I little dreamed then that I should
come to London again, and meet John Leech and become his friend; that
I should be, alas! the last man to shake hands with him before his
death (as I believe I was), and find myself among the officially
invited mourners by his grave; and, finally, that I should inherit,
and fill for so many years (however indifferently), that half-page in
_Punch_ opposite the political cartoon, and which I had loved so well
when he was the artist!

Well, I recovered from a long and distressing ailment of my sight
which had been pronounced incurable, and came to England, where I was
introduced to Charles Keene, with whom I quickly became intimate, and
it was he who presented me to Leech one night at one of Mr. Arthur
Lewis's smoking concerts, in the winter of 1860. I remember feeling
somewhat nervous lest he should take me for a foreigner on account of
my name, and rather unnecessarily went out of my way to assure him
that I was rather more English than John Bull himself. It didn't
matter in the least; I have no doubt he saw through it all: he was
kindness and courtesy itself; and I experienced to the full that
emotion so delightful to a young hero-worshipper in meeting face to
face a world-wide celebrity whom he has long worshipped at a distance.
In the words of Lord Tennyson:

"I was rapt
By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth
Towards greatness in its elder...."

But it so happened at just this particular period of his artistic
career and of mine that he no longer shone as a solitary star of the
first magnitude in my little firmament of pictorial social satire. A
new impulse had been given to the art of drawing on wood, a new school
had been founded, and new methods--to draw straight from nature
instead of trusting to memory and imagination--had been the artistic
order of the day. Men and women, horses and dogs, landscapes and
seascapes, all one can make pictures of, even chairs and tables and
teacups and saucers, must be studied from the life--from the
still-life, if you will--by whoever aspired to draw on wood; even
angels and demons and cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must be
closely imitated from nature--or at least as much of them as could be
got from the living model.

_Once a Week_ had just appeared, and _The Cornhill Magazine_. Sir John
Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton were then drawing on wood just like
the ordinary mortals; Frederic