to imagine a more abundant, and on the whole a more accurate, informant. The accumulated volumes of this periodical contain evidence on a multitude of points of which there is no mention in the serious works not even in the novels of the day. The smallest details of social habit are depicted there, and the oddities of a race of people in whom oddity is strangely compatible with the dominion of convention. That the ironical view of these things is given does not injure the force of the testimony, for the irony of "Punch," strangely enough, has always been discreet, even delicate. It is a singular fact, that though taste is not supposed to be the strong point of the English mind, this eminently representative journal has rarely been guilty of violations of taste. The taste of "Punch," like its good humor, has known very few lapses. "The London Charivari". we remember how difficult it was (in 1853) to arrive at the right pronunciation-has, in this respect, very little to envy its Parisian original. English humor is coarse, French humor is fine-that would be the general assumption, certainly, on the part of a French critic. But a comparison between the back volumes of the "Charivari" and the back volumes of "Punch" would make it necessary to modify this formula. English humor is simple, innocent, plain, a trifle insipid, apt to sacrifice to the graces, to the proprieties; but if "Punch" is our witness, English humor is not coarse. We are fortunately not obliged to declare just now what French humor appears to be in the light of the " Charivari," the "Journal Amusant," the "Journal Pour Rire." A Frenchman may say, in perfect good faith, that (to his sense) English drollery has doubtless every merit but that of being droll. French drollery, he may say, is salient, saltatory; whereas the English comic effort is flat and motionless. The French, in these matters, like a great deal of salt; whereas the English, who spice their food very highly, and have a cluster of sharp condiments on the table, like their caricatures comparatively mild." Punch," in short, is for the familyPunch" may be sent up to the nursery. This surely may be admitted; and it is the fact that "Punch" is for the family that constitutes its high value. The family is, after all, the people; and a satirical sheet which holds up the mirror, to this institution can hardly fail to be instructive. "Yes, if it hold the mirror up impartially," we can imagine the foreign critic to rejoin; " but in these matters the British caricaturist is not to be trusted. He slurs over a great deal―he omits a great deal more. He must, above all things, be proper; and there is a whole side of life which,

in spite of his Juvenalian pretensions, he never touches at all." We must allow the foreign critic his supposed retort, without taking space to answer back,— we may imagine him to be a bit of a "naturalist,"—and admit that it is perhaps because they are obliged to be proper that Leech and du Maurier give us, on the whole, such a cleanly, healthy, friendly picture of English manners. Such sustained and inveterate propriety is in itself a great force; it includes a good deal, as well as excludes. The general impression that we derive from the long series of "Punch" is a very cheerful and favorable one; it speaks of a vigorous, good-humored, much-civilized people. The good humor is, perhaps, the most striking point-not only the good humor of the artist who represents the scene, but that of the figures engaged in it. The difference is remarkable in this respect between "Punch" and the French comic papers. The wonderful Cham, who for so many years contributed to those sheets, had an extraordinary sense of the ludicrous and a boundless stock of facetious invention. He was strangely expressive; he could place a figure before you, in the most violent action, with half-a-dozen strokes of his pencil. But his people were like wild-cats and scorpions. The temper of the French bourgeoisie, as represented by Cham, is a thing to make one take to one's heels. They perpetually tear and rend each other, show their teeth and their claws, kick each other down-stairs, and pitch each other from windows. All this is in the highest degree farcical or grotesque; but at bottom it is almost horrible. (It must be admitted that Cham and his wonderful colleague, Daumier, are much more horrible than Gavarni, who was admirably real, and at the same time capable of beauty and grace. Gavarni's women are charming; those of Cham and Daumier are monsters.) There is nothing, or almost nothing, of the horrible in "Punch." The author of these remarks has a friend whom he has heard more than once maintain the too-ingenious thesis that the caricatures of Cham prove the French to be a cruel people; the same induction could, at least, never be drawn, even in an equal spirit of paradox, from the genial pages of "Punch." "If Punch' is never horrible, it is because Punch' is always superficial, for life is full of the horrible"-so we may imagine our naturalistic objector to go on. However this may be, "Punch" is fortunate in having picked out such a charming surface. English life, as depicted by Leech and du Maurier, and by that excellent Charles Keene,-the best-humored perhaps of the three, whose talent is so great that we have always wondered why it is

not greater,—is a compound of several very wholesome tastes-the love of the country, the love of sport, the love of a harmless, joke within the limits of due reverence, the love of sport, of horses and dogs, of family life, of children, of horticulture. With this there are a few other tastes of a less innocent kind,the love of ardent spirits, for instance, or of punching people's heads, or even the love of a lord. In Leech's drawings, country-life plays a great part; his landscapes, in their extreme sketchiness, are often admirable. He gave, in a few strokes, the look of the hunting-field in winter the dark, damp slopes; the black, dense hedges; the low, cool sky. He was very general; he touched on everything, sooner or later; but he enjoyed his sporting subjects more than anything else. In this he was thoroughly English. No close observer of that people can fail to perceive that the love of sport is the thing that binds them most closely together, and in which they have the greatest number of feelings in common. Leech depicted, with infinite vividness, the accidents of the chase and of the fishing season; and his treatment of the horse, in especial, contributed greatly to his popularity. He understood the horse, he knew him intimately, he loved him; and he drew him as if he knew how to ride as well as to draw. The English forgive a great deal to those who ride well; and this is doubtless why the badness of some of the sporting subjects that have appeared in "Punch" since Leech's death has been tolerated; the artist has been presumed to be a good rider! Leech never made a mistake; he did well whatever he did; and, it must be remembered, that for many years he furnished the political cartoon to "Punch," as well as the smaller drawings. He was always amusing, always full of sense and point, always intensely English. His foreigner is always an inferior animal — his Frenchman is the Frenchman of Leicester Square, the Frenchman whom the Exhibition of 1851 revealed to the people of London. His point is perfectly perceptible-it is never unduly fine. His children are models of ruddy, chubby, shy, yet sturdy British babyhood; and nothing could be nicer than his young women. The English maiden, in Leech, is emphatically a nice girl; modest and fresh, simple and blooming, and destined evidently for use as much as for ornament. In those early days to which we referred at the beginning of this article, we were deeply in love with the young ladies of Leech, and we have never ceased to admire the simple art with which he made these hastily designed creatures conform unerringly to the English type. They have English eyes and English cheeks, English figures.

English hands and feet, English ringlets, English petticoats. Leech was extremely observant, but he had not a strong imagination; he had a sufficient, but not a high sense of beauty; his ideal of the beautiful had nothing of the unattainable; it was simply a résumé of the nice faces he saw about him. And very nice they must generally have been. The great thing, however, was that he was a natural draughtsman; his little figures live and move; many of his little scenes are stamped on the memory. I have spoken of his representations of the country; but his town-pictures are numerous and capital. He knew his London, and his sketches of the good people of that metropolis are as happy as his episodes in the drawing-room and the hunting-field. He was admirably broad and free; and no one in his line has had more than he the knack of giving what is called a general effect. He conveys, at times, the look of the London streets-the color, the temperature, the damp blackness. He does the winter weather to perfection. Long before I had seen it, I was acquainted, through his sketches, with the aspect of Baker street in December. Out of such a multitude of illustrations it is difficult to choose: the two volumes of "Sketches of Life and Character," transferred from " Punch," are a real museum. But I recall, for instance, the simple little sketch of the worthy man up to his neck in bed on a January morning, to whom, on the other side of the door, the prompt housemaid, with her hammer in her hand, announces that "I have just broken the ice in your bath, sir." The black, cold dawn, the very smell of the early chill, that raw sootiness of the London winter air, the red nose of the housemaid, the unfashionable street seen through the window-impart a peculiar vividness to this small, inky-looking wood-cut.

We have said too much about Leech, however, and the purpose of these remarks is not to commemorate his work. "Punch," for the last fifteen years, has been, artistically speaking, George du Maurier. (We ought, perhaps, before this, to have said that none of our observations are to be taken as applying to the letterpress of the comic journal, which has probably never been fully appreciated in America.) It has employed other talents than his-notably Charles Keene, who is as broad, as jovial, as English (half his jokes are against Scotchmen), as Leech, but whose sense of the beautiful, the delicate, is inferior even to Leech's; and the wonderful Linley Sambourne, a genius quite apart, full of ingenuity and fancy, brilliant in execution, but wanting in the appearance and the love of reality, and more decorative, almost more mechan

ical, than dramatic. But for a great many people, certainly in America, du Maurier has long been, as I say, the successor of Leech, the embodiment of the pictorial spirit of "Punch." Shut up in the narrow limits of black and white, without space, without color, without the larger opportunities, du Maurier has nevertheless established himself as an exquisite talent and a genuine artist. He is not so much of a laugher as Leech,—he deals in the smile, rather than the laugh,-but he is a much deeper observer, and he is a finer and nobler draughtsman. He has not Leech's animal spirits; a want of high spirits, a tendency to reflection, to lowness of tone, as his own Postlethwaite would say, is perhaps his limitation. But his seriousness-if he is too serious-is that of the satirist as distinguished from the simple joker; and if he reflects, he does so in the literal sense of the word-holds up a singularly polished and lucid mirror to the drama of English society. More than twenty years ago, when he began to draw in "Once a Week," that not very long-lived periodical which set out on its career with a high pictorial standard,-it was apparent that the careful young artist who finished his designs very highly and signed them with a French name, stood very much upon his own feet. The earliest things of his that we know have the quality which has made him distinguished to-day-the union of a great sense of beauty with a great sense of reality. It was apparent from the first that this was not a simple and uniform talent, but a gift that had sprung from a combination of sources. It is important to remember, in speaking of du Maurier, -who is one of the pillars of the British journal par excellence,—that he has French blood in his veins. George du Maurier, as we understand his history, was born in England, of a French father and an English mother, but was removed to France in his early years, and educated according to the customs of that country. Later, however, he returned to England; and it would not be difficult for a careful student of his drawings to guess that England is the land of his predilection. He has drawn a great many French figures, but he has drawn them as one who knows them rather than as one who loves them. He has perhaps been, as the phrase is, a little hard upon the French; at any rate, he has been decidedly easy for the English. The latter are assuredly a very handsome race; but, if we were to construct an image of them from the large majority of du Maurier's drawings, we should see before us a people of gods and goddesses. This does not alter the fact that there is a very Gallic

element in some of du Maurier's gifts-his fineness of perception, his remarkable power of specifying types, his taste, his grace, his lightness, a certain refinement of art. It is hard to imagine that a talent so remarkable should not have given early evidences; but in spite of such evidences, du Maurier was, on the threshold of manhood, persuaded by those to whom it was his duty to listen, to turn his attention, as Mrs. Micawber says, to chemistry. He pursued this science without enthusiasm, though he had for some time a laboratory of his own. Before long, however, the laboratory was converted into a studio. His talent insisted on its liberty, and he committed himself to the plastic. He studied this charming element in Paris, at Düsseldorf; he began to work in London. This period of his life was marked by a great calamity, which has left its trace on his career and his work, and which it is needful to mention, in order to speak with any fairness of these things. Abruptly, without a warning, his eyesight partly forsook him, and his activity was cruelly threatened. It is a great pleasure, in alluding to this catastrophe, to be able to speak of it as a signal example of difficulty vanquished. George du Maurier was condemned to many dark days, at the end of which he learned that he should have to do his work for the rest of his life with less than half a man's portion of the sense most valuable to the artist. The beautiful work that he has produced in such abundance for so many years has been achieved under restrictions of vision which might well have made any work impossible. It is permitted, accordingly, to imagine that if the artist had had the usual resources we should not at the present moment be considering him simply as an accomplished draughtsman in black and white. It is impossible to look at many of his drawings without perceiving that they are full of the art of the painter, and that the form they have taken, charming as it has been, is arbitrary and inadequate.

John Leech died on October 27, 1864, and the first sketches in "Punch that we recognize as du Maurier's appeared in that year. The very earliest that we have detected belong, indeed, to December 5, 1863. These beginnings are slight and sketchy head-pieces and vignettes; the first regular "picture" (with a legend beneath it) that we remember is of the date of June 11, 1864. It represents a tipsy waiter (or college servant), on a staircase, where he has smashed a trayful of crockery. We perceive nothing else of importance for some time after this, but suddenly his hand appears again in force, and from the summer of 1865 its appearances

personal debility? To say, as we said just now, that du Maurier carries his specification of types very far, is to say mainly that he defines with peculiar completeness his queer people, his failures, his grotesques. But it strikes us that it is just this vivid and affectionate appreciation of beauty that makes him do such justice to the eccentrics. We have heard his ugly creations called malignantcompared (to their disadvantage) with similar figures in Leech. Leech, it was said, is always good-natured and jovial, even in the excesses of caricature; whereas his successor (with a much greater brilliancy of execution) betrays, in dealing with the oddities of the human family, a taint of "French ferocity." We think the discrimination fallacious; and it is only because we do not believe du Maurier's reputation for amiability to be really in danger that we do not hasten to defend him from the charge of ferocity- French or English. The fact is, he attempts discriminations that Leech never dreamt of. Leech's characterizations are all simple, whereas du Maurier's are extremely complicated. He would like every one to be tall and straight and fair, to have a well-cut mouth and chin, a well-poised head, well-shaped legs, an air of nobleness, of happy development. He perceives, however, that nature plays us some dreadful tricks, and he measures her departure from these beautiful conditions with extreme displeasure. He regrets it with all the force of his appreciation of the beautiful, and he feels the strongest desire to indicate the culpability of the aberration. He has an artistic, æsthetic need to make ugly people as ugly as they are; he holds that such serious facts should not be superficially treated. And then, besides that, his fancy finds a real entertainment in the completeness, in the perfection, of certain forms of facial queerness. No one has rendered like du Maurier the ridiculous little people who crop up in the interstices of that huge and complicated London world. We have no such finished types as these in America. If the English find us all a little odd, oddity, in American society, never ripens and rounds itself off so perfectly as in some of these OldWorld specimens. All those English terms of characterization which exist in America, at the most only as precarious exotics, but which are on every one's lips in England,the snob, the cad, the prig, the duffer,-du Maurier has given us a thousand times the portrait of such specialties. No one has done the "duffer" so well; there are a hundred vanations of the countenance of Mr. McJoseph, the gentleman who figured in "Punch on the 19th August, 1876; or the even

happier physiognomy of the other gentleman who, on the 2d November, 1872, says to a lady that he "never feels safe from the British snob till he is south of the Danube," and to whom the lady retorts, "And what do the South Danubians say? This personage is in profile: his face is fat, complacent, cautious; his hair and whiskers have as many curves and flourishes as the signature of a writing-master; he is an incarnation of certain familiar elements of English life,- the “great middle class," the Philistinism,—the absence of irony, of the sentiment of art. Du Maurier is full of soft irony: he has that infusion of it which is indispensable to an artistic nature; and, we may add, that in this respect he seems to us more French than English. This quality has helped him immensely to find material in the so-called æsthetic movement of the last few years. None of his duffers have been so good as his æsthetic duffers. But of this episode we must wait a little to speak. The point that, for the moment, we wished to make is that he has a peculiar perception of the look of breeding, of race; and that, left to himself, as it were, he would ask nothing better than to make it the prerogative of all his characters. Only he is not left to himself. For, looking about into the world, he perceives his Gorgius Midas, and Mr. McJoseph, and the whole multitude of the vulgar, who have not been cultivated like orchids and race-horses. But his extreme inclination to give his figures the benefit of the supposition that most people have the feelings of gentlemen, makes him, as we began by saying, a very happy interpreter of those frequent works of fiction of which the action goes on, for the most part, in the drawing-room of the British country-house. Every drawing-room, unfortunately, is not a home of the Graces; but for the artist, given such an apartment, a group of quiet, well-shaped people is more or less implied. The "fashionable novel," as it flourished about 1830, is no more; and its extinction is not to be regretted. We believe it was rarely accompanied with illustrations; but if it were to be revived, du Maurier would be the man to make the pictures—the pictures of people rather slim and still, with long necks and limbs so straight that they look stiff, who might be treated with the amount of irony justified (if the fashionable novel of 1830 is to be believed) by their passion for talking bad French. The only trouble would be the superiority of his illustrations to the text.

We have been looking over the accumulations of " Punch" for the last twenty years, and du Maurier's work, which during this long period is remarkably abundant and various,