Part 24 (1/2)

John Leech, ”born in Bennett Street, Stamford Street, 29th August, 1817, and baptized (son of John Leech, vintner) 15th November, at Christ Church, Blackfriars Road.” Such is the entry I find in the ma.n.u.script diary of his friend the late s.h.i.+rley Brooks, now before me, written a few days after the death of the gifted and lamented artist. The ”John Leech, vintner,” his father, here referred to, was at one time proprietor of the London Coffee House on Ludgate Hill. A late commentator says he ”was an Irishman, a man of fine culture, a profound Shakespearian scholar, and [presumably by way of apology--as if any such were needed] a thorough gentleman.” Be this as it may, he was not successful as a landlord, and as a matter of fact depended in a great measure for his support upon the talents of his remarkably gifted son.

EARLY DAYS.

Leech was only seven years old when his father sent him to the Charterhouse. His arm had been broken by a fall from a pony, and the effects of this accident debarred him from taking an active part in the athletic sports of cricket, hockey, or football; but his nature inclined him nevertheless to manly exercises, and despite his excellence with the pencil, which was manifested at a remarkably early age, he is said to have preferred the lessons of Angelo the fencing, to those of Burgess the drawing, master. He was not distinguished at school as a cla.s.sical scholar, and Latin verses in particular proved so serious a stumbling-block that he always got a schoolfellow to do them for him.

His famous friend and fellow-pupil, Thackeray, carried an indelible personal reminiscence of the Charterhouse about him in the shape of a broken nose, a mark of distinction which was earned in a pugilistic encounter with another schoolfellow.

A reminiscence of John Leech's schoolboy days will be found in one of his ill.u.s.trations to ”Once a Week,”[126] which represents a schoolboy perched in the topmost branches of a tree overlooking the walls of the Carthusian playground. As the mail coaches bound to the north pa.s.sed the Charterhouse walls in the old coaching days, the boys not seeing any just reason why they should be debarred from the exhilarating spectacle, notched the trees and drove in spikes at ticklish points, which enabled them to mount to the upper branches, whence they could watch the coaches at their leisure. The ill.u.s.tration referred to is labelled, _A Coach Tree_, but without this explanation the reader would scarcely suspect (the letterpress being of course silent on the subject) that the schoolboy represented in the ill.u.s.tration is the artist himself. Leech always retained a pleasant recollection of his old Carthusian school-days, and frequently attended the festivities of the Charterhouse.

His early apt.i.tude for the pencil was developed when he was only three years of age. One of his early efforts attracted the attention of Flaxman the sculptor, who advised that he should ”not be cramped with lessons in drawing; let his _genius_,” he said, ”follow its own bent, and he will astonish the world.” This advice was so far followed, that we believe we are justified in saying that beyond the ordinary perfunctory drawing lessons obtained at school, he received no other artistic education during the rest of his life. His father, the ”profound Shakesperian scholar” and ”perfect gentleman,” so little encouraged the bent of the boy's genius, that if he had had his way he would have driven this square peg into a very round hole. At sixteen years of age he took his son from the Charterhouse, and shortly afterwards apprenticed him to an eccentric person at Hoxton, nominally carrying on the profession of a surgeon, and rejoicing in the name of Whittle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN LEECH. ”_Illuminated Magazine._”

THE MAYOR AND CORPORATION OF SWINESTEAD WAIT UPON MR. BAGGES.

_Face p. 278._]

This Whittle proved a perfect study to the young artist, and it is possible that his connection with this eccentric personage had some influence in deciding him not to follow a profession for which he had but little sympathy. Whittle was a man of large frame and muscular development, so far at least as the upper part of his body was concerned, but the development extended no farther, his legs being formed on much more slender proportions. His tastes were decidedly athletic; he had rings let into the wall for the purpose of practising gymnastics, and delighted in posing before his amused pupils in the character of ”The Dying Gladiator,” ”Hercules,” and other antique statues. The few patients he possessed had small chance of professional attendance when Mr. Whittle was in training for a walking or running match, or any other amateur athletic engagement. ”When,” says s.h.i.+rley Brooks, ”lady patients, taking a walk, are suddenly surrounded by a hurrying and shouting crowd, in the middle of which, as they escape, they behold their medical adviser, in quaint attire, rus.h.i.+ng to pick up stones with his mouth, an early termination of the relations between the healer and his patients is not impossible.”[127] A person of this kind was obviously out of his element in a _learned_ profession, and this Whittle eventually recognised, and descended to his level by marrying one of his patients, a widow who kept a neighbouring public. He found himself more ”at home” behind the bar in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, and with ready facility adapted himself to circ.u.mstances by drawing beer for his former pupils and patients. Various stories have been told of this eccentric personage, who is said (with what truth we know not) to have commenced life as a Quaker, and ended it eventually as a missionary.

”RAWKINS.”

Whittle the eccentric was afterwards immortalized by Leech as ”Rawkins”

in Albert Smith's ”Adventures of Mr. Ledbury,” which made their appearance in ”Bentley's Miscellany.” We cannot advise those who would enjoy a hearty laugh to do better than refer to Leech's comical etchings of _The Return of Hercules from a Fancy Ball_ (on a wet night, without his latchkey), and the _Last Appearance of Mr. Rawkins in Public_, in which the _rencontre_ of Mr. Whittle and some of his female patients already referred to is superbly realized.

When Mr. Whittle and his practice had finally parted company in the manner we have described, John Leech's indentures were transferred to Dr. John c.o.c.kle, afterwards physician to the Royal Free hospital. During part of his spasmodic medical course, he went through the mystic performance at one time known as ”walking the hospitals,” and at St.

Bartholomew's varied his attendance at the anatomical lectures of Mr.

Stanley--where he met other square pegs intended for round holes, Albert Smith and Percival Leigh--with sketches of his fellow-pupils and their medical lecturers. Many of these, the earliest of his sketches, were in the possession of his friend, the late Mark Lemon. Before his time was out, Leech luckily resolved to throw his medical studies to the winds, and to live wholly by the practice of his art.

His first work, published when he was eighteen years of age, was ent.i.tled ”Etchings and Sketchings by A. Pen, Esq.,” and consisted of four quarto sheets, containing slightly caricature sketches of oddities of London life, such as cabmen, policemen, street musicians, and the like. He next tried his hand at lithography, and produced some political satires not without ability; but these at best were merely the tentative efforts of an artist who had not yet discovered the bent of his genius, in consequence of being compelled to accommodate himself to the standard of his early patrons--the printsellers. Having drawn his design, Leech has been known in those early times to spend a weary day in search of a buyer, by carrying the heavy stone about with him from publisher to publisher. The style of these tentative efforts may be judged by the work which first brought him into notice, a poor caricature of Mulready's envelope in commemoration of the establishment of Sir Rowland Hill's cheap postage system, a reproduction of which will be found in a late ”Biographical Sketch” by Mr. Kitton.[128] Although the pecuniary reward of this early effort was small, people began to ask by whom it was executed; thus it was that his subsequently well-known mark, the leech-bottle, first came into public notice.

Specimens of these tentative efforts are of course scarce, but occasionally the reader may fall in with odd numbers of the ”Comicalities,” issued some half century ago by the proprietors of ”Bell's Life,” in which may be found specimens of his early work among impressions from the designs on wood of Kenny Meadows, ”Phiz,” and even Robert Seymour.[129] Among these early efforts may also be named ”The Boys' Own Series”; ”Studies from Nature”; ”Amateur Originals”; the ”Ups and Downs of Life, or the Vicissitudes of a Swell”; and other etcetera.

When poor Seymour shot himself in 1836, the artist who was at first selected to fill his place as ill.u.s.trator of ”Pickwick” was Robert William Buss, who, failing however to supply the requirements of Charles d.i.c.kens, was (as we shall afterwards see) quickly discarded. Others, however, had applied to supply the place of the deceased artist, and among them were Hablot Knight Browne (”Phiz”), W. M. Thackeray, and John Leech; although the latter failed to secure the appointment, he appears to us of all others the one best fitted to pictorially interpret the author's creations. Thackeray was so little conscious of the bent of his own genius that he seems at this time to have had some thoughts of following the profession of an artist, but happily failed so completely that he was induced to follow up his alternative art of authors.h.i.+p, by which he achieved his fame and reputation. Notwithstanding his failure, his implicit faith in his own artistic powers remained unshaken to the end, in which belief he has been followed by one or two writers who might have known better.

It is not until 1840 that we find Leech had matured the style and manner which afterwards made him famous; and accordingly, in this year we find designs which are thoroughly worthy of his reputation. Among these may be named ”The Children of the Mobility,” seven lithographs (reproduced in 1875) dealing with the humorous and pathetic episodes of the London street arabs; ”The Comic Latin Grammar”; ”The Comic English Grammar”; and a now exceedingly rare _jeu d'esprit_, bearing the full t.i.tle of ”The Fiddle-Faddle Fas.h.i.+on Book and Beau Monde a la Francaise, enriched with numerous highly coloured figures of lady-like gentlemen,”[130] a most amusing skit upon the absurd fas.h.i.+on books of the period, containing four coloured plates of gentlemen (more than fifty figures) in male and female costume, posed in the ridiculous and well-known simpering style of those periodicals. All these works were produced in conjunction with Percival Leigh, one of the artist's fellow-students at St. Bartholomew's, and led directly to his engagement on the pages of _Punch_, which was started the following year.

Among the rarer works published in 1840, to which John Leech contributed the benefit of his a.s.sistance, may be mentioned a publication, ent.i.tled ”The London Magazine, Charivari, and Courier des Dames” (Simpkin, Marshall & Co.), in which we find some portraits and other work altogether out of the range of his usual style of ill.u.s.tration. The tone of this publication was personal in the extreme. Charles d.i.c.kens had produced (among other publications) his ”Pickwick Papers,” ”Oliver Twist,” ”Nicholas Nickleby,” and at this time was engaged on the most touching and pathetic of his stories, ”The Old Curiosity Shop,” which was, however, so little appreciated by the editor of this scurrilous publication, that we find him perpetrating the following sorry libel on the writer and three of his contemporaries: ”To cheesemongers and others! Ready for delivery, at a halfpenny per pound, forty tons of foundered literature; viz., Mrs. Trollope's 'Unsatis-factory Boy,'[131]

'Master Humphrey's Clock' (refer to the second meaning in 'Johnson's Dictionary': 'an unsightly crawling thing'!), Captain Marryat's 'Alas, Poor Jack'! and _Turpis_ Ainsworth's 'Guy _Fox_':--

'An animal cunning, unsavoury, small, That will dirty your hands if you touch it at all.'”

So little merit had this critical periodical itself, that some rare etchings by Hablot Knight Browne and Leech to a novel ent.i.tled ”The Diurnal Revolutions of David Diddledoff,” which appeared in its pages, failed to keep the dreary serial alive, and a quarrel ensuing between the proprietors and himself, Browne was dismissed and Leech supplied his place. Leech's caricature of Mulready's postage envelope, already mentioned, appears to have led to others, and among them one by ”Phiz,”

a circ.u.mstance which is referred to in the following attack: ”Phiz has found a lower deep in the lowest depths of meanness. When Leech's admirable caricature of Mulready's postage envelope was pirated by every tenth-rate _sketcher_, Phiz steps in to complete the work of injustice, and advertises his caricature of the same subject at _sixpence_, thus both borrowing the design and underselling the artist upon whose brains he is preying as the fly upon the elk's. Well might Leech exclaim, 'Et tu, Brute!' (and you, you brute!) Leech is a genuine artist, while Phiz is only a bad engraver.” By way of answer to this vulgar abuse, Phiz almost immediately afterwards produced his admirable ill.u.s.tration of _Quilp and the Dog_, in No. 18 of ”Master Humphrey's Clock.”

In the pages of this defunct periodical we find a long and virulent article on Benjamin D'Israeli, the late Lord Beaconsfield, from which we have disinterred the following remarkable prophecy. After referring to his celebrated parliamentary _fiasco_, and his own prophetic words on that memorable occasion: ”You won't hear me now; but the time will come when you _shall_ hear me!” the writer goes on to say: ”That time has never since arrived. In vain did Benjamin parody Sheridan's celebrated saying ('It's in me, and by G---- it shall be out of me!'). He renewed his efforts repeatedly.... But though, in consequence of his (_sic_) moderating his tone into a semblance of humility, he is sometimes just listened to, he has never made the slightest impression in the house, _and we may fairly predict he never will_.” The article is ill.u.s.trated by a remarkable semi-caricature likeness of the late Lord Beaconsfield, then in his thirty-second year, which, although unsigned and altogether different from his well-known style, we can a.s.sign to no other hand than that of John Leech. We found our opinion on the fact that the previous portrait is by him; that none but his etchings appear in the latter portion of the book; and because the bird represented following the footsteps and mimicking the walk of the young statesman, is own brother to the celebrated Jackdaw of Rheims immortalized by Thomas Ingoldsby. So remarkable is the likeness, that the shadow of D'Israeli's follower and that of Saint ”Jem Crow” of the Legends are identical.

ARTISTIC POSITION SECURED.

In 1840 some of John Leech's sketches were brought to the notice of the Rev Thomas Harris Barham, which led to his engagement on the pages of ”Bentley's Miscellany,” from which moment his artistic position was secured. His first ill.u.s.tration was _The Black Mousquetaire_. Barham in describing the scene, regretted, oddly enough, that he had neither the pencil of Fuseli or Sir Joshua Reynolds at command, or had himself taken lessons in drawing:--