y James' curious judgment that Leech had no
great sense of beauty, he has usually been otherwise adjudged, as in the
"poem" by Albert Smith and Edmund Yates--assuredly in harmony with most
men's views--where he is spoken of as

"'Handsome Jack,' to whose dear girls and swells his life _Punch_
owes."

And so it comes about that _Punch's_ pages are eloquent with portraits
of Mrs. Leech, who, with her children, became the very "orchard" of
Leech's eye. The last block of all on which the artist was engaged was
one to be called "An Afternoon on the Flags;" it represented a
complimentary dog-fancier comparing the points of beauty in a dog with
those of the lady before him, but it was still unfinished when he fell
back in his bed, dead from the fatal breast-pang.

Leech would never employ artists' models--partly because his _chic_
drawing, like Sir John Tenniel's, came natural to his genius, and his
memory was extraordinarily retentive, and partly because when he began
to draw for _Punch_, and for a long while after, it was unheard-of for
black-and-white men on comic papers to do anything so seriously
academic. But though he said that he had not in his life made
half-a-dozen drawings from Nature, he was always sketching "bits" for
use, and trusted to his memory and imagination for the rest. On one or
two occasions he would ask Mrs. Hole, the wife of the Dean of Rochester,
to sit for him in her riding-habit--but this was the nearest approach he
ever made to the "model." He would make his first sketch and then trace
it on to the block, finishing his rapid drawing with considerable
deliberation, yet so quickly that he would often send off three drawings
before dinner-time. He was extremely particular about the drawing, and
the engraving, too, of his boots and feet, and expressed boundless
admiration of Tenniel's power in that direction. "Talk of drawing!" he
exclaimed to Mr. Frith; "what is my drawing compared to Tenniel's? Look
at the way that chap can draw a boot; why, I couldn't do it to save my
life!" Like all other artists, he was constantly asked by friends what
paper was the best and what pencils he used. "H.B.," he would reply; "if
you can't put it down with that, you can't put it down at all." His
simplicity of means matched the simplicity of his art, and both the
transparent simplicity of his character. His views relative to private
persons' privacy prevented him from including portraiture in his
drawings o