oor thing out of its misery. When it was
dead, he had it put on a chair in his room, and made the sketch. This
was about three months before he died, and was the last thing he drew.
It required an effort on his part, as he had entirely left off doing any
work since the beginning of last year [1890]."

More than any other man on _Punch_, Keene suffered at the hands of the
engraver. But it was wholly his own fault. He took no heed whatever of
the engraver, and set before him problems to which there was no
solution. Thus, he loved to make his drawings on old rough paper, which
by its grain gave a wonderfully charming but irreproducible quality to
his ragged lines, and which by stains of age would impart effects wholly
foreign to the art of the wood-cutter.

[Illustration: "FRAU," ALIAS "TOBY," LYING IN STATE.

(_Keene's Last Drawing._)]

Moreover, he would manufacture his own inks in varying degrees of
greyness, and even of different colours, and then set them before the
cutter (not the _engraver_, mind) to translate into black-and-white. Yet
there are some who blame the craftsman for not reproducing what it was
an absolute impossibility to reproduce by printer's ink and graver! But
Keene was engrossed in his art; and I have seen a drawing, at Mr. Birket
Foster's house at Witley, which was the _seventh_ attempt he made before
he was satisfied. This was the drawing entitled "Ahem!" representing a
man kissing a girl, while someone, with the familiar inconsiderateness
of humanity, is approaching. The background for this drawing is Mr.
Foster's house.

But although Keene was not a man of ideas, his merits as a creator--as a
realiser of types--were supreme. Many of his _dramatis personae_ no doubt
became old-fashioned in a sense; but who can deny the truth to life of
the Kirk Elder, the slavey, the policeman, the fussy City man, the
diner-out, the waiter (did he not invent "Robert"?), the cabman, the
hen-pecked husband, the drunkard, the gillie, the Irish peasant, the
schoolboy, and the Mrs. Brown of Arthur Sketchley's prosaic muse? The
wealth of his limited fancy, and his power of resolving it into
well-ordered design, and presenting it with strange economy of means,
invested these puppets of his with a vividness which is often startling.
With greater force and subtlety, if with less refinement and grace, than
Leech--though not, like him, the genial sketcher of the genial side of
things--he has recorded, in the five or si