that in which he uses the word in his address.

When, however, we come to consider the circumstances and pressure under which these blocks were almost always engraved, the wonder will be that they were so perfect. The blocks upon which he drew were composed of small squares, fastened together at the back, so that when the drawing was completed on the block, it was unscrewed, and the various pieces handed over to a number of engravers, each having a square inch or two of landscape, figure, or face, as the case might be, not knowing what proportion of light and shade each piece bore to the whole. Had these blocks been carefully and thoughtfully engraved by one hand, and then been printed by the hand instead of the steam press, we might have seen some of the finesse and beauty which the drawing showed before it was "cut away."

There was nothing that was so great a mark of the gentleness of his nature as his steady abstinence from personality. His correspondence was large, and a perusal of it only shows how careful he must have been, to have shunned the many traps that were laid for him to make him a partisan in personal quarrels. Some of the most wonderful suggestions were forwarded to him, but he had a most keen scent for everything in the shape of personality.

drawing. He is almost always on the right side, sometimes, like his great chief Mr. Punch, not on the popular one.

From the wonderful fidelity with which he rendered the cabmen and gamins of London, · we might suppose he had them into his room to sit to him as studies. He never did this; he liked actions better than states. He was perpetually taking notes of all he saw; but this was the whole, and a great one. With this, and with his own vivid memory and bright informing spirit, he did it all. One thing we may be pardoned for alluding to as illustrative of his art. His wife, who was every way worthy of him, and without whom he was scarce ever seen at any place of public amusement, was very beautiful; and the appearance of those lovely English maidens we all so delight in, with their short foreheads, arch looks, and dark laughing eyes,. their innocence and esprit, dates from about his marriage. They are all, as it were, after her, her sisters; and as she grew more matronly, she may still be traced in her mature comeliness and motherly charms. Much of his sketches and their dramatic point are personal experience, as in "Mr. Briggs has a Slate off his House, and the Consequences." He was not, as indeed might be expected, what is called a funny man. Such a man was Albert Smith, whose absolute levity and funniness became ponderous, serious, and dreary, the crackling of thorns under the pot. Leech had melancholy in his nature, especially in his latter years, when the strain of incessant production and work made his fine organization super-sensitive and apprehensive of coming evil. It was about a year before his death, when in the hunting field, that he first felt that terrible breast-pang, the last agony of which killed him, as he fell into his father's arms; while a child's party, such as he had often been inspired by, and given to us, was in the house. Probably he had by some strain, or sudden muscular exertion, injured the mechanism of his heart. We all remember the shock of his death: how every one felt bereaved,-felt poorer,-felt something gone that nothing could replace,some one that no one else could follow.

We need do little more than allude to the singular purity and good taste manifested in everything he drew or wrote. We do not know any finer instance of blamelessness in art or literature, such perfect delicacy and cleanness of mind,-nothing coarse,-nothing having the slightest taint of indecency, no double entendre,—no laughing at virtue,— no glorifying or glozing of vice,--nothing to make any one of his own lovely girls blush, or his own handsome face hide itself. This gentleness and thorough gentlemanliness pervades all his works. They are done by a man you would take into your family and to your heart at once. To go over his four volumes of Pictures of Life and Character is not only a wholesome pleasure and diversion: it is a liberal education. And then he is not the least of a soft or goody man, no small What we owe to him of wholesome, hearty sentimentalism or petit maitre work: he is a mirth and pleasure, and of something better, man and an Englishman to the backbone; good as they are, than either-purity, affecwho rode and fished as if that were his chief tion, pluck, humour, kindliness, good humour, business, took his fences fearlessly, quietly, good feeling, good breeding, the love of naand mercifully, and knew how to run his ture, of one another, of truth-the joys of salmon and land him. He was what is bet- children, the loveliness of our homely Engter still, a public-spirited man; a keen, hear- lish fields, with their sunsets and village ty, earnest politician, with strong convictions, spires, their glimpses into the pure infinite a Liberal deserving the name. His political beyond-the sea and all its fulness, its waves pencillings are as full of good, energetic poli-"curling their monstrous heads and hanging tics, as they are of strong portraiture and them," their crisping smiles on the sunlit

give any of the larger, and often more complete and dramatic drawings. We hope ours will send everybody to the volumes themselves. There should immediately be made, so long as it is possible, a complete collection of his works, and a noble monument to industry and honest work, as well as genius and goodness, it would be.

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sands-all that variety of nature and of man | is impossible, from the size of our page, to which is only less infinite than its Maker; something of this, and of that mysterious quality called humour, that fragrance and flavour of the soul, which God has given us to cheer our lot, to help us to "take heart and hope, and steer right onward," to have our joke, that lets us laugh at and make game of ourselves when we have little else to laugh at or play with-of that which gives us when we will the silver lining of the cloud, and paints a rainbow on the darkened sky out of our own "troublous tears;"-something for our gift of laughter, and for our makers We end as we began, by being thankful of all these has this great and simple-heart-of the same, for the pleasant joke, for the ed, hard-working artist given to us and to mirth that heals and heartens, and never our children, as a joy and a possession for ever. Let us be grateful to him, let us give all else, is a gift from the Supreme Giver-to wounds, that assuages and diverts. This, like him our best honour, affection, and regard. Mr. Leech was tall, strongly but delicately be used as not abused--to be kept in its made, graceful, long-limbed, with a grave, and cultivated overmuch; for it has its perils proper place, neither despised nor estimated handsome face, a sensitive, gentle mouth, but as well as its pleasures, and it is not always, a mouth that could be " 'set," deep, penetratas in this case, on the side of truth and virtue, ing eyes, an open, high, and broad forehead, modesty and sense. If you wish to know exquisitely modelled. He looked like his from a master of the art what are the dangers works-nimble, vigorous, and gentle; open, of giving one's-self too much up to the comic and yet reserved; seeing everything, saying view of things, how it demoralizes the whole not much; capable of heartiest mirth, but generally quiet. Once at one of John Parry's commended to you, Sydney Smith's two lecman, read what we have already earnestly wonderful performances, "Mrs. Roseleaf's Teatures, in which there is something quite party," when the whole house was in roars, pathetic in the earnestness with which he Leech's rich laughter was heard topping them all. There are, as far as we know, only two speaks of the snares and the degradations that mere wit, comicality, and waggery bring photographs of him: one-very beautiful, We end with his like a perfect English gentleman-by Silvey; upon the best of men. the other more robust and homely, but very concluding words :good, by Caldesi. We hope there is a portrait of him by his devoted friend Millais, whose experience and thoughts of his worth as a man and as an artist one would give a good deal to have.

When Thackeray wrote the notice of his sketches in The Times, Leech was hugely delighted rejoiced in it like a child, and said, "That's like putting £1000 in my pocket." With all the temptations he had to Club life, he never went to the Garrick to spend the evenings, except on the Saturdays, which he never missed. On Sunday afternoons, in summer, Thackeray and he might ⚫often be seen regaling themselves with their fellow-creatures in the Zoological Gardens, and making their own queer observations, to which, doubtless, we are indebted for our baby hippopotamus and many another fourfooted joke. He never would go to houses where he knew he was asked only to be seen and trotted out. He was not a frequenter of Mrs. Leo Hunter's at homes.

"I have talked of the danger of wit and humour: I do not mean by that to enter into commonplace declamation against faculties because they are dangerous;-wit is dangerous, eloquence is dangerous, a talent for observation is dangerous, every thing is dangerous that has efficacy and vigour for its characteristics; nothing is safe but mediocrity. The business is, in conducting the understanding well, to risk something; to aim at uniting things that are commonly incompatible. The meaning of an extraordinary man is, that he is eight men, not one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as when wit is combined with sense and informabrilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined. But tion; when it is softened by benevolence, and restrained by strong principle; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it. who can be witty and something much better than witty, who loves honour, justice, decency, good-nature, morality, and religion, ten thousand times better than wit;-wit is then a beautiful and delightful part of our nature. There is no more interesting spectacle than to see the effects

We now give a few typical woodcuts.* It of wit upon the different characters of men;

* See Am. Publishers' note, page 111.

than to observe it expanding caution, relaxing dignity, unfreezing coldness,-teaching age, and

THE

NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.

No. LXXXIV.

FOR JUNE, 1865.