is fertile, but his ob-
servation is superfi-
cial, and his hand is
the hand of a man-
nerist.

In the year 1841 appeared the first number of a publication in the pages of which have been given to the world the best works of the two, we will say the three, best caricaturists of the present generation. The publication was Punch, or the London Charivari, and the caricaturists are John Leech, Richard Doyle, and Charles Keene. Each of these artists has made a style for himself, marked with the traits of original genius; and the development of each one is traceable, week after week, in the pages of Punch. Mr. Punch began his caricaturing both with pen and pencil in a very THE TIGHT QUEUE.-BY CRUIK small and vulgar way.

SHANK.

His pages were filled with little black silhouettelooking figures, illustrative of very little jokes or illustrated by them; as, for instance, a horse crushed beneath the weight of an obese rider was labeled "Breaking a horse ;" and "Going

flectively, but laugh outright. And how thor- off in a rapid decline" was written underneath oughly have they succeeded!

the representation of a black little boy tumbling Cruikshank had so many imitators that he off the steep roof of a black little house. At may be said to have founded a school of cari- the first glance Mr. Punch's early pages, dotted cature. As Jubal was the father of all such as with sable subjects of this kind, generally not handle the harp and organ, so Cruikshank must too large to be covered by a twenty-five cent own Crowquill, and Phiz, and all of their kid- piece, looked as if it were defaced with the manney as his progeny. They are all but feebler gled remains of crushed beetles. The wit of the Cruikshanks, living at second-hand on such vital- letter-press was about equal to the humor of the ity as he could spare. Among the caricaturists illustrations; and indeed it would be difficult to who rose into notice after him, but who did not find a publication more redolent of the air of the content themselves with imitating him, is Kenny vulgar London "free-and-easy" than the first Meadows, an artist of some humor and fancy, two or three volumes of the publication which which he shows best in such designs, for in- has since become so justly celebrated. For imstance, as one in his illustrations of the "Tam-provement was slow, and although there was a ing of the Shrew," in which Cupid, wearing Petruchio's hat and boots, is, with most comically austere visage, clipping with shears the claws of a cat, fiercely struggling, but, like Kate, struggling in vain. Kenny Meadows, however, has not freedom of hand or variety of style enough to take high rank as a caricaturist or characterist. His drawing is far from being correct, and his style is hard; his faces and figures look as if they were cut with a pen-knife; all his fat people have the same strictly circular obesity, all his handsome men the same smirk, all his pretty women the same simper. His fancy

place ready in England to be filled by a humorous paper such as Punch came to be, it was not until about the year 1844 that this now worldrenowned hebdomadal showed signs of improvement, and began to be really humorous and more elevated in tone, and consequently a power, if not an organ. Before that time all its efforts in this direction were much of a piece with poor Provis's assurances to his dear boy and Pip's comrade that they need not fear that he was going to be low.

It was by its illustrations that Punch was raised above its original level; and the elevation

horse, is his favorite among brutes not human. In the distance, too, looking for the lost spaniel, is the young lady's attendant page, another representative of a class upon which Mr. Leech has for years been mercilessly funny. All these figures are drawn with consummate knowledge of character and mastery of the pencil, and with a union of freedom and finish which, until he became occasionally careless of late, was characteristic of Mr. Leech's works. The distress of the young lady-her least possible stoop of inquiry at the four-legged brute to which the

was chiefly, if not entirely, due to the pencil of | here's the only dog I've seed to-day, and he Mr. Leech. We first detect him in the fourth don't answer to the name of Fido." Meanwhile number in a not very humorous or very well-de- Fido's bright protuberant eyes are looking out of signed cartoon called "Foreign Affairs," which the thief's pocket. We here have Mr. Leech's is a mere collection of mild caricatures of French, first presentation of the pretty young woman Italian, and German people. This is signed by whom he has since made so widely known :-a a cipher-a leech in a bottle-which he used in fine study from one of the lowest of the lower orthe early part of his career, but has since aban-ders in which he has found so many subjects for doned for his name or his initials. But although his caustic pencil, and a dog-which, next to a he soon improved perceptibly, both in the choice of subject and in treatment, Punch was nearly three years old before Mr. Leech handled political subjects boldly, or struck that rich mine of social satire which he has since worked so profitably, and in which Messrs. Doyle and Keene have been co-operators with him, though working with their own tools in their own way. During a great part of the year 1842 there was no political caricature of any kind in Punch; and it was not until the beginning of the year 1845 that Mr. Leech showed that peculiar talent by which he has since so much delighted us, in a lit-two-legged brute directs her attention-the viltle social sketch called "Innocence." It was excellent in itself, and is an early and a very good example of his second style, and in its subject and the figures introduced in it quite a representative exhibition of his multitudinous designs in this department of caricature. A young lady -a dainty, pretty creature-has lost her pet King Charles; and, in her innocence, she inquires of the very dog-thief who has picked it up if he has seen it. To which he answers: "Seed a little dog, marm? No, marm.

lainous countenance of this fellow, in which practiced impudence, low cunning, and inherent brutality are combined with a consciousness of superiority in the "do"-the dog, "the hero of a hundred fights," and yet the fit companion of such a master, every point in whose (the dog's) anatomy is drawn with the knowledge and the spirit of Landseer-and even the juvenile stolidity of the fat, be-strapped, be-buttoned page in the distance, all are given with a master's hand. This Mr. Leech has, since he made this drawing, ac

have lasted for years, leaving Mr. Briggs in the performance of divers distressful feats of deer-stalking upon the Highlands of Scotland, the sporting maladroitness and the domestic servitude of a certain class of men is made the occasion of no end of harmless merriment; and Mr. Briggs has become the type of a class. So of the Unprotected Female-a creature found in perfection only in England, but whose general traits are sufficiently cosmopolitan to make her appreciated in any civilized country, even in America-what an epitome is she of a

we men, or we women who have men-slaves, laugh cruelly in our strength, in our worldly wisdom, or in our well-sheltered helplessness, which is to us both as wisdom and as strengthlaugh cruelly, and yet inevitably! And this leads to the remark that Mr. Leech's wit is too often pitiless, almost malicious, and especially in regard to women. Unless self-love is blinding to a greater degree than is generally believed, he must be very unpopular with all women over thirty, and especially those who are unmarried and desire to look young. Maidenhood at thirty-five assuming, however slightly, the airs of maidenhood at twenty, he pursues with remorseless ridicule. Indeed, were women inclined to make cutting speeches, which of course they are not, they might say that he is a true representative of his sex in never forgiving a woman for not being pretty; for, young or old, the ugly ones fare hardly at his hands, and his Misses Stout and Misses Scragg, must have sent a pang through the heart of many a poor girl who felt that she was a little fuller or a little less rounded in figure than "the bending statue that enchants the world." The causticity of his pencil in this respect must be felt the more keenly, because of his continuous cherishing and glorification of the more fortunate ones of the sex between the ages of fifteen and forty. For it must be confessed that he illustrates their varied loveliness with unwearied and enchanting pencil.

quired a little more freedom of hand and a ❘ of beasts and not behind him-through all these greater variety of knowledge; but it is a ques-vicissitudes of his hapless existence, and they tion whether, on the whole, he has gained much. His talent in the course of three years made itself appreciated, and gained for Punch the attention of London, and London is England. He it was who designed those caricatures of Brougham, Wellington, Sibthorpe, Peel, and Disraeli which became staple stock in trade for Punch-caricatures equally extravagant and ridiculous, yet so like in fact and so vital in seeming, that they became so fixed in the memory of the public, that when those statesmen were thought of, it was the caricature and not the real man which arose before the mind's-class, at whose little miseries and great blunders eye. Mr. Leech's humor, either from his own resources or from the suggestions of others, seemed of boundless fertility. In caricaturing the great versatility of Lord Brougham (about whom, when he took his seat upon the woolsack, some barrister, whose eminence gave him the right to be envious, made the cutting remark that if the new Lord Chancellor only knew a little law he would know a little of every thing), Mr. Leech put him into an endless variety of employments and postures, all of them not very dignified; and finally, when invention seemed exhausted -though it was not-in a cartoon subscribed, "What he must do next," we saw Lord Brougham standing on his head with his plaid-trowsered legs kicking in the air. Mr. Leech it was who first gave Mr. Punch himself a character-who made him ubiquitous and protean-the Mentor of the British nation-to be seen in all disguises, warning, counseling, denouncing, protecting, ridiculing-an omniscient, omnipresent, grinning puppet; the jeering Chorus in the great drama of British life; in the confidence of every body, trusted by every body, betraying every body-solicitous only for his moral, his joke, and his three-pence. Fond of horses, hunting, and field-sports generally, Mr. Leech has found in the cockney pretenders to sporting honors, and the horse-dealers and their victims, an inexhaustible source of amusement. Indeed he has created a character in this walk of life. Mr. Briggs will live as long as Mr. Winkle. Were the woes of a stout old gentleman with a wife and a house, and a desire to hunt and shoot and fish, ever made more ludicrously apparent? From the time when he first appears, brought forward on the occasion of a loose slate being discovered on the roof of his house, in the repairing of which his domicile is pulled down about his ears and rebuilt again, through his entanglement with his rod and reel, in which he begins by making a trial cast in the drawingroom and bringing down every thing breakable in a crash, to his attempt to imitate Mr. Rarey with a vicious beast, after having taken lessons of the great horse-tamer, the issue of which we see in the precipitate rush of Mr. Briggs from a stable-door followed by an infuriated steed, who has a part of his owner's nether integuments in his mouth-though exactly what part we can not see, as we are before the tamer

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But although these are Mr. Leech's specialties, he has shown a very extended scope of close observation. Probably no other caricaturist ever presented such a wide range of subjects. His men of fashion-"swells" they are called in London-and his street-boys, present us vivid portraitures of both extremities of the social scale, every degree of which his observant eye has rested on. What would you say, my little man," says a benevolent old gentleman to one of Leech's little ragamuffins, "if I were to give you a penny?" "Vy," says the urchin, whose very toes curl up with delightful expectation, and who utterly ignores the expected form of returning thanks, "that you vos a jolly old cove." This drawing is one of the most exquisite of its kind in existence. "I say, Bill," cries another of this crew to his companion, pointing to an unhappy lad who had been converted into a page in livery, and who is painfully