Mrs. Briggs flings into the fire! How
cosy all the Briggs party seem in their dining-room: Briggs reading
a Treatise on Dog-breaking by a lamp; Mamma and Grannie with their
respective needleworks; the children clustering round a great book of
prints--a great book of prints such as this before us, which, at this
season, must make thousands of children happy by as many firesides!
The inner life of all these people is represented: Leech draws them as
naturally as Teniers depicts Dutch boors, or Morland pigs and stables.
It is your house and mine: we are looking at everybody's family circle.
Our boys coming from school give themselves such airs, the young
scapegraces! our girls, going to parties, are so tricked out by fond
mammas--a social history of London in the middle of the nineteenth
century. As such, future students--lucky they to have a book so
pleasant--will regard these pages: even the mutations of fashion they
may follow here if they be so inclined. Mr. Leech has as fine an eye for
tailory and millinery as for horse-flesh. How they change those cloaks
and bonnets. How we have to pay milliners' bills from year to year!
Where are those prodigious chatelaines of 1850 which no lady could be
without? Where those charming waistcoats, those "stunning" waistcoats,
which our young girls used to wear a few brief seasons back, and which
cause 'Gus, in the sweet little sketch of "La Mode," to ask Ellen for
her tailor's address. 'Gus is a young warrior by this time, very likely
facing the enemy at Inkerman; and pretty Ellen, and that love of a
sister of hers, are married and happy, let us hope, superintending one
of those delightful nursery scenes which our artist depicts with such
tender humor. Fortunate artist, indeed! You see he must have been bred
at a good public school; that he has ridden many a good horse in his
day; paid, no doubt, out of his own purse for the originals of some of
those lovely caps and bonnets; and watched paternally the ways, smiles,
frolics, and slumbers of his favorite little people.

As you look at the drawings, secrets come out of them,--private jokes,
as it were, imparted to you by the author for your special delectation.
How remarkably, for instance, has Mr. Leech observed the hair-dressers
of the present age! Look at "Mr. Tongs," whom that hideous old bald
woman, who ties on her bonnet at the glass, informs that "she has used
the whole bottle of Balm of California, but her hair comes off yet."