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Literature was far more bountiful to him than this; how to run in harness. He could not sit in an editor's room, like much more bountiful it is impossible and unnecessary to state. many of the nameless prostitutes of journalism, and write In most cases he was fairly, sometimes liberally paid, consider-leaders to order, without caring what views he advocated. ing that he had no ability to drive a bargain, and seldom any He was not so constituted that he could let his talents out at power of holding on for better offers. He treated his work as so much per night, and grow fat, as wreckers grow fat, by an art up to the point when it became a commodity ready for hanging out false lights in dangerous places. Whatever the market, and then he left it to take its chance. This was faults he may have died with, this crime was not amongst a fatal mistake. More literary reputations have been half- them, and for this reason, if for no other, his helpless family ruined by slop-shop publishers than slop-shop publishers have should be succoured. been ruined by bad authors. A want of trade knowledge, sympathy, or instinct,-trade knowledge in its highest sense,-was Robert Brough's failing. He thought one man's money as good as another's: it is nothing of the kind. He was too easily led away by a cheque-book or a bank note, and the result is that his hearse is turned into an advertising van, his worst production, Marston Lynch, is hawked about in a motley cover almost over his open grave, and his friends are thus made to appear to be claiming public sympathy for the family of a tenth-rate novelist!

The money he took and spent so readily was never lavished on himself. No man had more simple tastes, or was a better husband or a better father. If the whole truth is stated on one side, let it also be stated on the other. Ill-health produced embarrassments, as it always does; and a sickly author, inexperienced in business, with no "securities," is not likely to make a prudent borrower.

His literary career began early. At nineteen years of age he was the editor and only artist of a weekly satirical paper published at Liverpool, and called the Liverpool Lion. In this publication he had the assistance of his brother William, and also in the production of his first burlesque, the Enchanted Isle. He tried acting, and succeeded, particularly in the characters of Petruchio and Sir Andrew Aguecheek at the Theatre Royal. He was much liked in and about the town; and when he left Liverpool for a literary career in London (after the Enchanted Isle was transplanted to the old Adelphi Theatre, by Mr. Benjamin Webster) he received many gratifying proofs of the esteem in which he was held.

The prose works he has left behind him are the weakest part of his "remains," and his reputation may be safely built upon the foundation of his poems. These poems will shortly be collected by his brother, John Cargill Brough, and issued in a volume about next Christmas. Several unpublished verses will then appear, and an unfinished but ambitious fragment, entitled Gissippus. A hundred years ago these poems would have placed him high on the roll of poets. Even now, they will surely add something honourable to English literature, and live long after such books as his Marston Lynch, Which is Which, and the Life of Falstaff, are deservedly forgotten. In his novels, so-called, you see exag. gerated plots, inconsistent or undramatic characters, and many evidences of bad taste; it is only in his poems that you see the strength of his genius.

To complete the list of his works it is necessary to add many Christmas books, such as Ulf the Minstrel, and the popular burlesques and farcical sketches which he produced, chiefly for Mr. Robson and the Olympic theatre. These are Medea, Masaniello, The Doge of Duralto, and Alfred the Great, (Olympic buslesques), with the Seven Labours of Hercules, Kensington Gardens, etc. (occasional farces). These sparkling but ephemeral productions have brought his name most prominently before the general public, and have overshadowed, for a time, his more delicate creations. As they helped to keep him, they ought not to be abused, although much of their reputed wit is of a purely mechanical order.

In reviewing the career of Robert B. Brough, it is impossible to look upon literature as an unreliable "crutch." Here In London he immediately took root as a stage writer, and was a sickly young man who started in life with no expensive the most popular burlesques of the day were those of the education, with no habits of business, and in a trade requiring "Brothers Brough." This dramatic partnership with his no plant or capital, beyond a few shillings' worth of pens, ink brother William lasted for some years, during which time and paper, and who for ten years enjoyed his freedom of Robert was busy with other things. He edited the Man in action, a tolerable income, and the excitement of being a the Moon at its commencement, in conjunction with Angus London celebrity. He dies, and leaves troops of friends, who B. Reach; he started and nearly sustained single-handed a honour his memory by trying to provide for his children. comic paper called Mephistophiles; he was an active contri- When his name is cleared from the fumes of that Bohemia buter to Diogenes, the Comic Times, and several other Punch-which he only fancied he loved, it will show a something that like publications. His talent in parody was very great, and his imitations of popular authors are hardly inferior to the Rejected Addresses. He was, at one time, the Brussels correspondent of the Sunday Times, reader of MS. plays at the Haymarket theatre, and also the editor of the Atlas weekly newspaper. He contributed occasionally to Household Words and its successor All the Year Round, his last prose sketch in the latter journal being an essay called "My Advisers." His poetical contributions to the same journals were amongst the best poems that Mr. Dickens was ever called upon to "edit." Few persons can fail to admire such pieces as "Neighbour Nelly," and "Totty's Consolations."

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His poetical contributions to the old Welcome Guest,-particularly the famous "Tent-maker's Story," and "Doctor Johnson" in the new issue of that periodical,-are specimens of clear, pure, graceful narrative poems that no English poet has ever surpassed. His verses about children will bear comparison for tenderness, and poetic feeling, and simplicity, with the best of Wordsworth's; and in his translations of Béranger's Songs, and Victor Hugo's Odes and Ballads, he has so reproduced other men's thoughts as to create fresh poems. His power over versification was very great, and it is particularly shown in his rendering of Victor Hugo's 66 Captive."

The little volume he published under the title of Songs of the Governing Classes, if rather wild and untutored in principle, is vigorously honest. Everything he wrote was written from earnest conviction. He never became associated with the daily press, because his mind was not adapted

those children may be proud of. If literature is a "bad
crutch," how few "crutches" are better?

EMINENT LIVING ARTISTS.—MR. JOHN LEECH.
BY WALTER THORNBURY, AUTHOR OF "LIFE IN SPAIN."
I LEAVE it for the date-grubbers and literary resurrection-
men after Mr. Leech's death,-(may his shadow never be less
for many a year),—to rake up biographical facts. I can only
mention that he was born in London about 1816, and was
educated at Charter House, soon after which he began a
triumphant artistic career by, I think, etching a country fair,
or some such humourous trifle, for the printsellers. It
might have been only some copy or travesty of Wilkie or
Teniers, this early work, I know not; but this I know,
that in the Charter House playground still linger among the
boys traditions of such a work by this quick-witted and
laughter-provoking Carthusian.

Though still, then, in the prime of life, it has been a long career of Mr. Leech's, from comic Latin grammar down to his last week's Punch work, and his pleasant tranquil success as a man of name and fortune down in the country. Coming in an easy first in the race for popular approval, Mr. Leech now rears his arch face, and lively, watchful, keen eyes far above his rivals and contemporaries. Gilbert draws better, and is more artful; but he draws too much, and, in consequence, has become mannered. Keene is more robust and manly; but he is uncertain, and rather archaic. Crowquill, Hine, and Kenny Meadows,-all of quick and pleasant fancy, are old, or gone by. Cruikshank, still careful, and neat, and dexterous,

hides amongst his thick grove of old laurels. Millais only now and then charges into the list. Portch is too young, imitative, and unformed. Smallfield, Morten, Lawless, and others of the young men, have not elbow-room enough yet to do their best; and then, again, many of these men are not humourists at all, but only book illustrators. As an original humourist, and not as a mere illustrator, however clever, of other men's meanings, must we consider John Leech.

and such "low creatures," more formerly, and his hits were very full and palpable ones, drawn with a broad, dark quill

pen.

Now he introduces more figures; gets further west, thinks more of the club; is less full-flavoured, does more refined fun with even less work; is just as kind-hearted, but deals more with the kid-glove world. His Mr. Briggs now is not a good-tempered, foolish, blundering citizen, but a drawling young guardsman, strolling about the parks. In mentioning the preparedness of the world for the avatar of Mr. Leech, I should have mentioned among his other good fortunes the projection of that merry sultan of all comic papers,-Punch; a paper which, with occasional veins of dulness, profound as Tupper's and bottomless as Ainsworth's, has yet yielded some perfect Koh-i-noors of wit,- -a paper which Hood and Tennyson have adorned, and which Douglas Jerrold used for years as a platform from which he let off firework displays of sparkling, scorching, singeing, and fulminating epigrams. It is in this ocean of fun that Leech has for years wallowed,-a Behemoth of drollery. With him, as with your indiarubberbacked vaulter, every somersault has but given him at once appetite and spring for another. A humourist with more stamina, with more endurance, with more "bottom," as fighters call the attribute, I never knew. It is, perhaps, a feature of this fast and not sure age that no previous century has ever produced more prolific men. Other ages have had more profound verbal scholars,-more subtle logicians,-more close woven solid writers, -poets of larger mind, and painters of more gigantic grasp,-but they never had more versatile and swift and encyclopedic men than our own. Agile, quick-footed,-quick yet industrious,-compelled for fame and money, and by the cravings of a weekly illustrated paper, to work, Mr. Leech has innundated England with mer

In two things Mr. Leech has been especially favoured by Providence. First, he arrived in this world at a time when, from some reaction of seriousness and of continued war, the whole world had fallen a laughing. There was a demand, such as never before had existed, for a humourist; for Cruikshank had ruled the roast so long that people were getting tired of him, as the Athenians were even of Aristides. No comet over Brompton or the City indicated Leech's birth: but the world was as ready for him as it was for Napoleon or Mohammed, or any other of God's awarded reapers. The coming comic man assuredly came when Leech came, and cried, and awoke, and found himself in that vast smoky London he was destined to amuse so wisely, and so long. A rich harvest of fun had been long browning for this little reaper, and his hand grew soon strong enough for the reaping-hook. He arrived into a rich peaceful world, that had time to hear and look on jokes, and gold enough to pay willingly for them. He had not to starve and beg about, laugh at what he loved and extol what he hated,- -as poor Gillray had to starve and do. There was no perpetual new outrage of George IV. to lash or sneer at; it was a more respectable, free, happy age,-more nervous and timid, but less gross and brutal. A fair and level lawn lay before Mr. Leech for his life's race, and off he went at a merry canter,-evidently a well-bred, high-mettled colt, that would be "a plater," if time was given him. We English had done with the gin-drinking, pawnbroking, cellar-hiding art-riment, has taught a whole generation how to laugh, and has life; thanks to the Reform Bill and popular patronage, 66 "patron was now a forgotten term of degradation; and those who had talent and industry, either in art or literature, could mix in the first ranks of England's gentlemen. Leech arrived in an age when the desire for reading had become an epide. mic, when knowledge was spreading like a deluge, and the multiplication of illustrated books, rising daily in the Row, thick as gnats on summer evenings, and most of them about as long-lived, was without end. The age wanted Mr. Leech, and lo! Mr. Leech came in a comic avatar.

Now, if Mr. Leech was merely a comic man, he would scarcely be more worth describing or dissecting than that blue winged butterfly, that haunts chalky lanes in summer scarcely more worth untangling than the logical inaccuracies of yesterday's leader, or last week's pantomime. But our artist, though often, I regret to say, flimsy and dishevelled to the last degree in his drawing, and totally regardless of all laws of art, is not the mere joker who may be the "poor Yorick" talked of at a dinner-table in an antiquarian disinterring way by fogies some sixty years hence. No, he has many faults: he is a little too dandyish in tone, and deals too much with trivialities; but he is never unkindly, never gross. Some think of late he has gone rather too far sometimes for prudery,-displays ankles and legs rather more than he need; that he deals rather too much with the follies of "swelldom," which are scarcely general enough in interest: in a word, that he has moved up from the parlour and kitchen into the drawing-room, and holds perpetual evening party there; but no one accuses him of being gross, like Rowlandson, or cruel and horrible, as Gillray. He is not strong and passionate enough to be very violent; he is too much a gentleman to be indecent. A man who is fond of children, who argues by his pencil so warmly in favour of domestic happiness, a man who detests snobbery and vulgarity, can never do harm to the age he lives in.

As we all go from extreme to extreme, life is a succession of jerks to the positive or the negative pole. A change in style has come over Mr. Leech the last few years; he used to be rather too full-fleshed and vulgar in his figures; they were redundantly funny, but the fun had a little of the comicsong exuberance of flavour about it. There was then more black and white, more of the rollicking bachelor, than now that he is restrained and patent-booted. He liked street boys,

executed drawings enough to fill the "Great Eastern" from stem to stern; drawings that if sold now (probably they were all on wood, and so have perished), would be worth a duke's income to the fortunate owner.

From one great fault of the age Mr. Leech, as far as I know, has steered perfectly clear. With all provocations to it he has never been personal. Men now sell slander by the pound, retail by penny page club lies, go down to authors' houses and then tattle about all they saw, publish friends' letters after death, and write down foul scandal with poisoned pens on poisoned paper, getting so much for every poisoning. I do not believe that any face in Leech's drawings is taken from life without alteration; no, not even that Jeames of the fattest calves objecting to the governess reading prayers; no, not even that youngster from Eton, who wakes the governor to tell him to pass the wine. Leech is never spiteful,malignant; he never indulges private malice, is never personal. Even Mr. Dickens, kind and hearty as he is, has been often, often accused,-always I believe unjustly,-of personality; but Mr. Leech,-NEVER.

-never

In these days, when we know that literary men are not safe from literary spies, it reflects great honour that Mr. Leech has resisted all these temptations, has betrayed no social confidence, and allowed no personal spite to sour his fun and humour. If Mr. Leech is not very wonderful or massive, or learned in his light and shade and his composition, he has at least learned, as this forbearance shows,-not only that true art, whether serious or comic, is selection, not mere imitation, but also the lesson so difficult to some small scribblers, that of not wounding feelings and not breaking glass windows to get impudent peeps at public men's privacy. Mr. Leech, like all true artists of pen and pencil, sketches not individuals but classes; it is only the poor green hand who cannot invent or re-arrange, that painfully copies an insufficient model, and neither adds nor takes away.

The true secret of being liked by any set of men is to like that set of men. The man who likes the world, the world always likes; just as the man who likes you looks at you, and the man who does not like you looks away; so if you smile at the world's looking-glass, the glass smiles at you. Mr. Leech likes the world, is happy and successful in it, and the world likes the good-natured, happy, and successful man,-the man who courts it from sheer good spirits, and not

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from self-interest. He whom the world honours, is he who, if
it does not behave well, and be pleasant and gentlemanly, and
"all that sort of thing, you know," would as soon go and
smoke a weed, or leave the world alone, as look at it. Your
man of good spirits is always liked, if the spirits are not too
good and boisterous; it is your ailing dyspeptic friend, whom
you have constantly to keep inquiring after, that is so unbear-
able.
I know nothing of Mr. Leech beyond his art; I never saw
him; but I am as sure he is arch, kind, and manly, as I am that
the man who writes a round flowing hand is good-natured, or
a swell," which means rich
that the man who drawls is "
and idle. He is no sickly, pale thinker of the old bookworm-
type, but a hearty fellow, who is fond of the country, is a
good shot, and a crack rider after the hounds. He likes
London, evidently because it is the great mart of faces, and of
those street humours which Dickens has developed so wonder-
fully, and he lives by drawing men, not the trunks of trees.
Besides, Punch is bought chiefly by Londoners, and they
want to hear of the drolleries and social absurdities of
London.

That Mr. Leech knows the country well, and, in a simple
unaffected way,
loves it, is evident from ten minutes' study of
his folio from Punch. There are little touches of sea-side
places, of brook sides, of coverts,-all thoroughly English,
breezy, fresh, unaffectedly true, and unstrained into idealism.
The backgrounds we refer to are slight, but they are nume-
rous, and show a power that Hogarth himself,-a regular
Londoner,--never showed a glimpse of. Just as a great man
must have deep sense of both ends of the pole of life,-the
tragic and the comic,-so I think the real humourist should
possess a loving nature.

better than the woodcuts, and that is saying a great deal. Perhaps no living writer has surpassed Mr. Leech in lively and natural colloquial dialogue.

It has sometimes struck me that, after all our great frescoes, our sacred pictures, and our historical art, you have to get on stilts to see properly, and don't care about when you have done so, it will be rather a reproach to the art of our age if it should so happen (mind, I do not say it will) that our future antiquarians of 1960 shall have to overhaul,not our frescoes, and our high art, and our academic works, for the manners and customs, and the follies, fancies, faces, etc., of the present century,-but the pleasant and vitalized pages of Mr. Leech's folios: but in these they will certainly find our swells and snobs, our anglers and Eton boys, our grooms and urchins, and our cockneys,-as they were, not as they might have been on the stage, or in Dreamland, all embalmed like flies in precious ointments.

How delighted will be the Professor Mole-eye of a hundred years hence when the New Zealander, tired of Londonbridge, comes down to the earth mounds that mark the site of the British Museum, and asks the professor for information about the dress and manners of 1860. The professor, with gloating eye, will unroll some folios of one John Leech, and will show the intelligent but sedentary savage the adventures of Mr. Briggs, the type of the John Gilpin of our day, the humours of an age long since extinct. The New Zealander will learn that, in 1852, we were running into folly on the subject of chatelaines, the Exhibition, agricultural chemistry, horse-racing, steeple-chasing, etc. He will have the comic side of the age broadly and fully set before him, and will not have to glean its follies and fashions from rare prints, as we men of 1860 do now the ephemerides of 1760. O lucky antiquarian of 1960! The beard movement, the rage for mesmerism, the aquarium madness, the Rarey fancy, the round-hat mania, are all embalmed for that lucky and as yet undefined individual.

Of Mr. Leech's thoroughly English and manly love of our great national sport,-fox hunting,-we need scarcely adduce any proof. Has not Mr. Leech, who has created so many indelible comic individualities, epitomized all the drolleries We really ought to be very grateful to Mr. Leech for thus and blunders of the hunting-field in the person of our dear old friend Mr. BRIGGS ?-a much more real person, by-the-recording our little follies, and our small humourous weakbye, and doomed for a much longer life, we think, than the nesses, for watching us with such keen, bright, good-humoured Rodomondo of Jones's epic, "The Stars and the Ocean," eyes as he does, making us laugh so wholesomely at ourselves, or than the hero of Brown's novel, "The Cornet-à-Piston and inserting us one by one in his museum for many a future Player of Stromboli." Who, too, is more perfect at the generation to laugh at too; nor do we sympathize with those "regular rasper," the satin-skinned "bit of blood," the intensely serious, solemn men, with perpetually clenched teeth fretful "whip," and the snob experimentalizer, than Mr. and brandished fist, who do not like to see follies and vices merely Leech? Why, I would rather have a rough hack dashed laughed at. They, being Heraclites, despise the Democrites; in by Leech, than I would half-a-dozen of Vernet's melo- they are for putting to the sword the swell who lisps and dramatic Arab stallions and Mameluke steeds of the desert, nicknames God's creatures, and would as soon hear a man that savour so much of some French Astley's. It is just swear as join in talking playful and expressive slang; using from this honest liking of common pleasures that Mr. themselves poisoned arrows, they despise the tilter with blunt Leech is so popular. He does not plant his easel on weapons. Why foolish Mr. Briggs? they say; the satirist's clouds, but on good west-end earth; he likes watering- province is to improve society, to chastise vice, to whip folly places, boating, and pheasant-shooting, and all other happy, out of our streets. But dear me, Hystrikes, the whole world What a caution for Jones the epic does not consist of demigods, though there may be still plenty sensible amusements. of Pythons to kill. There are many ways of doing good; writer, who never dances, never shoots, never smiles, never does anything like any one else, because his cue is some men help forward good by laughing, others by fighting. say sometimes to act the genius and look the misanthrope. With no very Mr. Leech chooses to do it by laughing. He is always, if you special "moral purpose," as the cant of our day runs, look, on the right side, and has quiet words to even on such serious things as the sufferings of the poor, and -on the Mr. Leech is always on the side of right and justice; no one laughs louder at popular follies, or more pertinaciously the degradation of some of our country districts,-o squibs and crackers them. He helped heartily to laugh education question, and on the selfish cruelty of the game out of court the temporary insanity of that unwomanly laws. He dances round us with his bladder full of peas, and Bloomerism; he is fierce against the unmeaning and useless no one knows where it may fall,-now perhaps upon a duke's exaggeration of crinoline; he has helped forward the Volun- coronet, now on the bullet head of Tom the groom. It may teer movement, for which we all owe him thanks, and he be small good in the cause of universal progress that these has tried to encourage the greater employment of women in blows do; but still their effect, if small, is wonderfully wide London shops. Indeed, there is hardly any kind, generous in its operation. Mr. Leech is no Titan to burst open bastille movement and progression of the last twelve years that Mr. doors, or drag wretches to the axe; but he is a light tirailleur, He has tried to who is perpetually firing from behind wall and bush, and his Leech has not leant a helping hand to. expose the luxury and insolence of our servants; he has voxed fire is very stinging and galling, and always hits his mark. us with the threatening precocity of the young generation; We have heard of the single rifleman who drove back a whole he has struck a blow at every small dirty fungus of folly regiment at a ford in the Peninsula: we should like to see the or vice that has pimpled up for almost the last twenty years. army of fools who dare attempt to storm Mr. Leech's position. Sometimes the fungus he kicks is very small, but still it is a What wailing there would be next day in Fooldom,-what gnashing of teeth in Bore-avia, fungus.

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And here, apropos of nothing, we may allude to the excellent fun and sense of the legends that Mr. Leech or his friends append to Mr. Leech's drawings; sometimes they are oven

A few lines from one of Mr. Leech's indexes will admirably show the versatility of his humour, and also the favourite and inexhaustible subjects of his fancy:

The Roadside on the Derby-day.
Special Constables.

Going to Ascot.

Hints for Prison Discipline.

Scene on the Chain Pier.

A Cheap Day's Hunting.
Fishing off Brighton.
Waiting for a Dip.

Master's Favourite 'Oss.

Prize Vegetarians.

Memorials of the Great Exhibition.

The Mayor Coming In and The Mayor Going Out.
Bloomeriana.

The Greenwich Dinner.
Betting Offices.

Table Turning.

America, Leech and Punch would still be indelible under the shadow of St. Paul's. The fate of Spenser's Fairy Queen, and of Livy's history, can never befal Mr. Leech's butterfly fancies.

How can I characterize the special technical excellence of Mr. Leech? He has not a scrap of poetry about him, yet he gives pleasant hints of cushat haunted nooks in the Highlands, and of green and flowery meadows, beside English rivers. He is material, yet his fancy is sometimes, as in the "Fat Perch fishing for Men," quite sopian.. His line is heavy, and not always very refined; yet he draws the most piquant and unapproachable girls that fair England can rear. Unlike, too, the mere reproducer of keepsake beauty, he draws graceful young men equally well, and the sweetest children father ever loved. His horses are full of character; he draws the screw as well as the thorough-bred; and though Now, from this we see that Mr. Leech, when not watching he likes best the drawing-room, no one lingers with a more street urchins playing, or swells swelling, delights in sea-pleasant smile over the little urchin moulder of mud pies. bathing places, rough rides, yachting, and such pleasant ways of observing old friends in new lights. As he has never depicted university humours, which I can highly recommend him as a whetstone for wit,-though they have scarcely proved so to Mr. Cuthbert Bede, the comic clergyman, I presume Mr. Leech was not a member of either university, but ended his education at the Charter House, No education, however, though it might have made him more book-learned, logical, Whether our great humourist is any descendant of the and reasoning, could have made his wit or his eye keener."John Leech, schoolmaster, of ," who in 1650 pubNo education would have made our delightful artist more lished a small 12mo, entitled,serious or more solemn. God made the flowers for the butterflies, the laughable things were given us to laugh at; but then we must laugh at them as Mr. Leech laughs at them, kindly and wisely. We must not throw somersaults over poor men's coffins, or attend club dinners dressed as harlequins.

It is, perhaps, rather invidious to compare Mr. Leech, a man so pre-eminently of the present day, with his predecessors. I think Rowlandson, though less industrious, and less read, and less refined, was just as funny; but then the fun was the fun of a low country theatre. Gillray was twice as strong; but then he was brutal, savage, licentious, and unprincipled. I do not think, however, that Leech is equal to Cruikshank, either in artistic skill, variety, or imagination; but he is just as amusing, though he has less fancy. But then good old Cruikshank is getting on in years, and is not quite what he was; and his old butts, the fat bishops and great aldermen, are gone away into the fossil-land, and we have other and newer butts to slap our arrows into: old frightened Tories, par example, progress-stoppers, and such cattle. But in two respects Mr. Leech is miles behind the great George,-in delicacy of hand, and in power of pathos. There are moments when, ceasing to draw tremendous noses, and fat boys, and frantic old maids, and such pantomime conventions, Cruikshank can be awfully in earnest,-as in the Gin Trap, where the skeleton, in a woman's mask, proffers the thirsty fool the aqua mortis; as in the Progress of Crime, where the murderer, dragged down by demons, plunges over a precipice into darkness unutterable; or, as in the Bottle, where the poor maddened girl flies over the ghastly and death. haunted bridge into the oblivion of the sable waters. Mr. Leech has no tragic power, so far as he has yet shown. We regret that in this respect Mr. Leech should be a one-legged man; but how can a man be tangie who has had no opportunities for anything but the comic?

Just as Mr. Leech has been fortunate in starting with Punch, and in being born in an age that will be illustrated, whatever it does,-when photography is benefiting art, and art is advancing daily, so was he also pre-eminently lucky in a century when it is almost impossible that a clever man's name should perish. Books and prints are no longer, like sturgeon, luxuries for kings, but are bought by the masses, who are, after all, the wisest and most generous patrons. Printing disseminates even rubbish so fast that it becomes now indestructible by the accidents of time. In days before printing, half the books of Livy perished; now, such a loss three hours after publication is next to impossible. If French fire turned England into an Assyria, Punch and Leech would be flourishing in America; if the Tartars broke over into

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His dogs are good, and his old sailors and cabmen (they must pardon the collocation) unsurpassable, and not caricatured.

And here let us sum up our verdict, by returning to the bondage of facts, and detailing what Leech has done as nearly as possible, seriatim. It will show better than comment the versatility and width of his comic talent in a career not yet, we trust, half over.

"A Booke of Grammar-Questions for the Help of Young Scholars. Now the fourth time imprinted, corrected, and amended. Hereunto are annexed, Four Little Colloquies, in Latine, etc. London."

we know not; and, not being pedigreearians, we are ignorant too whether he is any son of one Dr. J. Leech, who in 1855 published a work at Glasgow, dedicated "to all genuine Britons who value their civil and religious liberty, upon the iniquity and impolicy of confirming drunkards and lunatics;" but this we know, that it was not till 1857 that Mr. Leech ventured on independent publication, though as early as 1847 he appears in the British Museum Catalogue. As a matter of history we append a corrected list of his works, with short critical or explanatory annotations.

1817. Coloured etchings and woodcuts to Gilbert A'Beckett's Comic History of England.-These were excellently and unctuously funny, but the book was unfortunately a culminating point of the disgraceful irreverence and flippancy to which the "comic school" brought itself, from first creating, then pandering, to a transitory taste.

1818. The Rising Generation, from Punch. Twelve on stone. Folio.

1848. Illustrations to Albert Smith's Christopher Tadpole.-Exactly suited to Smith's humour, which was racy, lively, but not thoughtful.

1851. Illustrations to the Month, edited by Albert Smith. 1852. H. H. Paul's Dashes of American Humour: Illustrations to.-I have not seen this book.

1854. Illustrations to Fullom's Great Highway. — A flashy, melodramatic book.

1854. The first volume of Pictures of Life and Character, from the collection of Mr. Punch.

1856. Illustrations to The Paragreens.

1857. Merry Pictures, by the comic hands of H. K. Browne (Phiz), Leech, and others. Folio.-Observe, Lecch is put after Phiz.

1857. Under the pseudonym of Emeritus: the Militiamen at Home and Abroad.-A droll but conventional showing up of the effete militiaman. How differently Mr. Leech treats the riflemen of 1860, of whom he himself is one.-Vide "Artist's Corps," any drill day.

1857. Illustrations with J, Doyle to that best of all books of parody,-Theodore Martin's and Aytoun's Bon Gaultier (Book of Ballads).-These are most admirable, and well drawn.

1858. Some of the illustrations to Blaire's Encyclopædia of Rural Sports.

Second series of Pictures of Life and Character, from Punch, 1857. ·

Third Series, 1860.

1859. Illustrations to Francis's Newton Dogvane.

1859. Illustrations to Soapey Sponge, and other coarse but clever sporting books, by the same smart author.

1859. The Flyers of the Hunt, by Mills: Illustrations to. 1859. Illustrations to Paul Prendergast.

a discomfort. The Gilpin family almost sigh for Chepe again.

In this stage of the garden and the gardeners let the present little book come to them. But with a reservation. For perhaps the author has a tendency "to protest too much." It is not every garden that will pay the rent. Let not every

But this list, I am sure, is still imperfect, and misses many suburban dweller survey the little enclosure at the back of his of Mr. Leech's lesser works.

THE GARDEN THAT PAID THE RENT.* WHEN a train-band Captain Gilpin of our time transplants himself and family from residence in Chepe over the shop to the neat, detached, standing in its own grounds, smartly slated and smoothly stuccoed villa at Edmonton,-"the Laurels," say, from the small evergreens of that pattern playing sentinel at the gates,-we all know that the first notion that will possess his kindled mind will be in regard to the great things that can be done with the garden. To a man who, from the back windows of his dwelling, has for years and years looked on to nothing more cheerful than the grim, grimy blank wall of a neighbouring house, a small parallelogram of gritty gravel, rank grass, and dwarfed vegetation, the whole neatly half-bound in brick, possesses unspeakable attractions. He will engage a working gardener to put things tidy; he will garden himself. Why not? For Captain Gilpin has now leisure on his hands, and is prescribed exercise; he having developed an amazing tendency to fat of late years. He will dig, and his son Tom shall hoe, and his daughter Polly shall weed; and, altogether, with such a wonderful combination of labour and intelligence, the garden shall be brought to a great state of perfection. Expense is incurred. New gravel, new mould, new garden tools, and a bright-red watering-pot; and Mr. Gilpin wears a garden hat and garden gloves, and with garden scissors snips away dexterously amongst the dead leaves; and a summer-house is erected, over which creepers are to festoon themselves and roses twine, and it is expected that it will be a delicious retreat in hot weather, when the house is unbearable; and the possibility of enjoying the meal of tea in the seclusion of that small bower is looked forward to as fraught with the choicest earthly bliss. much early rising and hard working in the garden: and there is enthusiasm, and hope, and expectancy, if nothing much

besides.

And at first there is

But a change comes. The hired gardener is a dreadful hireling; what good he does for his money no one knows.

house,-about the size of a large counterpane,-with the fond
fancy that he is going to coin that precious property. The
promise may be kept to the ear and yet broken to the hope.
But, given an acre of garden ground, decently stocked with
fruit-trees, with well-expended money and well-bestowed
labour, our author shows that, after perhaps some months of
loss, the garden may be made not merely to pay its expenses,
but, above that, to return a moderate profit, perhaps enough
to pay the house-rent, if that be no considerable amount.
But the profits are to be swollen by means not strictly
horticultural. Keep rabbits,-a dozen always, the common
brown ones,-recommends the author. You will have quan-
tities of refuse vegetables, leaves of all kinds. You can buy
rabbits six weeks old for sixpence each. In ten weeks they
will be ready for table, worth eighteen-pence each. As you
kill the old rabbits, buy more young ones. They will not
have cost a halfpenny to keep; and if your family eat seventy
in the course of the year, there will be a clear profit to the
credit of the garden of three pounds ten shillings.

The author is quite in love with manure, and relates thereanent this anecdote:-"A clergyman was congratulating a farmer on the state of his crops. The farmer was still nervous, for there had been bad years. My friend,' said the farmer replied; that's all very well; but gie' mey th' doong clergyman, trust in Providence.' 'Providence! yes, yes,' the

cart.'

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So, great stress is laid upon the dust-heap and the refuse of the house and garden. Of the dust-hole into which he peered, our author writes:-"Here are materials that might be elaborated into pork, which you now leave for the Therefore a pig is to be kept, who is not necessarily a disscavengers; more, which you pay them to carry away." agreeable animal, except when he is ill kept; who is not really fond of wallowing in mud, according to the popular view of his predilections, but, being doomed to eat and sleep in a narrow stye, never cleaned out, and suffering from irritation of the skin produced by continual living in dirt, naturally Draining is pronounced to be the foundation of all gardenburies himself in the mire to allay the consequent itching. ing. The following is an economical plan :

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"Dig drains three feet deep, and in the place of tiles, which incur an expense, empty the contents of your dust-bin, and allow your ashes, etc., to be a foot deep in the bottom of the drain, and fill up the remaining two feet with soil. The layer of cinders will form a good drain, answering quite as well as though tiles had been used, and having the advantage of costing nothing. Indeed, this use of cinders is a saving, for the dustman will not remove ashes

For the foundation of gravel walks broken granite is recommended:

"Nine inches of this, with one inch of fine gravel at the top, forms a perfect gravel walk. Again, six or eight inches of cinders, and three inches of gravel at the top, makes a good substantial path. The path should of course slope from the centre to the

sides."

very round He dawdles about with a birch-broom over his shoulders, he inspects the skies, and mutters prophecies about the weather, which are seldom borne out by facts. He thrusts roots in the ground for the express purpose, it would seem, of digging them up again. He is constantly sitting in the wheelbarrow eating mysterious meals from a blue and white handkerchief, curiously knotted. He is unremitting in his applications for beer. Mr. Gilpin finds digging a sadly back-without being paid for it." aching business, almost as bad as the rheumatism. He resigns the working out of detail to others; henceforward his sole duties shall be those of inspection and direction. Mrs. Gilpin has not skirmished amongst the dead leaves, warring determinedly with withered vegetation, for a long time. She thinks the garden a great expense,-a hobby of Mr. Gilpin's, in the enjoyment of which he should now be rather checked than encouraged. The flowers are not of remarkable perfection, considering the toil and time spent upon them; and the vegetables are costly of production, and even then some way behind the London markets in quality. And the whole family have become by this time quite accustomed to the garden, and know all about it. It is no longer the fresh joy it was once. Then come apathy and neglect, dismissal of the hireling, and an end of early rising and gardening; the rust eats holes in the red watering-pot, and stinging-nettles appear in abundant crops. The summer-house has not answered expectation; there is a perennial puddle on its floor, whitewash hangs about one's coat after a visit to it, garden insects of the ugliest shapes have made it an especial haunt, and spiderwebs veil one's face on ingress or egress. It is a mistake and

• The Garden that Paid the Rent, London: Chapman and Hall. 1800.

Against insect life, as may be supposed, the author makes unflinching war. For worms, the prescription runs that the grass be watered with lime water, which brings the worms to the top, when they can be readily destroyed. To be rid of ants'-nests, they are to be deluged with boiling water. Plants afflicted with ants are to be immersed in water, until the insects are drowned. Tobacco smoke, or syringeing with tobacco-water, will get rid of the green fly; black sulphur is fatal to the red spider. Earwigs are to be trapped with bean-stalks, and then blown through the stalks into a pail of hot water. Scatter cabbage leaves about at night, and you will find them loaded with snails and slugs in the morning, to be despatched then as you please. And, to finish this Black, Brunswicker list, arsenicated sandwiches are to be placed at the disposal of rats and mice.

In fine, this is a pleasant little book, to be commended to

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