three mishaps on his promising young chestnut, that Leech invented the drawing of "A Contented Mind"—wherein the mud-bespattered young hopeful has increased the number of falls to five. And he loved to watch the sons of his colleague, Gilbert Abbott a Beckett—both of them in due time called to the Table—and to base upon the mischievous adventures and the characteristic invention of the young pickles many a laughable drawing. They were the originals of the boys who, with a ten-and-sixpenny box of tools and a sufficiency of nails, in the absence of their parents put the furniture of the house in a state of thorough repair!! And on a skating experience of one of them—Mr. Arthur a Beckett—comes that well-known design of a youth at the mercy of a skate-tout at the ice-edge. "Look out!" he cries; "you are running the gimlet into my heel!" "Never mind, sir," responds the man, persuasively; "better 'ave 'em on firm!"

From Charles Dickens, from Mr. Frith, Mr. Holman Hunt, and Mr. Horsley, R.A., Leech also accepted happy thoughts; and from an "Eton boy," the smart reply of a belle of a ballroom to the young Oxford man who "couldn't get on there without women's society"—"Pity you don't go to a girls' school, then!" The Eton boy claimed and received remuneration, to the amount of a couple of guineas, which came out of Leech's generous pocket, accompanied by a present and good counsel—a form of acknowledgment, however, which was "not to be taken as a precedent." Sometimes, too, Leech would re-draw or touch up sketches of good jokes sent in by outsiders; but on such occasions he, according to the usual practice of the Punch men, never signed the drawing so made.

The melancholy of Leech, which probably found relief in his more sarcastic and serious drawings, was one of the predominant features of his character. Sadness and dejection are often the birthwrong of the humorist, as we have seen in the cases of Gillray, Seymour, Andre Gill, and Labiche, and many others of Punch's own day. But Leech's gravity belonged to a mind too well-balanced to overreach itself, too genuine for false sentiment. Moreover, he "could be a merry fellow when harmless fun was demanded." So says Sir John Millais, who after Thackeray, and perhaps Percival Leigh, was the friend Leech loved the best—far more than any others of the Punch Staff, cordial as his friendship with them was. Sometimes his depression would make him think, says Dean Hole, that he was "wasting his time on unworthy objects and an inferior method," which was exactly what Kenny Meadows told him. It is true that the said Bohemian had, in a soberer moment, assured him of his immeasurable superiority to Kenny's self; but as the wine flowed, the truth came out of it, it appeared that Meadows considered his own illustrations of Shakespeare of vastly greater account than the mere comic sketches of young John Leech.

Leech, it seemed, could be as humorous as he pleased, and as whimsical. When his children misbehaved, he would correct them by making a sketch of their "naughty faces;" and he was always ready to turn a joke upon himself. He made merciless fun of sea-sickness—yet what is there so comic in sea-sickness, after all, that we always laugh at it, just as we laugh at the toothache, which George Cruikshank was so fond of caricaturing?—the suffering, in both cases awful beyond the power of words to express. One would almost be led to believe that Leech shared the immunity of the robust scoffers whom one usually sees behind a big cigar on board the yacht or steamboat. Yet when he crossed to Boulogne on a visit to Dickens, and was received with uproarious applause from what Americans call the "side-walk committee," by reason of his superior greenness and more abject misery, he was quite pleased, and said with the utmost gratification that he felt he had made a great hit. His companionship with Dickens was frequent; and when, in 1848, he was overthrown by a wave while bathing at Bonchurch, and received a slight concussion of the brain, the novelist rendered him the greatest medical service. On that occasion and the week after the cartoons were executed by Doyle and Newman respectively, while Thackeray filled the space usually occupied by Leech's smaller cuts.

His prejudices were to some extent the prejudices of Thackeray. That he should have shared Gilbert a Beckett's dislike of Jews was perhaps to be accounted for by his having in his youth been detained on two occasions in "sponging-houses," though through no fault of his own; and visiting the sins of the lowest upon the whole race, as is the orthodox practice, he displayed towards them something of Alonzo Cano's ill-will and more than his power of ill-doing. Similarly, towards Irishmen and Frenchmen he showed the same hearty prejudice, not untinged, perhaps, with patriotism; and of that Thackeray was led to write: "We trace in his work a prejudice against the Hebrew nation, against the natives of an island much celebrated for its verdure and its wrongs. These are lamentable prejudices, indeed; but what man is without his own?" Yet they were honestly entertained, and acted upon according to the lights of Punch which at that time were full aflame.



But these playful dislikes paled beside the hatred he bore to organ-grinders—a hatred as unrelenting as the organ-grinders themselves. For this he had only too sound a reason, for it was they who, grinding his overworked nerves, were destined literally to play him into his grave. As early as 1843 he began his campaign against them in Punch, and he never relaxed it until his death. Morbidly timid of all noise, he loved to stay at some quiet English seaside place, "where the door-knockers were dieted to three raps a day;" but he writhed most under the sound of the organ, and not Hogarth's Enraged Musician endured half the torture that Leech suffered in physical and nervous agony. He appealed with his pencil to the law; he ridiculed the barbarous persons, such as Lord Wilton, who "rather liked it;" he portrayed the effect of these tyrants of the street upon the sick and on the worker; and he never spared the offenders themselves. Once, indeed, he was goaded into showing one of these dirty persons leading a louse, like a monkey, by a string; but after a few copies had been struck off (and included in the parcel for Scotland), the printing-press was stopped, and the "realism" was cut from the block. From the first contribution, in which an old lady was supposed to advertise for a professor of mesmerism—a discovery much talked about at that time—in order to mesmerise all the organs in her street, at so much per organ, down to the end, some scores of drawings were directed against his unnatural enemy, who literally drove him from house to house. Even when he took final refuge at his delightful residence, 6 The Terrace, Kensington—now, alas! removed to make way for showy shops—and fitted it with double windows, he still could get no rest. Standing with Mr. Silver under the tree beneath whose shade Thackeray, Keene, and Leech loved to foregather round his al fresco dinner-table, I have hearkened to the pretty clink, clink, clink, of a far-distant smith as he smote his hammer upon the anvil, and, wondering that so sweet a sound could trouble any man, I have realised how shattered must have been the sufferer's nervous system as he neared his end.



When Mr. M. T. Bass, M.P., brought in his private Bill to regulate "street music," Mark Lemon sent him an eloquent letter of support, in which he touchingly dwelt on the torments suffered by his friend. "The effect," he wrote, "upon his health—produced, on my honour, by the causes I have named—is so serious that he is forbidden to take horse exercise, or indulge in fast walking, as a palpitation of the heart has been produced—a form of angina pectoris, I believe—and his friends are most anxiously concerned for his safety. He is ordered to Homburg, and I know that the expatriation will entail a loss of nearly L50 a week upon him just at present. I am sure I need not withhold from you the name of this poor gentleman—it is Mr. John Leech."



The artist only survived this appeal for half a year, and died before he could enjoy any relief from Mr. Bass's meagre Bill. But the public was loud in denunciation of the nuisance when they learned that he who had made their lives so much merrier for a quarter of a century had been harassed into the grave. "Carlyle," wrote Mr. Moncure Conway, "who suffered from the same fraternity, mingled with his sorrow for Leech some severe sermons against that kind of liberty which 'permitted Italian foreigners to invade London and kill John Leech, and no doubt hundreds of other nervous people who die and make no sign!'" Leech's last drawing appears on p. 188 (November 5th, 1864), in which an Irishman is shown thoroughly enjoying the after-effects of a fight, his face having been pummelled out of all recognition. It is full of fun and life and spirit, and gives no hint that he who drew it would delight the world no more.



And when the news went forth that John Leech was dead, a hush seemed to fall on the country, as it had done ten months before, when Thackeray died, and as it did again a few years after, on the death of Dickens. The three men all died sudden deaths, and Leech felt and declared that Thackeray's was the knell of his own. "I saw the remains of the poor dear fellow," he said, "and, I assure you, I can hardly get over it. A happy or merry Christmas is out of the question." What wonder, then, that on hearing that Leech had followed, Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie should have exclaimed, "How happy my father will be to meet him!"

"I fancy Thackeray was tired of life," said Leech in his deep bass voice to his Punch colleague Mr. Henry Silver. "At these words I wondered much," says the latter gentleman, "as any young man might who failed to see beneath the surface of a loved and prospering life. 'I feel somehow I sha'n't survive him long,' he added rather wearily; 'and I shouldn't much care either, if it were not for my family.' Then, after a pause, he said more cheerfully, 'But I can do some work yet. And at any rate, thank Heaven! they needn't send the hat round.'" But they had need, and they did. After his death Punch made sturdy, repeated, and successful efforts, not only to collect a fund for the artist's family, but also to make known the facts of his death-sale.

Punch's tribute to his mighty servant befitted the occasion: "The simplest words are best where all words are vain. Ten days ago a great artist in the noon of life, and with his glorious mental faculties in full power, but with the shade of physical infirmity darkening upon him, took his accustomed place among friends who have this day held his pall. Some of them had been fellow-workers with him for a quarter of a century, others for fewer years; but to know him well was to love him dearly, and all in whose name these lines are written mourn for him as a brother. His monument is in the volumes of which this is one sad leaf, and in a hundred works which, at this hour, few will not remember more easily than those who have just left his grave. While Society, whose every phase he has illustrated with a truth, a grace, and a tenderness heretofore unknown to satiric art, gladly and proudly takes charge of his fame, they, whose pride in the genius of a great associate was equalled by their affection for an attached friend, would leave on record that they have known no kindlier, more refined, or more generous nature than that of him who has been thus early called to his rest."

He was taken to the cemetery in the same hearse that had carried Douglas Jerrold to his last abode. Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, Horace Mayhew, F. M. Evans, John Tenniel, Henry Silver, F. C. Burnand, J. E. Millais, and Samuel Lucas were the pall-bearers; around his grave, close to where Thackeray lay, stood the whole Punch Staff and many friends who loved him; and Dean Hole completed the Burial Service in sad and broken tones.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] See Punch, p. 237, Vol. I.



CHAPTER XIX.

PUNCH'S ARTISTS: 1841-50.

William Harvey—Mr. Birket Foster—Kenny Meadows—His Joviality—Alfred "Crowquill"—Sir John Gilbert—Exit "Rubens"—Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz")—Henry Heath—Mr. R. J. Hamerton—W. Brown—Richard Doyle—Desires Pseudonymity—His Protest against Punch's "Papal Aggression" Campaign—Withdraws—His Art—Epitaph by Punch—Henry Doyle—T. Onwhyn—"Rob Roy" Macgregor—William McConnell—Sir John Tenniel—His Career—And Technique—His Early Work—Cartoons—His Art—His Memory and its Lapses—"Jackīdēs"—Knighthood.

Three other names belong to the year 1841: Ashley, William Harvey, and Mr. Birket Foster—the second distinguished landscape artist who may be said to have been raised upon Punch. Of the first-named, nothing need be said, but that he contributed a single sketch and no more. William Harvey, however, stands on a different footing, yet his employment on Punch is inexplicable. He had no real humour, and, what is perhaps more to his credit, he pretended to none; nor did he take pains, as so many do, to prove it. Kenny Meadows, we are told, used to rally him on his excessive sense of gracefulness, which stood in the way of anything like truthful representation. "Beauty," he would say, "is Harvey's evil genius, and grace his damnation." It hardly required the couple of initials ("A" and "E" on pp. 144 and 146 of the first vol.), conceived and carried out in the Birket Foster manner, with landscape backgrounds and field-sport symbols, to prove that Nature had not intended the artist for a Punch draughtsman. He was far better fitted for the illustration of "Knight's Pictorial Shakespeare" than for comic draughtsmanship. And when he had spread consternation in the office by sending in a charge of twelve guineas for the third wrapper, which he had been commissioned to design—money never being scarcer than at that moment—the proprietors immediately became equally convinced that such was not his vocation, and his connection with the paper ceased forthwith.

I said he drew "in the Birket Foster manner," for that young draughtsman, who was at the time one of Landells' apprentices, had already begun to draw initials on p. 85 of Punch's first volume—an "O," consisting of a laurel wreath with a Lifeguardsman charging through. These initials—there were thirteen in 1841, eleven in the following year, and two in 1843—were remarkable work for a boy of seventeen; and still more remarkable was the fact that he should be entrusted, even at a pinch, with the execution of a cartoon. It is true that this was only an adaptation of Cruikshank's plate of "Jack Sheppard cutting his name on the Beam"—a design highly appreciated at a moment when the fortunes of Harrison Ainsworth's young housebreaker were being followed with breathless interest by every section of society; and it is not less a fact that the head of Lord John Russell was touched up by Henning. Still the achievement is as remarkable as coming from an artist of Mr. Birket Foster's temperament, as those other cartoons, executed in "The Censor" at a later period, by Professor Herkomer. But this was not all he did, for to him are to be credited also a few miscellaneous illustrations, as well as those extremely French-looking designs which he imitated, by order, from drawings by Gavarni for a novelette by Lecourt (pp. 262, 263 and 275, Vol. I.). As an artist he was entirely untaught, save for Brine's quaint advice, and for the counsel of Crowquill that in figure-drawing he should make dots first for the head and chief joints, as an assistance. For a time he followed these strange indications on the royal road to drawing, and on them, perhaps, he based to some extent the illustrations which he made for book-covers, together with Charles Keene, for Mr. Edmund Evans—who, it may not be out of place here to repeat, now so well known as the engraver and publisher of Miss Kate Greenaway's picture books, was a fellow-pupil of Birket Foster's with "Daddy" Landells. He, too, made a couple of drawings for Punch in 1842, when he was no more than sixteen: the first a "blackie," entitled "Train'd Animals"—representing a trainful of wild beasts (p. 108, Vol. III.), and the other an initial; and his name appears as well as the engraver of one of "Phiz's" designs in "Punch's Valentines." It occurred to him a little later on to buy up "remainders" of unsaleable novels, to employ clever artists to illustrate some stirring scene of love, adventure, or revenge, and with this design on the boards to place the book for sale on the railway bookstalls. His shrewdness met with a rich reward; the picture sold the book; and it often happened that a book that had failed egregiously on its first appearance, would run into two or three editions when presented as a railway novel with a cover sufficiently startling or absorbing in its interest.

An unprecedented, and an unrepeated, incident occurred in 1842. In that year there appeared a number of drawings by Gavarni (apart from those re-drawn by Mr. Birket Foster), and something has been made by commentators of the early enterprise of the Editor in inviting the contributions of the eminent French master of caricature. But as a matter of fact Gavarni was not invited at all, nor did he ever draw for Punch. These blocks, and the one by Gagniet, had simply been bought up by the publishers, and used after they had appeared in "Les Parisiens peints par Eux-Memes" as well as in the English translation of 1840. The use of cliches, it should be stated, has never since been resorted to. When Gavarni did make a prudence-visit to England in 1847 he held aloof from Punch, perhaps on account of his former connection with "The Great Gun." His principal achievement here was to offend the Queen, Thackeray, Dickens, and others, by coolly ignoring their proffered hospitality and friendly advances.

In this same volume first appeared a notable quintet—Kenny Meadows, Alfred "Crowquill," W. M. Thackeray, Sir John Gilbert, and "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne).

Few men of his day enjoyed so great a vogue as Kenny Meadows. His pencil was for many years in extraordinary demand; and although as an artist he could not stand against his great contemporary George Cruikshank, his popularity—among publishers, at least—if not as great, was nearly as extensive. His work is more than half forgotten now, but the memory of his name survives; and to speak of "Kenny Meadows" is to recall the typical art of the illustrator and (such as it was) of the comic draughtsman of the first half of the century.



Kenny Meadows—he dropped the preliminary "Joseph" for reasons of "professional distinction"—had first met Douglas Jerrold, in company with Laman Blanchard, in Duncombe's shop, as early as 1828, and in due time was employed to illustrate "Heads of the People," which Jerrold edited in 1840, and for which he had secured the co-operation of Thackeray, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Lover, William Howitt, and other literary lights. Henry Vizetelly, who knew Meadows well, wrote to me but a few months before his death of his acquaintance with the artist. "He was," said he, "witty and epigrammatic in conversation. He was a singularly incorrect and feeble draughtsman, but abounded with clever and often highly poetic ideas. Like most of the members of the Mulberry and Shakespeare Clubs, he knew all the principal passages in Shakespeare by heart long before he became an illustrator of the plays. Like many artists and literary men of the period, he was always in financial straits. Every sixpence that he earned he handed over to his wife, a quiet thriftful woman, sister of Archibald Henning, and she used to give him a small sum whenever he spent his evenings abroad in company with Macready, Laman Blanchard, John Forster, Jerrold, and others, at the Shakespeare Club. He was a little man with a feeble frame, and much addicted to convivial society." He was, indeed, a boon-companion, generous and kind-hearted, and a delightful raconteur—"happy, conversational Meadows," as Blanchard Jerrold calls him—when at the club, and a jovial roystering Bohemian when he left it.

About the time that Punch was started, Kenny Meadows was living hard by College Place, Camden Town, and one night gave a rollicking dinner to the members of the newly-formed Staff; but Hine (from whom I had the story), as a sober man of peace and quiet, declined the invitation, as was his wont, and the next day, meeting Meadows, was surprised to receive a very penitent apology for their behaviour of the previous night. "What behaviour?" asked Mr. Hine, unconscious of any possible cause of offence. "What! didn't you hear us? Where do you sleep?" "In front. Why?" "Why? Because before breaking up at three this morning we said, 'Let's give Hine three cheers to finish up with;' which we did, with an unearthly noise, and danced a solemn dance on the pavement, and sang you songs fortissimo, and altogether made a diabolical uproar." "Never heard a sound," said Hine. Meadows turned sorrowfully on his heel without a word, and for some days could not get over his disappointment that, in spite of all their best endeavours, his young friend's rest had been unbroken.

When his first two drawings appeared in "Punch's Valentines"—"Young Loves to Sell" and "The Speculative Mamma"—Meadows was already fifty-one years old, with thirty-four more of conviviality before him; he was, therefore, the Nestor of Punch's Staff, as well as its most distinguished member. "Meadows was essentially valuable to Punch," says George Hodder, who by marriage had become his nephew, "for the thoughtfulness of his designs, which were intended to portray something more than a burlesque view of a current event or a popular abuse." His delight when he made a hit was like that of a prize-winning boy; and he used to pride himself that his drawing of a butterfly at the mouth of a cannon, typifying peace—published in Punch in February, 1844—inspired Landseer with his celebrated picture entitled "Peace," in which, however, the butterfly was superseded by a lamb.

Although he was excellent as a "general utility" man, who took as naturally to tragedy as he did to farce, to subjects of squalor as to grace of beauty, to Shakespeare as to Punch, he is not to be credited with any great sense of humour, his vis comica running rather to grotesqueness than to real fun or wit. His intention was usually more admired than his achievement—in his press work, at least; and the symbolic treatment of his subjects in certain of the cartoons which he executed in 1842-3-4, such as his "Temperance Guy Fawkes," his Cruikshankian "Gin Drop" and "Water Drop," "The Irish Frankenstein," and "The Bull Frog," are to be included among Punch's early successes. But better than this sort of design he enjoyed work of a more decorative type, in which grace and humour, as he understood them, might be introduced. Of this class is his wrapper used throughout the fifth volume. (See p. 46.) But his "poetic fancy and inventive genius," which aroused the enthusiasm of many others besides the appreciative John Timbs, were not in harmony with Punch's character, nor was his fun sufficiently pointed and robust. Whilst he remained he illustrated Jerrold's "Punch's Letters to his Son" and "Complete Letter-writer," which duly received the honour of a reprint; but he left in 1844, and straightway betook himself to the hostile camp of "The Great Gun," which aspired to be Punch's chief rival, to "The Man in the Moon," and other of the Jester's numerous thorns—for of such is the spirit of caricaturists.



The period of Alfred "Crowquill's" work corresponded with that of Meadows. Although a versatile man, using his pen and pencil with equal facility and ability—the former, perhaps, more successfully than the latter—Forrester (for that was his real name) was but an indifferent humorist. He was of those who thought that fun could be imparted to a drawing by the simple expedient of grotesque exaggeration of expression; and as a great admirer of Seymour's "Cockney humour," he was frequently pointless and stilted. Personally he was highly popular with the Staff, for he was philosophically happy and jovial, and sang good songs, and was, moreover, greatly sought after at a time when comic artists were few. He was cartoonist, too, in a small way, in the second, third, and fourth volumes of Punch; but his chief merit lay in his jeux de mots, for he was a good punster. Yet even his pictorial puns, good as they were, constituted little claim on a paper which was steadily improving its Staff; and when he left, in 1844, his place was easily and advantageously filled.

Passing over the name of Thackeray, who takes his place among the literary contributors, we come to Sir John Gilbert. His work, though slight, has spread over a longer period than that of any other Punch artist—save Sir John Tenniel, forty years later. His first contribution was the frontispiece to the second volume for 1842, which also constituted its wrapper, and was used as such for the monthly parts for many years. He continued with a few drawings to "The Natural History of Courtship" and "Punch's Letters to his Son," but his most ambitious effort was that representing the late Duke of Cambridge, coronet in hand, begging for public money as a marriage portion for his daughter. But when Jerrold's fiat went forth, "We don't want Rubens on Punch" young Gilbert turned his attention to the newly-started "Illustrated London News," on which his services were warmly welcomed and continuously employed, with such brilliant results to itself and to the black-and-white art in England. I was one day conversing with a distinguished foreign artist on the comparative merits of Gilbert and Dore, whose fecundity in their art was equal, and I ventured to assert the great artistic superiority of Gilbert. "You are right!" cried my enthusiastic friend, with more judgment of art than accuracy of English idiom; "Gilbert cocks Dore into a top-hat!"

Not for twenty-one years did he reappear in the pages of the London Charivari, until after an interval in which he built up his reputation as the greatest draughtsman on wood that England, and perhaps any country, has produced. Then he contributed the first illustration, in an admirable spirit of caricature, to Mr. Burnand's "Mokeanna," and then again, after another nineteen years, he made a full-page drawing for the Almanac of 1882, representing the unhappy plight of a knight who, summoned hastily to the wars, cannot induce his new suit of armour to come together over his fattened frame, even with the combined assistance of female relations and muscular retainers.



In this same year of 1842 Hablot Knight Browne, overcoming his former reluctance, began to draw for the paper. He drew its second wrapper (see p. 42)—an enormous improvement on Henning's—as well as some beautiful little comic cuts exquisitely engraved (used to illustrate "A Shillingsworth of Nonsense"), and a couple of "Punch's Valentines." In one of these—the Lawyer—the original of Mr. Squeers may be seen in the character of an orthodox pettifogging attorney perched upon a stool. But Punch could not support such twin stars as Leech and "Phiz," and the latter left in 1844 for "The Great Gun," whose leading draughtsman he became. In the pages of "The Great Gun" he illustrated Maxwell's "Memoirs of a London Latch-key;" and then, in 1850, he drew for "Life, the Mirror of the Million." In the Punch volumes for 1842, 1844, and 1852, his hand may be traced; and again in 1861, after his great illness, he turned once more to Punch. The brave worker, who would not admit his stroke of paralysis, but called it rheumatism, could still draw when the pencil was tied to his fingers and answered the swaying of his body. In 1861 are eleven of his sketches—initials, most of them; in 1862, but one or two; in the following year, sixteen; in 1864, eleven; in 1865, five; and again in 1866, 1867, 1868, seven cuts, and one in 1869; altogether, a little over three-score drawings, besides three full-page cuts in the Pocket-book of 1850. But, for all that, "Phiz" died more than half forgotten. His biographer, indeed, had never heard of his Punch work; and even the paper which had been so kind to him, and dedicated on July 22nd, 1882, two graceful obituary stanzas to "delightful Phiz—immortal Phiz," entirely forgot to mention that his facile pencil had been employed in Punch's service.

A single cartoon came from Henry Heath (Vol. III.), who was well enough known as a political caricaturist through having made many such plates for Spooner, the publisher, in the Strand. Heath emigrated to Australia, and Mr. R. J. Hamerton, who was soon to become a notable member of the Punch corps, filled the place he left, signing his "B. H." (Bob Hamerton) to resemble as closely as might be the initials of the old favourite. But when, later on, Punch work came to Mr. Hamerton, the Spooner caricatures were dropped. A couple of unimportant contributions sent in under the initials "J. R." complete the record for 1842.

It was through Jerrold's and Lemon's friend, Joe Allen, to whom he handed some of his pen-and-ink drawings, that Mr. R. J. Hamerton secured his footing on Punch. This was in the middle of the year, and in the opening number of the new volume appear his first contributions. For some weeks they were signed "Shallaballa"—the itinerant Punch's first cry on his jumping up before the public in his show, and apparently an appropriate pseudonym; but when the artist was reminded by Mark Lemon of the real significance of the objectionable word, he abandoned it for the better-known picture-rebus of his name—a Hammer on the side of a Tun.

The only meeting of the Punch men which he attended was that at the "Whistling Oyster," next door to the "Crown," at the time when the musical bivalve, as narrated in the description of the "Punch Club," was the talk of the town. Mr. Hamerton, who was introduced by Mark Lemon, and who made the fantastic portrait of it which was published in the following number of Punch, remembers Douglas Jerrold reciting on that occasion his version of the ingredients and constitution of Punch, which was worked up and contributed by Horace Mayhew to the next volume, but, of course, without the names attached, as here given:—

The Spirit is "The Comic Blackstone" (Gilbert a Beckett).

The Acid is "The Story of a Feather" (Douglas Jerrold).

The Sweet is The Great "Saxon Suggestor" (W. M. Thackeray).

The Spice is "The Sub" (Horace Mayhew).

The Water is The "Professor" (Percival Leigh).

And the Spoon is The "Editor" (Mark Lemon).

Where, then, was the art?



Mr. Hamerton was one of the few Irishmen who have worked on the paper. He had begun to teach drawing at a school in Co. Longford when he was but fourteen, and came to London to draw upon stone under the eye of Charles Hullmandel, the father of the lithographic art in England. With the exception of occasional incursions into oil and water colour—he was a popular member of the British Artists half-a-century ago—and a few years' book-illustration for the London publishers, "it was stone, stone, stone, till 1891, when the drawing on the huge stones became too much for my old back." Like his life-long friend and contemporary, Hine, he was not of Punch Punchy—at least, in respect to conviviality; and after a record of Staff service extending to 1844, with fitful contributions up to 1848, he deserted the precincts of Whitefriars, and soon after renounced wood-drawing in favour of his more lucrative employment. He had, however, already contributed ten cartoons—striking for their handling, if not at first for their finish. The majority of his subjects were Irish—such as the "Irish Ogre Fattening on the 'Finest Pisintry,'" "The Shadow Dance," "King O'Connell at Tara," "Bagging the Wild Irish Goose," and so forth—and terribly severe he was, as only an Irishman could be, on Daniel O'Connell and Lord Brougham. He illustrated a Beckett's "Comic Blackstone;" but his masterpiece in wood-draughtsmanship was his illustration of John Forster's "Life of Goldsmith" for Bradbury and Evans. Then after a couple of contributions from "W. B."—W. Brown, whose "Comic Album" was deservedly popular in its day, and whose "Statue to Jenkins" pleased Punch's readers greatly—and the cut signed "B," attributed to Thomas Hood, and another anonymous contribution by "S," there came Richard Doyle, one of the most notable acquisitions of the decade. He was the second son of the famous "[HB]," and had done capital comic work of an amateur character while still a boy. His "Comic English Histories," executed when he was only fifteen years of age, were published after his death; but he was still young when he first became known to the public. He was possessed of an extraordinary power of fanciful draughtsmanship; and his precocity is sufficiently proved by his comic illustrations to Homer, wrought at the tender age of twelve, with real humour, wealth of invention, and excellence of expression. His uncle, Mr. Conan, dramatic critic of the "Morning Herald," showed his work to his friend Mark Lemon, and Lemon forthwith requested Mr. Swain to instruct the youth in wood-draughtsmanship. So the engraver set forth with blocks and pencils to this "certain clever young son" of the once mighty "HB," who was now in a fair way of falling out of public notice. Arrived at Cambridge Terrace, he endeavoured to impart to Richard Doyle the art and mystery of drawing on the wood—how to prepare his blocks, and so forth, and to give such further information as might be required. But so nervous was the youth, who was small and thin in person, and greatly agitated in mind and manner, that he persisted in keeping his distance out of simple shyness, and literally dodged around the dining-room table, altogether too excited to lend the slightest attention to the words of his mentor. In due course, Mr. Swain tells me, the first drawing was delivered, "and a bad, smudgy thing it was, too, altogether different from the work he almost immediately contributed for the Almanac of that year." Doyle's first work in Punch consisted of the clever comic borders to the Christmas number, one of which enclosed Hood's "Song of the Shirt;" but with the illustration to the rhymed version of "Don Pasquale" he made his actual debut.

He was not promoted at once to the position of cartoonist; for the first six months he contributed only one big cut to five of Leech's, and his proportion during several years that followed did not exceed one in three. His first cartoon, entitled "The Modern Sisyphus"—representing Sir Robert Peel, as the tormented one, engaged in rolling the stone (O'Connell) up the hill, with Lord John Russell and others, as the Furies, looking on—appeared on March 16th, 1844; and from that time onwards his work rapidly increased in volume. His initial-letters—an invention further developed later on by C. H. Bennett, Mr. Ernest Griset, and Mr. Linley Sambourne—and his cartoons were reinforced by the famous series of "Brown, Jones, and Robinson," "Mr. Pips hys Diary," "Bird's-eye Views of English Society," and "Ye Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe," their manner of presentation having been created by the artist, who was forthwith dubbed by his comrades "Professor of Mediaeval Design." When Doyle was first called to the Table, his punctilious father did not show any enthusiasm, being in some doubts, apparently, as to the supposed wild recklessness of those savage orgies. He wrote to the Proprietors, hoping that they would not insist upon it for a time, as his son's health was not robust. A little later Doyle himself wrote stiffly to protest against his real name having been printed on the cover of Punch contrary to his distinct request to Mark Lemon, who had promised to retain the name by which he was already known to the public—"Dick Kitcat"—as in the etched plates to Maxwell's "Hector O'Halloran." But the demand was not persisted in.

"Dicky" Doyle continued to work regularly for the paper, and his monogram signature, with a "dicky" either perched upon the top or pecking on the ground close by, was rarely absent from a single number, when the Popery scare—which had seized the popular mind towards the end of 1849—infected Punch with extraordinary virulence. So long as Mark Lemon confined his cartoons and his text to the general question of "Papal Aggression," Doyle, who was a devout Irish Catholic, held his peace; but when the very doctrine of the faith was attacked, and the Pope himself personally insulted, he severed himself regretfully but determinedly from the paper. Anterior to this, Doyle had remonstrated, but had been reminded that he himself had been permitted to caricature Exeter Hall and all its ways, so that he could not complain if the tables were turned upon his own party. Jerrold and Thackeray, says Mr. Everitt, sought to dissuade him in vain. "Look at the 'Times,'" they argued; "its language has been most violent, but the Catholic writers on its Staff do not, for that reason, resign. They understand, and the world at large understands, that the individual contributor is not responsible for the opinions expressed by other contributors in articles with which they have nothing to do.' 'That is all very well in the "Times,"' was Doyle's answer, 'but not in Punch. For the "Times" is a monarchy [I believe, these were his very words], whereas Punch is a republic.' So when a week or so later an article, attributed to Jerrold himself, jeeringly advised the Pope to 'feed his flock on the wafer of the Vatican,' it was too much for Doyle.... So he wrote to resign his connection with Punch, stating his reasons plainly and simply."

But when Doyle resigned, for reasons which earned him the respect of all who heard of them, it was not realised how strong was the undercurrent of feeling within the Punch office. It is true that at the bottom of what I may call the "Punch Aggression" were Jerrold and the Proprietors; and that the onslaught of the one, with the encouragement of the others, so profoundly wounded Doyle as to force him into sacrificing lucrative employment, and condemning him in the result to a life of toil. But for once in his career Doyle was guilty of behaviour which, if not inexcusable in the circumstances, was certainly indefensible. He left the paper in the lurch. His letter of resignation was sent in on November 27th, he having allowed the Editor to think that the blocks for the Almanac, already overdue, had all been completed; and when it was discovered that they had not been done, and that nothing was forthcoming, consternation reigned in the office. No doubt the revenge was sweet, but it was ill-judged; for while no Catholic member of the Staff has ever raised his voice in its justification, Doyle's conduct served but to increase the bitterness of the anti-Catholic feeling in Punch's Cabinet, and perhaps to produce attacks more intemperate than any that had gone before. And, moreover, it rendered more difficult the position of others of the same faith who became members of the Staff.

So Doyle quitted the paper at the close of 1850, yet his hand was seen in its pages in 1857, 1862 (four cuts), and 1864. This was a question of "old stock"—a matter which often crops up in Punch: it is not a unique circumstance to see a sketch appear many years after it was drawn, and even when the hand that has drawn it has turned to dust. In 1883 there appeared a cut by Mr. Sambourne which was made fifteen years before; and in 1894 there was published a sketch by R. B. Wallace (of the late Lord Beaconsfield) a year after the artist died and fourteen years after he had ceased to draw for the paper.

But when Doyle left Punch he would draw for none of its rivals. With the exception of the single lapse already alluded to, his conduct was always high-minded and generous; and his virtue and nobility of character have been testified to by all his friends. He declined the offer of a large sum to draw for a well-known periodical as he disapproved of the principles of its conductors; and on similar grounds he refused to illustrate a new edition of Swift. Mr. Holman Hunt has recorded his testimony as to his sterling worth. "Dicky Doyle," he tells me, "I knew affectionately. John Leech and Doyle were never very cordial, Doyle's staunch Romanism separating them. While so rigid and consistent a religionist, he was one of the most charitable of men, and would never be a party to any scandal, however much it had been provoked. I am afraid that no portrait was ever painted of him, certainly none showing his delightfully amusing laugh, which always seemed to be indulged apologetically—with the face bent into the cravat and the double chin pressed forward."

Doyle's great misfortune as an artist was that his father, cultivating the son's fancy at the expense of his training, not only would allow him no regular teaching, but would not permit him to draw from the model—nothing but "observance of Nature" and memory-drawing. The result was that Doyle remained an amateur to the end—an extremely skilful one, whose shortcomings were concealed in his charming illustrations and imaginative designs, but were startlingly revealed in his larger work and in his figure-drawing. As a draughtsman he was usually feeble, though graceful; his effects, technically speaking, were constantly false, and his drawing often as poor as Thackeray's. He was saved by his charm and sweetness, his inexhaustible fun and humour,[51] his delightful though superficial realisation of character, and his keen sense of the grotesque. When he died in December, 1883, Punch devoted to his memory a poem in which his artistic virtues are generously appreciated, but not a word is said as to the parting of their ways. From this tribute, this "reconciliation after death," I transcribe one stanza:—

"Turning o'er his own past pages, Punch, with tearful smile, can trace That fine talent's various stages, Caustic satire, gentle grace, Feats and freaks of Cockney funny— BROWN, and JONES, and ROBINSON; And, huge hive of Humour's honey, Quaint quintessence of rich fun, Coming fresh as June-breeze briary With old memories of our youth, Thrice immortal Pips's Diary! Masterpiece of Mirth and Truth!"

In 1844 the versatile artist-dramatist, Watts Phillips, first declared himself in Punch with a few examples of his art, which George Cruikshank had fostered. They lasted up to 1846, but amounted to very little. He gave more attention to "Puck," of which Chatto was the editor; and when, a few years afterwards, he joined "Diogenes" as its cartoonist, he gave full rein to his undoubted talent.

In the same year Richard Doyle's brother Henry—better known as a distinguished member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and best of all as the grave and extremely able Director of the National Gallery of Ireland—made a number of small cuts for Punch, which were published in 1844 and the following years; but as I was informed, at the time of his death, by his elder brother James, now also dead (the chronicler, and the compiler of the "Official Baronage of England"): "The Punch episode was the merest child's play to him. His line, chosen years before, was sacred or poetic art; and his illustrations to Telemachus, done before this time, remarkable for invention and colour, were greatly admired by Prince Albert. That he drew for Punch at one time is, of course, true; but the mention of it gives a false impression of his taste and principal work at that period." Yet the spirit of humour was strong within him, for he was one of the "Great Gunners" in 1845; and from 1867 to 1869, when he was appointed to Dublin, he was cartoonist for "Fun," signing with a Hen, or "Fusbos."

Thomas Onwhyn, best known, nowadays, perhaps, by his "extra illustrations" to "Pickwick" and "Nicholas Nickleby," and by his plates to "Valentine Vox" and Cockton's other novels, began to contribute a few blocks to Punch—a fact which has hitherto been denied. His first drawing, published on p. 130, Vol. XIII. (1847), illustrates an article by Gilbert a Beckett, entitled, "The Friends Reconciled." The next was a "Social," on p. 230 of the same volume, representing a hatter's wiles and their victim. But Onwhyn was better used to the etching-needle than the pencil, and his drawing on wood was hard and unsympathetic, and his figures were usually rather strained than funny. About this time he was retiring from his position as a popular illustrator of books. Throne Crick's "Sketches from the Diary of a Commercial Traveller," embellished by Onwhyn, had just appeared; and the artist was beginning to bring out his series of albums of plates, big and small, on all sorts of humorous subjects. The time was, therefore, appropriate at which to embark on independent illustration in Punch. But in the following year he contributed not more than a sketch or two; and thenceforward, until he finally laid down his pencil in 1870, he confined his artistic efforts to his own happy ideas with but few exceptions—such as "Welcome, a Charade; by W. Shakesides" (1850). Onwhyn died so late as 1886.

For four years, if we except two or three unimportant cuts contributed by E. J. Burton in 1847-8-9, no new name appears upon the draughtsman's roll. Then John Macgregor—the celebrated "Rob Roy"—who had begun to contribute paragraphs and short articles in 1847, commenced adding sketches, such as his "Silence in the Gallery," in January, 1848. "Prince Albert's Hat" was also his, and others besides; and it is worth remarking that the proceeds of these sketches and articles were given to the police-courts, wherewith the magistrates might assist poor cases.

The year 1850 became of the first importance in the history of Punch. Not that William McConnell and his gentle art would make the year remarkable, for his early defection from Punch, and his premature death from consumption, cut short a career which promised considerably more than it achieved. Mr. Sala tells me that McConnell was a handsome little fellow, bright, alert, and full of originality. He was always exceptionally well-dressed—and with good reason, for his father, on coming over from Ireland and settling in Tottenham Court Road, resumed his trade of tailor. The youth sent in some sketches, which were highly thought of by Mark Lemon. He was turned over to Mr. Swain for some instruction in drawing on the wood, and subsequently took up his residence in the engraver's house for a time; but, not living long enough to prove his individuality, he remained to the end an imitator of Leech. Perhaps that was the reason that he drew so small a salary from Punch; at any rate, he always resented what he considered to be the contumelious and shabby treatment meted out to him by Mark Lemon. But for such money as he did receive, it must be admitted that he gave full value in the fierceness of his cartoons on Louis Napoleon. He did much book illustration, besides drawing for the Press, serious and comic—his Punch work including a couple of cartoons in 1852, among a great number of "socials." His last appearance was in July of that year. He was a good and improving draughtsman, especially of horses; and he revelled in beggars, "swells," and backgrounds.



* * * * *

The great acquisition of the year was John Tenniel. The paper had been left by Doyle, as I have explained, without its Almanac blocks, and it found itself, moreover, without a second cartoonist, and, what was quite as important at the moment, without an artist of distinctly decorative ability, who would provide the fanciful initial-letters, headings, and title-pages which have always been a feature in Punch. The circumstances of his joining the paper Sir John once recounted to me in conversation, with that sort of apologetic humour and true modesty that are characteristic of him:—

"I never learned drawing, except in so far as attending a school and being allowed to teach myself. I attended the Royal Academy Schools after becoming a probationer, but soon left in utter disgust of there being no teaching. I had a great idea of High Art; in fact, in 1845 I sent in a sixteen-foot-high cartoon for Westminster Palace. In the Upper Waiting Hall, or 'Hall of Poets,' of the House of Lords, I made a fresco, but my subject was changed after my work had been decided on and worked out. At Christmas, 1850, I was invited by Mark Lemon to fill the place suddenly left by Doyle, who with very good reasons for himself—that of objection to the "Papal Aggression" campaign suddenly severed his connection with Punch. Doyle had left them in great straits—the Pocket-book and Almanac to come out—and I was applied to by Lemon, on the initiation of Jerrold, to fill the breach. This was on the strength of my illustrations to AEsop's Fables, which had recently been published by Murray. I did the title and half-title to the nineteenth volume, as well as the first page-border to the Almanac, together with a few initials and odds and ends for the end of that volume, and the first illustration to the next; but only the half-title, title, and tail-piece were signed. My first cartoon was that facing page 44 in the twentieth volume; and, only signing occasionally for the first month or two, I went on from time to time doing cartoons.



"As for political opinions, I have none; at least, if I have my own little politics, I keep them to myself, and profess only those of my paper. If I have infused any dignity into cartoon-designing, that comes from no particular effort on my part, but solely from the high feeling I have for art. In any case, if I am a 'cartoonist'—the accepted term—I am not a caricaturist in any sense of the word. My drawings are sometimes grotesque, but that is from a sense of fun and humour. Some people declare that I am no humorist, that I have no sense of fun at all; they deny me everything but severity, 'classicality,' and dignity. Now, I believe that I have a very keen sense of humour, and that my drawings are sometimes really funny!

"I have now been working regularly at the weekly cartoons for Punch for close on thirty years (from 1862),[52] missing only two or three times from illness. In all that time I have hardly left London for more than a week; yet I enjoy wonderful health, doubtless to be attributed to regular riding. I carry out my work thus: I never use models or Nature for the figure, drapery, or anything else. But I have a wonderful memory of observation—not for dates, but anything I see I remember. Well, I get my subject on Wednesday night; I think it out carefully on Thursday, and make my rough sketch; on Friday morning I begin, and stick to it all day, with my nose well down on the block. By means of tracing-paper—on which I make all alterations of composition and action I may consider necessary—I transfer my design to the wood, and draw on that. The first sketch I may, and often do, complete later on as a commission. Indeed, at the present time I have a huge undertaking on hand, in which I take great delight—the finishing of scores of my sketches, of which I have many hundreds. They are for a friend—an enthusiastic admirer, if I may be permitted to say so. Well, the block being finished, it is handed over to Swain's boy at about 6.30 to 7 o'clock, who has been waiting for it for an hour or so, and at 7.30 it is put in hand for engraving. That is completed on the following night, and on Monday night I receive by post the copy of next Wednesday's paper. Although case-hardened in a sense, I have never the courage to open the packet. I always leave it to my sister, who opens it and hands it across to me, when I just take a glance at it, and receive my weekly pang. My work would be difficult to photograph on to the wood, as it is all done in pencil; the only pen-and-ink work I have done, so far, being for the Almanac and Pocket-book.[53]



"As I never have a model, I never draw from life, always when I want a portrait, a uniform, and so on, from a photograph, though not in quite the same spirit as Sambourne does. I get a photograph only of the man whom I want to draw, and seek to get his character. Then, if the photograph is in profile, I have to 'judge' the full face, and vice versa; but if I only succeed in getting the character, I seldom go far wrong—a due appreciation is an almost infallible guide. I had the opportunity of studying Mr. Gladstone's face carefully when he did me the honour of inviting me to dinner at Downing Street, and I have met him since; but I fancy, after my 'Mrs. Gummidge' cartoon and 'Janus,' I don't deserve to be honoured again! His face has much more character and is much stronger than Mr. Bright's. Mr. Bright had fine eyes and a grand, powerful mouth, as well as an earnest expression; but a weak nose—artistically speaking, no nose at all—still, a very intellectual face indeed."

Thus it was not only Nature, but the Pope, who marked out Tenniel for the position of Punch's Cartoonist—the greatest "Cartoonist" the world has produced. Had the Pope not "aggressed" by appointing archbishops and bishops to English Sees, and so raised the scare of which Lord John Russell and Mr. Punch really seem to have been the leaders, Doyle would not have resigned, and no opening would have been made for Tenniel. Sir John, indeed, was by no means enamoured of the prospect of being a Punch artist when Mark Lemon made his overtures to him. He was rather indignant than otherwise, as his line was high art and his severe drawing above "fooling." "Do they suppose," he asked a friend, "that there is anything funny about me?" He meant, of course, in his art, for privately he was well recognised as a humorist; and little did he know, in the moment of hesitation before he accepted the offer, that he was struggling against a kindly destiny.

John Tenniel was only sixteen years old when his first oil picture was exhibited at the Suffolk Street Galleries, and he soon became recognised, not only as a painter, but as a book and magazine illustrator of unusual skill. But he and Keene had already proclaimed themselves the humorists they were by the production of the "Book of Beauty," to which much public attention was drawn when the sketches contained in it were exhibited and sold. They had been fellow-students at the life class, and in the year 1844 were both intimate visitors at the house of their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Barrett. After dinner, when the lamp was brought in, the two young artists would amuse themselves, together with their host, by making drawings in coloured chalks. Mr. Barrett, it may be said, was a thin man, signing himself "5-12ths," in recognition of the nobler proportions of Mrs. Barrett, unquestionably his "better half." Keene chose the "Signs of the Zodiac," to begin with, as the subject of his admirable burlesques, Tenniel having already selected quotations from Shakespeare, history, poetry, and so forth, the humour which he infused into them being equal to anything he afterwards produced in Punch. But it may interest the present owners of these highly-prized productions to know that those who produced them thought very little of them as art, while Sir John expressed the greatest surprise that in their rubbed condition they should attract any notice whatever. As early proofs, however, of the comic faculty of two of Punch's giants, they were interesting and valuable designs; while, so far as Sir John's work was concerned, they were the forerunners of the extremely humorous illustrations of Shakespearian quotations with which he advanced his reputation and his position on the paper.

No sooner had the severe young classicist determined to accept the position offered him in Punch's band, than Mr. Swain was requested to wait upon him in Newman Street, and instruct him in the art of drawing upon wood. But he found that Tenniel, the illustrator of the Rev. Thomas James's edition of AEsop's Fables, published by John Murray in 1848, was already a brilliant expert. The accomplished young draughtsman soon took keen delight in the smooth face of a block, and at once began—and ever continued—to demand a degree of smoothness that was the despair of Swain to procure. Tenniel, indeed, always drew with a specially-manufactured six-H pencil—which appears more impressive with its proper style of "H H H H H H"—and so delicate was the drawing that, firm and solid as were the lines, it looked as if you could blow it off the wood. The result is that Swain has always interpreted Sir John Tenniel's work, not simply facsimile'd it, aiming rather at producing what the artist intended or desired to have, than what he actually provided in his exquisite grey drawings. So Swain would thicken his lines while retaining their character, just as he would reduce Mr. Sambourne's, particularly in the flesh parts, and otherwise bring the resources of the engraver's art to bear upon the work of the masters of the pencil. Doubtless the artists might deplore the "spoiling" of their lines; but pencil greys are not to be reproduced in printer's ink—they must be "rendered." And though, as artists, draughtsmen may groan under the transitional process, they realise that in submitting their work to the wood-cutter's craft, they must take its drawbacks along with its advantages.



The first drawing by Tenniel in the bound volume is, as he says, the frontispiece to the second half-yearly volume for 1850, but his actual first contribution the initial on p. 224 of that volume. Perhaps the most notable thing about it is the extraordinary resemblance between the artist's work at the beginning and at the end of his career. Of course, it is much "tighter;" it is much younger. But the hand and method are strangely unchanged. It is beautiful in its exquisite precision and its refinement, and altogether superior in its character to what its creator, in a spirit of severe self-criticism, chooses to believe. "My first cartoon," he wrote to me, "was 'Lord Jack the Giant-Killer'—and awfully bad it is; in fact, all my work, at that particular time, NOW seems to me about as bad as bad could be, and fills me with wonder and amazement!!" But this cartoon, continuing the Papal campaign so hateful to Doyle, by showing Lord John Russell with his sword of truth and liberty attacking the crozier-armed Cardinal Wiseman, was greatly inferior to the smaller contributions. His improvement, however, was rapid. Tenniel's first "half-page social" is on p. 218 of the same volume; while in 1852 we have his first superb Lion, and his first obituary cartoon. Gradually he took over the political big cut, which Leech was happy to place in his hands; but during the long years that they worked together the two men were admirable foils to one another. Leech sketched and Tenniel drew; Leech gave us farce and drama, and Tenniel, high comedy and tragedy; and the freedom of the one heightened the severer beauties of the other. And when Leech died, his friend continued the labour alone. Except in 1864, 1868, and 1875-6-7-8, in which last-named year he took his first holiday from Punch work and went with Mr. Silver to Venice—(during his illness or absence Charles Keene contributed thirteen cartoons[54])—and again in 1884 and 1894 (when Mr. Sambourne twice took over the duty), he has never, from that day to this present time of writing, missed a single week. Nearly two thousand cartoons, initials innumerable, "socials," double-page cartoons for the Almanac and other special numbers, and two hundred and fifty designs for the Pocket-books—such is the record of the great satirist's career; and the only change has been in the direction of freedom of pencil and breadth of artistic view.



Of his work little need be said here, for in its main bearings it has already been fully considered. But acknowledgment must at least be made of how, with all his sense of fun and humour, Sir John Tenniel has dignified the political cartoon into a classic composition, and has raised the art of politico-humorous draughtsmanship from the relative position of the lampoon to that of polished satire—swaying parties and peoples, too, and challenging comparison with the higher (at times it might almost be said the highest) efforts of literature in that direction. The beauty and statuesque qualities of his allegorical figures, the dignity of his beasts, and the earnestness and directness of his designs, apart from the exquisite simplicity of his work at its best, are things previously unknown in the art of which he is the most accomplished master, standing alone and far ahead of any of his imitators. The Teutonic character and the academic quality of his work, modified by the influence of Flaxman and the Greeks, are no blemishes; one does not even feel that he draws entirely from memory. Indeed, the things are completely satisfying as the work of a true artist, and—a quality almost as grateful and charming as it was previously rare—of a gentleman.