The History of "Punch" Part 33

(_From the Portrait by Sir John E. Millais, Bart., R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery._)]

The story of Leech's early life has been already told. How he was the son of the luckless owner of the London coffee-house in Ludgate Hill; how Flaxman saw his infantile drawings and declared he would be nothing but an artist--nay, "he _was_ an artist;" how, at the Charterhouse, the gentle, nervous lad was schoolfellow of Thackeray, with whom he formed a pa.s.sionate, life-long friendship; and of yet another hearty friend, Mr.

Nethercote; how, when he was medical student at Bartholomew's Hospital, he contracted another evergreen friendship with Percival Leigh, and formed an acquaintanceship, long maintained, but never fully ripened, with another medico--Albert Smith, of Middles.e.x; how his father's failure caused him to give up medicine and the knife in favour of art and the pencil--by the exercise of which, when he was still under Dr.

c.o.c.kle, son of the pill-doctor, he had already fascinated his fellow-students, and in particular Percival Leigh--on whose initiative it was that the "Comic Latin Grammar" was carried into execution. All this and more has ere now been recorded. But it all bears directly on his _Punch_ career, and must not by any means be overlooked.

In 1836, when he was but nineteen years of age, he had made a bid for the unhappy Seymour's vacant place as Charles d.i.c.kens' ill.u.s.trator; but he had been already forestalled by "Phiz," and Leech was perforce rejected, as Thackeray had been refused before him, and Buss dismissed.

Leech was already a good draughtsman on wood, having while resident with Orrin Smith the wood-engraver--he who had previously tried to magnetise the idea of a "London Charivari" into life--received many practical hints of the greatest artistic value. For some time afterwards he worked in harmony with his fellow-student of a literary turn, whose n.o.ble bra.s.s-plate inscribed "Mr. Albert Smith, M.R.C.S., Surgeon-Dentist!"

once brought upon the artist, says Percival Leigh, the candid chaff, of a vulgar street-urchin. "Good boy!" said Leech, appreciating the attention and rewarding it with a penny. "Now go and insult somebody else." He drew furthermore upon the stone, and distinguished himself in "Bell's Life in London"--the paper to which several of the most eminent comic artists of the day then contributed--and in 1841, five years after his first-published "Etchings and Sketchings, by A. Pen, Esq.," he issued in its complete form his "Children of the Mobility." It was at that time that Percival Leigh, having satisfied himself of the character and tone of the new comic paper, not only made his own debut in it, but introduced his friend and colleague, John Leech--with what distressing result as to his full-page block of "Foreign Affairs" the chapter on cartoons discloses. (_See_ p. 173.) And here it may be added that all was not plain sailing between Leech and _Punch_ at the commencement; for soon after he resumed work he struck for higher terms. Until he got his way he did no more work for the paper--as the reader may satisfy himself by turning to its pages; and when he did, his triumph was visited, as has already been described, upon the heads of less talented contributors. It may safely be a.s.sumed that Leech knew nothing of this, for the gentleness of the man was such that he could not have suffered the idea that his success meant others' disadvantage.

Three things may be said to have brought Leech's powers as a humorous draughtsman prominently before the public--his ill.u.s.trations 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 "sn.o.b," 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 t.i.the 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 n.o.bility 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 sn.o.b; 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 const.i.tutes 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 ant.i.thesis, 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 ill.u.s.trated the pa.s.sing 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-cla.s.s British householder, who liked to have everything nice and neat about him, including the pretty, amiable, zealous, h-less maidservant in nice white ap.r.o.n 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 7 a year. And so Leech gave us the series he ent.i.tles "Servantgalism," harshly ill.u.s.trative 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" pa.s.sing their time in relatively idle luxury, when they, together with linen-drapers' a.s.sistants 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 a.s.suredly 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 n.o.ble movement; and as fate willed it, Mr. G. Haydon, who had greatly a.s.sisted 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 sn.o.bs 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 a.s.sociates; 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 "m.u.f.f"--_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 'h.e.l.l'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 cla.s.s 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 c.o.c.kney 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL.

TIME: Midnight. A Sketch not a Hundred Miles from the Haymarket.

_Bella:_ "Ah! f.a.n.n.y! How long have you been _gay_?"

(From _Punch_, 12th Sept., 1857, Vol. x.x.xiii.)]

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 "pa.s.sion," whether love, or sympathy, or hot indignation. His love of children, even when he laughs at them, is surpa.s.sed 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" ent.i.tled "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 a.s.serted 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.

Pa.s.sing 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--a.s.suredly 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "LEECH'S 'PRETTY GIRL.'"

(_A Skit by Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., R.A. By Permission of W. W. Fenn, Esq._)]

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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 c.o.c.kywax?' 'Why, yes; and them's the floats we uses; see, young c.o.c.kywax'?"

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-gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 d.i.c.kens, 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, a.s.sured 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 d.i.c.kens, 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 d.i.c.kens 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN LEECH'S HOUSE, KENSINGTON HIGH STREET (NOW DEMOLISHED).

(_Drawn by John Fulleylove, R.I._)]