If ever there was a square English hole, and a square English peg to fit it, that hole was Punch, and that peg was John Leech.  He was John Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised—­John Bull polite, modest, gentle—­full of self-respect and self-restraint, and with all the bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly after, but very soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the drawing-room, and the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius, which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater number—­and yet delight the most fastidious of his day—­and I think of ours.  One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel his charm.

He was all of a piece, and moved and worked with absolute ease, freedom, and certainty, within the limits nature had assigned him—­and his field was a very large one.  He saw and represented the whole panorama of life that came within his immediate ken with an unwavering consistency, from first to last; from a broadly humorous, though mostly sympathetic point of view that never changed—­a very delightful point of view, if not the highest conceivable.

Hand and eye worked with brain in singular harmony, and all three improved together contemporaneously, with a parallelism most interesting to note, as one goes through the long series of his social pictures from the beginning.

He has no doubts or hesitations—­no bewildering subtleties—­no seeking from twelve to fourteen o’clock—­either in his ideas or technique, which very soon becomes an excellent technique, thoroughly suited to his ideas—­rapid, bold, spirited, full of colour, breadth, and movement—­troubling itself little about details that will not help the telling of his story—­for before everything else he has his story to tell, and it must either make you laugh or lightly charm you—­and he tells it in the quickest, simplest, down-rightest pencil strokes, although it is often a complicated story!

For there are not only the funny people and the pretty people acting out their little drama in the foreground—­there is the scene in which they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes, winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and cloud—­all the poetry of nature, that he feels most acutely while his little people are being so unconsciously droll in the midst of it all.  He is a king of impressionists, and his impression becomes ours on the spot—­never to be forgotten!  It is all so quick and fresh and strong, so simple, pat, and complete, so direct from mother Nature herself!  It has about it the quality of inevitableness—­those are the very people who would have acted and spoken in just that manner, and we meet them every day—­the