expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation, triumph....  Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted otherwise—­it is life itself.  An optimistic life in which joyousness prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to us who look on—­like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache after a Greenwich banquet—­which are about the most tragic things he has dealt with.

(I am speaking of his purely social sketches.  For in his admirable large cuts, political and otherwise serious, his satire is often bitter and biting indeed; and his tragedy almost Hogarthian.)

Like many true humorists, he was of a melancholy temperament, and no doubt felt attracted by all that was mirthful and bright, and in happy contrast to his habitual mood.  Seldom if ever does a drop of his inner sadness ooze out through his pencil-point—­and never a drop of gall; and I do not remember one cynical touch in his whole series.

In his tastes and habits he was by nature aristocratic; he liked the society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite spontaneously and without effort to upper-class British ideal of his time, and had its likes and dislikes.  But his strongest predilections of all are common to the British race:  his love of home, his love of sport, his love of the horse and the hound—­especially his love of the pretty woman—­the pretty woman of the normal, wholesome English type.  This charming creature so dear to us all pervades his show from beginning to end—­she is a creation of his, and he thoroughly loves her, and draws her again and again with a fondness that is half lover-like and half paternal—­her buxom figure, her merry bright eyes and fresh complexion and flowing ringlets, and pursed-up lips like Cupid’s bow.  Nor is he ever tired of displaying her feet and ankles (and a little more) in gales of wind on cliff and pier and parade, or climbing the Malvern Hills.  When she puts on goloshes it nearly breaks his heart, and he would fly to other climes!  He revels in her infantile pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings and butterfly delights and lisping mischiefs; her mild, innocent flirtations with beautiful young swells, whose cares are equally light.

She is a darling, and he constantly calls her so to her face.  Her favourite seaside nook becomes the mermaid’s haunt; her back hair flies and dries in the wind, and disturbs the peace of the too susceptible Punch.  She is a little amazon pour rire, and rides across country, and drives (even a hansom sometimes, with a pair of magnificent young whiskerandoes smoking their costly cigars inside); she is a toxophilite, and her arrow sticks, for it is barbed with innocent seduction, and her bull’s-eye is the soft military heart.  She wears a cricket-cap and breaks Aunt Sally’s nose seven times; she puts her pretty little foot upon the croquet-ball—­and croquet’d you are completely!  With what glee she would have rinked and tennised if he had lived a little longer!