is daughters to them
and spoiled the noble curve of those lovely noses that Leech drew so
well, and brought them down a peg in many ways, and given them a new
lease of life; and he has enabled us to discover that they are not of
such different clay from ourselves after all. All the old slavish
formulae of deference and respect--"Your Grace," "Your Ladyship," "My
Lord"--that used to run so glibly off our tongues whenever we had a
chance, are now left to servants and shopkeepers; and my slight
experience of them, for one, is that they do not want to be toadied a
bit, and that they are very polite, well-bred, and most agreeable
people.

If we may judge of our modern aristocracy by that very slender
fragment of our contemporary fiction, mostly American, that still
thinks it worth writing about, our young noble of to-day is the most
good-humoured, tolerant, simple-hearted, simple-minded,
unsophisticated creature alive--thinking nothing of his
honours--prostrate under the little foot of some fair Yankee, who is
just as likely as not to jilt him for some transatlantic painter not
yet known to fame.

Compare this unpretending youth to one of Bulwer's heroes, or
Disraeli's, or even Thackeray's! And his simple old duke of a father
and his dowdy old duchess of a mother are almost as devoid of swagger
as himself; they seem to apologise for their very existence, if we may
trust these American chroniclers who seem to know them so well; and I
really think we no longer care to hear and read about them quite so
much as we did--unless it be in the society papers!

But all these past manners and customs that some of us can remember so
well--all these obsolete people, from the heavily whiskered swell to
the policeman with the leather-bound chimney-pot hat, from good pater-
and mater-familias who were actually looked up to and obeyed by their
children, to the croquet-playing darlings in the pork-pie hats and
huge crinolines--all survive and will survive for many a year in John
Leech's "Pictures of Life and Character."

Except for a certain gentleness, kindliness, and self-effacing modesty
common to both, and which made them appear almost angelic in the eyes
of many who knew them, it would be difficult to imagine a greater
contrast to Leech than Charles Keene.

Charles Keene was absolutely unconventional, and even almost
eccentric. He dressed more with a view to artistic picturesqueness
than to fashion, and despised gloves and chimney