hackeray in effect, Leech looks
at all these people with a certain respect for their riches, with an
amiable curiosity concerning their footmen's calves. Nevertheless, to
the end he was not kinder to Dives' oppression, less sympathetic towards
the troubles of Lazarus, nor more indulgent to the vulgarity of the
snob; nor a whit more tolerant of viciousness, affectation, or meanness
of any kind.

Of Leech's political work (for which at first he entertained so great a
dislike) I say perhaps enough in dealing with what may be called
_Punch's_ Big Drum--the weekly cartoon. Taken together, those designs
might be held to represent a life's good work; yet they represent but a
fraction of what he executed during his seven-and-twenty years' hard
labour. If after a close study of all his productions with pencil and
etching-needle, you ask yourself what constitutes his real life's-work,
you will probably choose to ignore his book plates--even those to the
Comic Histories of Rome and England, to the sporting novels of "Mr.
Sponge," and the rest--and point to his "Pictures of Life and
Character," as given forth in one continuous stream from 1841 to 1864.

The "movements" and the "isms" and the creations of fashion, of nearly
all of which we have a whole series spread over a long, but none too
long a time, reflect in themselves alone the social history of our
day--development of intellect and its antithesis, fashion in dress and
language, art and literature, craze and affectation; in short, the whole
national evolution during a quarter of a century. It is amusing to
glance at some of them--a few out of the very many--and sample the
journalistic wit with which Leech eyed and illustrated the passing hour.

The periodical wail of the British householder and his wife on the
subject of the great "domestic difficulty" gave Leech a fund of anecdote
that he was not slow to draw upon. He was himself a typical middle-class
British householder, who liked to have everything nice and neat about
him, including the pretty, amiable, zealous, h-less maidservant in nice
white apron and clean print-dress. He closed his eyes and ears to Sydney
Smith's discovery that _all_ the virtues and most of the graces are not
to be had for L7 a year. And so Leech gave us the series he entitles
"Servantgalism," harshly illustrative for the most part of the comic
side of what a later generation calls Slaveyism. And as _Punch_, chiefly
under the influence of Thackera