in the drawing in which a Cockney
horseman reins up at the edge of a steep hill--you might almost call it
a hole--down the side of which the rest are scampering, with the words
"Oh, if this is one of the places Charley spoke of, I shall go back!"
Indeed, in spite of all his sport, he almost agreed with Hood--

"There's something in a horse
That I can always honour, but never could _endorse_."

Yet, like his great rival "Phiz," who rode with the Surrey hounds, he
loved the cover-side; but as time went on, and youthful ardour cooled,
he would rather attend the meet than follow in the chase. As he favoured
the Puckeridge hounds, it comes about that most of his landscape
backgrounds are views in Hertfordshire. And when he preferred the more
sober delights of the Row--not the same Row we now scamper along from
Hyde Park Corner, but the old one along by the Serpentine, and, for a
time, in Kensington Gardens--his tall graceful figure always attracted
attention; and when he mounted his pony, which he called "Red Mullett,"
people who recognised him would turn and remark that Mr. Punch had come
out for a ride upon dog Toby.

[Illustration: THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL.

TIME: Midnight. A Sketch not a Hundred Miles from the Haymarket.

_Bella:_ "Ah! Fanny! How long have you been _gay_?"

(From _Punch_, 12th Sept., 1857, Vol. xxxiii.)]

But it was not by his comic faculty alone that John Leech helped to
make _Punch_ great, nor even by his political work. It was also by his
frank demonstration of that deep feeling which is often called
"passion," whether love, or sympathy, or hot indignation. His love of
children, even when he laughs at them, is surpassed by few other artists
or writers, even by those of Mr. Punch--that adorer of first youth and
green-apple and salad days. The enthusiasm with which he threw himself
into all attacks upon abuses showed him a hot-blooded philanthropist. It
was not for the first time that in his "Moral Lesson of the Gallows" he
used his Hogarthian power against the scandal and brutalising horror of
public executions. In the little "social" entitled "The Great Social
Evil," which so electrified _Punch's_ readers at the time, there appears
the hand of the reformer, perhaps; but primarily a whole heartful of
wide sympathy and pathos, from which, with true instinct, the artist has
banished every suggestion of humour, retaining only with a few skilful
strokes the sad and pathetic reality of the