ed true to his views and his vow, although moustaches soon came
into regular fashion.

Yet moustache, beard, and whiskers have been a mine of fun to
Leech--from the little Eton boy who tells the hairdresser, when he has
cut his curls, just to give him a close shave, and who ties the major's
whisker to his sister's ringlet; to the snobs who, "giving to hairy
nothings a local habitation and a name," flatter themselves that their
stubbly chins will get them mistaken for "captings" at the very least;
and to the military Adonises who may boast that their silken beards and
fierce moustaches lead a beauty by each single hair. One of the most
amusing results of Leech's drawings of whiskered swells was Sothern's
creation of "Lord Dundreary"--as the actor was always ready to proclaim.
But for the artist, this most comical character would have been nothing
but the ordinary stage-fool as it was at first designed, and the
playgoers of two generations would never have held their aching sides at
one of the most mirthful of modern _roles_.

Then the series of hearty laughs that, in 1851, accompanied his handling
of "Bloomerism"--that parent of our modern dress reform and the divided
skirt, and certainly the ancestor of the lady-bicyclist's costume ("A
skirt divided against itself cannot stand; it must sit upon a
bicycle")--served to kill the thing that the natural modesty of Leech
put down as unwomanly and his aesthetic sense as hideous. And the
crinoline, to which the American invention was to afford an antidote,
provides Leech with material for a hundred humorous points of view. For
it grew and grew in monstrousness and outrageous proportions until 1861,
when it began to dwindle, and by such refuge as a "hooped petticoat" can
afford saved its dignity as it made its welcome exit from the scene.

And the Cochin-China Fancy, and the Table-Turning Craze (in respect to
which Mark Lemon declared that if Hope, the spiritualist, would give a
convincing _seance_ in Whitefriars, _Punch_ would recant), and the
Racecourse, and the Great Exhibition, and Horsetaming, and a score of
other subjects--whether pastime or fashion or phase--were all used by
Leech with unfailing humour. The Chartist period of 1848 was a great
opportunity, happily seized, and some of the artist's sketches were the
result of his personal observation; for he was himself sworn in. "Only
loyalty and extreme love of peace and order made me do it," he said; but
none the more d