Dickens
among them; Canon Hole, a great friend of Leech's, and who has written
most affectionately about him, read the service; and when the coffin
was lowered into the grave, John Millais burst into tears and loud
sobs, setting an example that was followed all round; we all forgot
our manhood and cried like women! I can recall no funeral in my time
where simple grief and affection have been so openly and spontaneously
displayed by so many strangers as well as friends--not even in France,
where people are more demonstrative than here. No burial in
Westminster Abbey that I have ever seen ever gave such an impression
of universal honour, love, and regret.

"Whom the gods love die young." He was only forty-six!

I was then invited to join the _Punch_ staff and take Leech's empty
chair at the weekly dinner--and bidden to cut my initials on the
table, by his; his monogram as it was carved by him is J.L. under a
leech in a bottle, dated 1854; and close by on the same board are the
initials W.M.T.

I flatter myself that convivially, at least, my small D.M., carved in
impenetrable oak, will go down to posterity in rather distinguished
company!

If ever there was a square English hole, and a square English peg to
fit it, that hole was _Punch_, and that peg was John Leech. He was
John Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised--John Bull
polite, modest, gentle--full of self-respect and self-restraint, and
with all the bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly
after, but very soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the
drawing-room, and the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than
in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper
middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius,
which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater
number--and yet delight the most fastidious of his day--and I think of
ours. One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his
charm.

He was all of a piece, and moved and worked with absolute ease,
freedom, and certainty, within the limits nature had assigned him--and
his field was a very large one. He saw and represented the whole
panorama of life that came within his immediate ken with an unwavering
consistency, from first to last; from a broadly humorous, though
mostly sympathetic point of view that never changed--a very delightful
point of view, if not the highest conceivable.

Hand and eye work