chief contributor supplies the old gentleman’s pictorial harem!  What famous thews and sinews Mr. Punch’s horses have, and how Briggs, on the back of them, scampers across country!  You see youth, strength, enjoyment, manliness in those drawings, and in none more so, to our thinking, than in the hundred pictures of children which this artist loves to design.  Like a brave, hearty, good-natured Briton, he becomes quite soft and tender with the little creatures, pats gently their little golden heads, and watches with unfailing pleasure their ways, their sports, their jokes, laughter, caresses.  Enfans terribles come home from Eton; young Miss practising her first flirtation; poor little ragged Polly making dirt-pies in the gutter, or staggering under the weight of Jacky, her nursechild, who is as big as herself—­all these little ones, patrician and plebeian, meet with kindness from this kind heart, and are watched with curious nicety by this amiable observer.

We remember, in one of those ancient Gilray portfolios, a print which used to cause a sort of terror in us youthful spectators, and in which the Prince of Wales (his Royal Highness was a Foxite then) was represented as sitting alone in a magnificent hall after a voluptuous meal, and using a great steel fork in the guise of a toothpick.  Fancy the first young gentleman living employing such a weapon in such a way!  The most elegant Prince of Europe engaged with a two-pronged iron fork—­the heir of Britannia with a BIDENT!  The man of genius who drew that picture saw little of the society which he satirized and amused.  Gilray watched public characters as they walked by the shop in St. James’s Street, or passed through the lobby of the House of Commons.  His studio was a garret, or little better; his place of amusement a tavern-parlor, where his club held its nightly sittings over their pipes and sanded floor.  You could not have society represented by men to whom it was not familiar.  When Gavarni came to England a few years since—­one of the wittiest of men, one of the most brilliant and dexterous of draughtsmen—­he published a book of “Les Anglais,” and his Anglais were all Frenchmen.  The eye, so keen and so long practised to observe Parisian life, could not perceive English character.  A social painter must be of the world which he depicts, and native to the manners which he portrays.

Now, any one who looks over Mr. Leech’s portfolio must see that the social pictures which he gives us are authentic.  What comfortable little drawing-rooms and dining-rooms, what snug libraries we enter; what fine young-gentlemanly wags they are, those beautiful little dandies who wake up gouty old grandpapa to ring the bell; who decline aunt’s pudding and custards, saying that they will reserve themselves for an anchovy toast with the claret; who talk together in ball-room doors, where Fred whispers Charley—­pointing to a dear little partner seven years old—­“My dear Charley, she has very much gone off; you should