have seen that girl last season!” Look well at everything appertaining to the economy of the famous Mr. Briggs:  how snug, quiet, appropriate all the appointments are!  What a comfortable, neat, clean, middle-class house Briggs’s is (in the Bayswater suburb of London, we should guess from the sketches of the surrounding scenery)!  What a good stable he has, with a loose box for those celebrated hunters which he rides!  How pleasant, clean, and warm his breakfast-table looks!  What a trim little maid brings in the top-boots which horrify Mrs. B!  What a snug dressing-room he has, complete in all its appointments, and in which he appears trying on the delightful hunting-cap which Mrs. Briggs flings into the fire!  How cosy all the Briggs party seem in their dining-room:  Briggs reading a Treatise on Dog-breaking by a lamp; Mamma and Grannie with their respective needleworks; the children clustering round a great book of prints—­a great book of prints such as this before us, which, at this season, must make thousands of children happy by as many firesides!  The inner life of all these people is represented:  Leech draws them as naturally as Teniers depicts Dutch boors, or Morland pigs and stables.  It is your house and mine:  we are looking at everybody’s family circle.  Our boys coming from school give themselves such airs, the young scapegraces! our girls, going to parties, are so tricked out by fond mammas—­a social history of London in the middle of the nineteenth century.  As such, future students—­lucky they to have a book so pleasant—­will regard these pages:  even the mutations of fashion they may follow here if they be so inclined.  Mr. Leech has as fine an eye for tailory and millinery as for horse-flesh.  How they change those cloaks and bonnets.  How we have to pay milliners’ bills from year to year!  Where are those prodigious chatelaines of 1850 which no lady could be without?  Where those charming waistcoats, those “stunning” waistcoats, which our young girls used to wear a few brief seasons back, and which cause ’Gus, in the sweet little sketch of “La Mode,” to ask Ellen for her tailor’s address.  ’Gus is a young warrior by this time, very likely facing the enemy at Inkerman; and pretty Ellen, and that love of a sister of hers, are married and happy, let us hope, superintending one of those delightful nursery scenes which our artist depicts with such tender humor.  Fortunate artist, indeed!  You see he must have been bred at a good public school; that he has ridden many a good horse in his day; paid, no doubt, out of his own purse for the originals of some of those lovely caps and bonnets; and watched paternally the ways, smiles, frolics, and slumbers of his favorite little people.