ing so suspected, and how the two men became fast friends ever after.
Once a regular _Punch_ man, Leech immediately expanded, and as quickly
hit the taste and fancy of the public; and from that day forward rarely
did his hand or his humorous or tragic faculty play him false; nor did
the people falter in its praise or its allegiance.

Although he expanded, he yet took some time to settle down. Not until
the sixth volume (1844) could he be considered paramount in what was
esteemed the higher walk of cartooning--a department which he
subsequently shared, first with Doyle, and then with Tenniel. But it was
in the social cuts that he excelled--in his pictures of low life that
are never low; in his great mastery in the delineation of character and
his gift of seeing humour in most scenes of everyday happening, and his
power of recording comic conceptions, unfailingly and irresistibly. It
is true that as Mr. Punch went up in the social scale Leech accompanied
him in the rise--if, indeed, it was not Leech, together with Thackeray's
powerful help, who elevated _Punch_. At the same time he sympathised
profoundly with the horrors of poverty and oppression, and looked kindly
on gutter-children and on honest dirt and misery; and to the end he
regarded the "snob," the 'Arry of his day, with the genial contempt he
had lavished on him at the beginning. Thackeray appreciated the change
in the paper, and recorded it, too; though he credits Jerrold with a
policy which was nought but the policy of a comic paper softened in its
asperities by time, and encouraged by the greater refinement of its
Staff and of its more cultivated public.

"Mr. Leech," said Thackeray, "surveys society from the gentleman's point
of view. In old days, when Mr. Jerrold lived and wrote for that famous
periodical, he took the other side; he looked up at the rich and great
with a fierce, a sarcastic aspect, and a threatening posture, and his
outcry or challenge was: 'Ye rich and great, look out! We, the people,
are as good as you. Have a care, ye priests, wallowing on a tithe pig
and rolling in carriages and four; ye landlords, grinding the poor; ye
vulgar fine ladies, bullying innocent governesses, and what not--we will
expose your vulgarity; we will put down your oppression; we will
vindicate the nobility of our common nature,' and so forth. A great deal
was to be said on the Jerrold side, a great deal was said--perhaps, even
a great deal too much." And now, says T