GIGANTIC NAVVY:  “Let’s walk between yer, Gents; folks ’ll think you’ve took up a Deserter.”—­Punch, October 19, 1861.]

They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of subtlety—­intensely comic!  Their enormous perplexities about nothing, their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him, though he was the most abstemious of men.  I am now speaking of his middle-class people—­those wonderful philistines of either sex; those elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little about the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.

When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if not quite so funny, at his best, I think.  His costermongers and policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are inimitable studies; and as for his ’busses and cabs, I really cannot find words to express my admiration of them.  In these, as in his street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.

Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his volunteers—­he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous, in which they have immortalised its beginning.

[Illustration:  AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE

OMNIBUS DRIVER (to Coster).  “Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will you?  What are you gaping at?  Did you never see a Milisher man before?”

A disgustingly ignorant observation in the opinion of young Longslip, Lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Fusileer Guards—­Punch, March 7, 1863.]

Charles Keene is seldom a satirist.  His nature was too tolerant and too sweet for hate, and that makes him a bad and somewhat perfunctory hater.  He tries to hate ’Arry, but he can’t, for he draws an ideal ’Arry that surely never was, and thus his shaft misses the mark:  compare his ’Arry to one of Leech’s snobs, for instance!  He tries to hate the haw-haw swell, and is equally unsuccessful.  When you hate and can draw, you can draw what you hate down to its minutest details—­better, perhaps, than what you love—­so that whoever runs and reads and looks at your pictures hates with you.