he humorous and pathetic episodes of the London
street arabs; "The Comic Latin Grammar"; "The Comic English Grammar";
and a now exceedingly rare _jeu d'esprit_, bearing the full title of
"The Fiddle-Faddle Fashion Book and Beau Monde a la Francaise, enriched
with numerous highly coloured figures of lady-like gentlemen,"[130] a
most amusing skit upon the absurd fashion books of the period,
containing four coloured plates of gentlemen (more than fifty figures)
in male and female costume, posed in the ridiculous and well-known
simpering style of those periodicals. All these works were produced in
conjunction with Percival Leigh, one of the artist's fellow-students at
St. Bartholomew's, and led directly to his engagement on the pages of
_Punch_, which was started the following year.

Among the rarer works published in 1840, to which John Leech contributed
the benefit of his assistance, may be mentioned a publication, entitled
"The London Magazine, Charivari, and Courier des Dames" (Simpkin,
Marshall & Co.), in which we find some portraits and other work
altogether out of the range of his usual style of illustration. The tone
of this publication was personal in the extreme. Charles Dickens had
produced (among other publications) his "Pickwick Papers," "Oliver
Twist," "Nicholas Nickleby," and at this time was engaged on the most
touching and pathetic of his stories, "The Old Curiosity Shop," which
was, however, so little appreciated by the editor of this scurrilous
publication, that we find him perpetrating the following sorry libel on
the writer and three of his contemporaries: "To cheesemongers and
others! Ready for delivery, at a halfpenny per pound, forty tons of
foundered literature; viz., Mrs. Trollope's 'Unsatis-factory Boy,'[131]
'Master Humphrey's Clock' (refer to the second meaning in 'Johnson's
Dictionary': 'an unsightly crawling thing'!), Captain Marryat's 'Alas,
Poor Jack'! and _Turpis_ Ainsworth's 'Guy _Fox_':--

'An animal cunning, unsavoury, small,
That will dirty your hands if you touch it at all.'"

So little merit had this critical periodical itself, that some rare
etchings by Hablot Knight Browne and Leech to a novel entitled "The
Diurnal Revolutions of David Diddledoff," which appeared in its pages,
failed to keep the dreary serial alive, and a quarrel ensuing between
the proprietors and himself, Browne was dismissed and Leech supplied his
place. Leech's caricature of Mulready's postage envelope, al