t the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with
the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on
one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers
of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore
all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.

When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if
not quite so funny, at his best, I think. His costermongers and
policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are
inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses and cabs, I really cannot
find words to express my admiration of them. In these, as in his
street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.

Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and
peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his
volunteers--he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer
movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous,
in which they have immortalised its beginning.

[Illustration: AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE

OMNIBUS DRIVER (_to Coster_). "Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will
you? What are you gaping at? Did you never see a Milisher man before?"

_A disgustingly ignorant observation in the opinion of young Longslip,
Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Fusileer Guards_--_Punch_, March 7, 1863.]

Charles Keene is seldom a satirist. His nature was too tolerant and
too sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad and somewhat perfunctory
hater. He tries to hate 'Arry, but he can't, for he draws an ideal
'Arry that surely never was, and thus his shaft misses the mark:
compare his 'Arry to one of Leech's snobs, for instance! He tries to
hate the haw-haw swell, and is equally unsuccessful. When you hate and
can draw, you can draw what you hate down to its minutest
details--better, perhaps, than what you love--so that whoever runs and
reads and looks at your pictures hates with you.

Who ever hated a personage of Keene's beyond that feeble kind of
aversion that comes from mere uncongeniality, a slightly offended
social taste, or prejudice? One feels a mere indulgent and
half-humorous disdain, but no hate. On the other hand, I do not think
that we love his personages very much--we stand too much outside his
eccentric world for sympathy. From the pencil of this most lovable
man, with his unrivalled power of expressing all he saw and thought, I
cannot recall many lova