of Leech in a word was that he
turned caricature into character; and would leave behind him not a
little of the history of his time and its follies, sketched with
inimitable grace.

"If we turn back to a collection of the works of Rowlandson or Gilray,
we shall find, in spite of the great humour displayed in many of them,
that they are rendered wearisome and unpleasant by a vast amount of
personal ugliness. Now, besides that it is a poor device to represent
what is satirized as being necessarily ugly, which is but the resource
of an angry child or a jealous woman, it serves no purpose but to
produce a disagreeable result. There is no reason why the farmer's
daughter in the old caricature who is squalling at the harpsichord (to
the intense delight, by the bye, of her worthy father, whom it is her
duty to please) should be squab and hideous. The satire on the manner of
her education, if there be any in the thing at all, would be just as
good, if she were pretty. Mr. Leech would have made her so. The average
of farmers' daughters in England are not impossible lumps of fat. One is
quite as likely to find a pretty girl in a farm-house, as to find an
ugly one; and we think, with Mr. Leech, that the business of this Style
of art is with the pretty one. She is not only a pleasanter object, but
we have more interest in her. We care more about what does become her,
and does not become her. Mr. Leech represented the other day certain
delicate creatures with bewitching countenances encased in several
varieties of that amazing garment, the ladies' paletot. Formerly those
fair creatures would have been made as ugly and ungainly as possible,
and then the point would have been lost. The spectator, with a laugh at
the absurdity of the whole group, would not have cared how such uncouth
creatures disguised themselves, or how ridiculous they became. . . . But to
represent female beauty as Mr. Leech represents it, an artist must have,
a most delicate perception of it; and the gift of being able to realise
it to us with two or three slight, sure touches of his pencil. This
power Mr. Leech possesses, in an extraordinary degree. . . . For this
reason, we enter our protest against those of the Rising Generation who
are precociously in love being made the subject of merriment by a
pitiless and unsympathizing world. We never saw a boy more distinctly in
the right than the young gentleman kneeling on the chair to beg a lock
of hair from his pretty