so made.

The melancholy of Leech, which probably found relief in his more
sarcastic and serious drawings, was one of the predominant features of
his character. Sadness and dejection are often the birthwrong of the
humorist, as we have seen in the cases of Gillray, Seymour, Andre Gill,
and Labiche, and many others of _Punch's_ own day. But Leech's gravity
belonged to a mind too well-balanced to overreach itself, too genuine
for false sentiment. Moreover, he "could be a merry fellow when harmless
fun was demanded." So says Sir John Millais, who after Thackeray, and
perhaps Percival Leigh, was the friend Leech loved the best--far more
than any others of the _Punch_ Staff, cordial as his friendship with
them was. Sometimes his depression would make him think, says Dean Hole,
that he was "wasting his time on unworthy objects and an inferior
method," which was exactly what Kenny Meadows told him. It is true that
the said Bohemian had, in a soberer moment, assured him of his
immeasurable superiority to Kenny's self; but as the wine flowed, the
truth came out of it, it appeared that Meadows considered his own
illustrations of Shakespeare of vastly greater account than the mere
comic sketches of young John Leech.

Leech, it seemed, could be as humorous as he pleased, and as whimsical.
When his children misbehaved, he would correct them by making a sketch
of their "naughty faces;" and he was always ready to turn a joke upon
himself. He made merciless fun of sea-sickness--yet what is there so
comic in sea-sickness, after all, that we always laugh at it, just as we
laugh at the toothache, which George Cruikshank was so fond of
caricaturing?--the suffering, in both cases awful beyond the power of
words to express. One would almost be led to believe that Leech shared
the immunity of the robust scoffers whom one usually sees behind a big
cigar on board the yacht or steamboat. Yet when he crossed to Boulogne
on a visit to Dickens, and was received with uproarious applause from
what Americans call the "side-walk committee," by reason of his superior
greenness and more abject misery, he was quite pleased, and said with
the utmost gratification that he felt he had made a great hit. His
companionship with Dickens was frequent; and when, in 1848, he was
overthrown by a wave while bathing at Bonchurch, and received a slight
concussion of the brain, the novelist rendered him the greatest medical
service. On that occasion and the week after