, in the ease and
beauty of his line, his knowledge of effect, his complete mastery over
the material means at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to me as
superior to Leech as Leech is to him in grace, in human naturalness
and geniality of humour, in accurate observation of life, in keenness
of social perception, and especially in width of range.

[Illustration: A STROKE OF BUSINESS

VILLAGE HAMPDEN (_"who with dauntless breast" has undertaken for
sixpence to keep off the other boys_). "If any of yer wants to see
what we're a Paintin' of it's a 'Alfpenny a 'Ead, but you marn't make
no Remarks."--_Punch_, May 4, 1867.]

The little actors on Leech's stage are nearly all of them every-day
people--types one is constantly meeting. High or low, tipsy or sober,
vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before
Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full
of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of
for our amusement.

Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar
and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity,
they are characters themselves, rather than types of English
characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they
really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the
depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life
just as it is?

[Illustration: "NONE O' YOUR LARKS"

GIGANTIC NAVVY: "Let's walk between yer, Gents; folks 'll think you've
took up a Deserter."--_Punch_, October 19, 1861.]

They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of
subtlety--intensely comic! Their enormous perplexities about nothing,
their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its
ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness
of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and
which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just
as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him,
though he was the most abstemious of men. I am now speaking of his
middle-class people--those wonderful philistines of either sex; those
elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those
muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and
florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their
prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little
abou