x thousand designs that make
up the sum of his contribution, the character of "the classes" of our
day, and that with such intensity of truth that we derive our delight in
his work even more from the faithfulness of its representation than from
the fun of the joke and the comic rendering of the subject. One writer
has been found who sees in his pictures nothing but degradation, and who
condemns the one which shows a tippler who has returned late and thrown
himself upon the bed beside his wife fully clad and with his umbrella
open, as "obscene, and it is matched by many another equally odious!"
But everybody else will endorse Sir Frederic Leighton's enthusiastic
testimony that "among the documents for the study in future days of
middle-class and of humble English life, none will be more weighty than
the vivid sketches of this great humorist."[56] In praising Keene's
"feeling of out-of-doorness," in the "Magazine of Art," Mr. William
Black criticised truly when he declared, "Ever and again we come upon a
bit of a turnip-field, a hedge-row, even the corner of a London street,
the vividness of which is a sudden delight to the eyes." This estimate
was well thrown into verse a few months later, when _Punch_ in its
bereavement sang the praises of its greatest artist:--

"... Nor human humours only; who so tender
Of touch when sunny Nature out-of-door
Wooed his deft pencil? Who like him could render
Meadow or hedge-row, turnip-field or moor?

Snowy perspective, long suburban winding
Of bowery roadway, villa-edged and trim,
Iron-railed city street, where gas-lamps blinding
Glare through the foggy distance, dense and dim?"

Keene's simple, kind, and somewhat lonely life are too well known to
call for recapitulation here--his tenderness and chivalry towards women,
his unconventionality, his love of ancient pipes and virulent
"dottle"-smoking, his quaint story-telling and singular modesty, his
sensitiveness (he never would ask his nephew, Mr. Corbould, to sit as
model to him again after a bantering inquiry of how much he was going to
pay), his Conservatism, his humour, his gentle hobbies, and, lastly, his
stern economy. Indeed, by his thrift, when he died, he was found to have
accumulated over L30,000, chiefly out of his _Punch_ work, in spite of
the fact that he would never receive a salary: all this is accessible
elsewhere. For some time before he died he ceased to draw for the paper,
so broken was he;