ld like it well
enough; as it is it spoils four days a week, leaving little time for
anything else. Oh! I'm aweary, I'm aweary! of this illustration
business."[176] This seems to us inexpressibly sad. We hear nothing of
it in earlier days, when he was drawing the excellent designs for
"Roland Cashel," for "Dombey," or for "Bleak House."

Of the works and sketches in water colour and oils exhibited in
Liverpool after the artist's death, personally we have seen nothing.
They took the public by surprise, for few at least of the outer world
suspected that this shy, retiring illustrator of books was a persevering
and accomplished water-colour artist. We ourselves were aware of the
fact, and had seen some thirty original and highly characteristic
sketches, some of them studies of characters in novels of Charles
Dickens and Lever; all executed prior to 1846, some in Indian ink, some
in crayon, a few in pencil. Among them was a small but highly finished
water-colour drawing, representing a group of seven knights in full
martial panoply, and a striking effect is produced by the glint of the
sun on the burnished armour of the central figure. The author of a
recent sketch would cite these water colours as a complete answer to
those who like ourselves maintain, in no mere spirit of detraction, that
the artist possessed not one particle of _genius_. Surely he cannot be
in earnest. If so, we have only to say, that if painting subjects in
oils or water colour from the thousand and one hints to be gathered from
history, fiction, or every-day life, be a test of _genius_, the walls of
every summer and winter exhibition--to say nothing of the Royal
Academy--would be furnished annually with examples from end to end.

Leech died in the meridian of his fame at the early age of forty-six.
Hablot Browne when he died had not only survived his talents, but his
peculiarly shy and retiring nature had caused him at the age of
sixty-seven to be absolutely forgotten. The famous men of letters whose
works he had illustrated were dead and gone; the world of literature and
of art took such small note of him that his funeral was the funeral of a
private individual, and not of one who, if he did not partake in, had
contributed in no considerable degree to the success of Charles Dickens
and of Charles James Lever. When his passing-bell rang out upon the
summer air, journalists remembered that a great artist was gone to his
rest, and _Punch_ inserted in hi