The children of fiction are a mixed company, some lifelike and some eminently the reverse.  In Joan Miss Rhoda Broughton drew with unequalled skill a family of odious children.  Henry Kingsley look a more genial view of his subject, and sketched some pleasant children in Austin Elliot, and some delightful ones in the last chapter of Ravenshoe.  The “Last of the Neros” in Barchester Towers is admirably drawn, and all elderly bachelors must have sympathized with good Mr. Thorne when, by way of making himself agreeable to the mother, Signora Vesey-Neroni, he took the child upon his knee, jumped her up and down, saying, “Diddle, diddle, diddle,” and was rewarded with, “I don’t want to be diddle-diddle-diddled.  Let me go, you naughty old man.”  Dickens’s children are by common consent intolerable, but a quarter of a century ago we were all thrilled by Miss Montgomery’s Misunderstood.  It is credibly reported that an earlier and more susceptible generation was moved to tears by the sinfulness of Topsy and the saintliness of Eva; and the adventures of the Fairchild Family enjoy a deserved popularity among all lovers of unintentional humour.  But the “sacred bard” of child-life was John Leech, whose twofold skill immortalized it with pen and with pencil.  The childish incidents and sayings which Leech illustrated were, I believe, always taken from real life.  His sisters “kept an establishment,” as Mr. Dombey said—­the very duplicate of that to which little Paul was sent. “’It is not a Preparatory School by any means.  Should I express my meaning,’ said Miss Tox with peculiar sweetness, ’if I designated it an infantine boarding-house of a very select description?’”

“‘On an exceedingly limited and particular scale,’ suggested Mrs. Chick, with a glance at her brother.”

“‘Oh! exclusion itself,’ said Miss Tox.”

The analogy may be even more closely pressed, for, as at Mrs. Pipchin’s so at Miss Leech’s, “juvenile nobility itself was no stranger to the establishment.”  Miss Tox told Mr. Dombey that “the humble individual who now addressed him was once under Mrs. Pipchin’s charge;” and, similarly, the obscure writer of these papers was once under Miss Leech’s.  Her school supplied the originals of all the little boys, whether greedy or gracious, grave or gay, on foot or on pony-back, in knickerbockers or in nightshirts, who figure so frequently in Punch between 1850 and 1864; and one of the pleasantest recollections of those distant days is the kindness with which the great artist used to receive us when, as the supreme reward of exceptionally good conduct, we were taken to see him in his studio at Kensington.  It is my rule not to quote at length from what is readily accessible, and therefore I cull only one delightful episode from Leech’s Sketches of Life and Character.  Two little chaps are discussing the age of a third; and the one reflectively remarks, “Well, I don’t ’zactly know how old Charlie is; but he must be very old, for he blows his own nose.”  Happy and far distant days, when such an accomplishment seemed to be characteristic of a remotely future age!  “Mamma,” inquired an infant aristocrat of a superlatively refined mother, “when shall I be old enough to eat bread and cheese with a knife, and put the knife in my mouth?” But the answer is not recorded.