[Illustration:  WAITING FOR THE LANDLORD!

RIBBONMAN (getting impatient).  “Bedad, they ought to be here be this toime!  Sure, Tiriace, I hope the ould gintleman hasn’t mit wid an accidint!!!”—­Punch, July 27, 1878.]

Perhaps, also, Leech’s frequent verification of our manly British pluck and honesty, and proficiency in sport, and wholesomeness and cleanliness of body and mind, our general physical beauty and distinction, and his patriotic tendency to contrast our exclusive possession of these delightful gifts with the deplorable absence of them in any country but our own, may fail to enlist the sympathies of the benighted foreigner.

Whereas there is not much to humiliate the most touchy French or German reader of Punch, or excite his envy, in Charles Keene’s portraiture of our race.  He is impartial and detached, and the most rabid Anglophobe may frankly admire him without losing his self-esteem.  The English lower middle class and people, that Keene has depicted with such judicial freedom from either prejudice or pre-possession, have many virtues; but they are not especially conspicuous for much vivacity or charm of aspect or gainliness of demeanour; and he has not gone out of his way to idealise them.

Also, he seldom if ever gibes at those who have not been able to resist the temptations (as Mr. Gilbert would say) of belonging to other nations.

Thus in absolute craftsmanship and technical skill, in the ease and beauty of his line, his knowledge of effect, his complete mastery over the material means at his disposal, Charles Keene seems to me as superior to Leech as Leech is to him in grace, in human naturalness and geniality of humour, in accurate observation of life, in keenness of social perception, and especially in width of range.

[Illustration:  A STROKE OF BUSINESS

VILLAGE HAMPDEN ("who with dauntless breast” has undertaken for sixpence to keep off the other boys).  “If any of yer wants to see what we’re a Paintin’ of it’s a ’Alfpenny a ’Ead, but you marn’t make no Remarks.”—­Punch, May 4, 1867.]

The little actors on Leech’s stage are nearly all of them every-day people—­types one is constantly meeting.  High or low, tipsy or sober, vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of for our amusement.

Whereas a great many of Keene’s middle-class protagonists are peculiar and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity, they are characters themselves, rather than types of English characters.  Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life just as it is?

[Illustration:  “NONE O’ YOUR LARKS”