Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/382

 Leech it will be remembered obtained a footing on the staff of "Bentley's Miscellany" at the time when George Cruikshank was leaving it. Cruikshank, however, was an admirer of the genius of Leech, and when they laid him in his untimely grave in Kensal Green Cemetery, on the 4th November, 1864, the veteran artist was among the crowd of distinguished men who looked sorrowfully on. The influence which George Cruikshank exercised upon the genius of Leech will be apparent to any one who has given attention to the early etchings of the latter. This influence will be particularly discernible in the illustrations to "Richard Savage" and "The Marchioness of Brinvilliers." Both were men of genius, but Leech's fancy was of a tamer kind, and little inclined him in the direction of the supernatural or the terrible. Leech, for instance, never produced anything which equalled Fagin in the Condemned Cell; The Murder of Sir Rowland Trenchard; Xit Wedded to the Scavenger's Daughter; Jack o' Lantern; or the reverie of the Triumph of Cupid. We shall find but few diabolicals in his gallery of pictorial subjects, notwithstanding which there is not a fiend in the whole of Cruikshank's demon ranks who equals Leech's devil in Thomas Ingoldsby's legend of "The House-warming."

It may seem invidious to institute a comparison between the two men. Some, indeed, may hold that a comparison is impossible; but we will quickly show that such a comparison is not only possible but unavoidable. George Cruikshank, for instance, might or might not have illustrated the "Comic Histories" of England and of Rome better than John Leech; we may fancy, however, his hand on the Surtees' novels, the odd men, the strange coats, the eccentric women, the podgy "cockhorses," the wonderful dogs that would have put in an appearance in the various sporting scenes and incidents which form the subject of these "horsey" romances; we should like, for instance, to see what he would have made of the pretty serving woman who figures in the frontispiece of "Ask Mamma;" how he would have treated the fair "de Glancey"; how he would have grouped and dressed his figures at The Handley Cross Ball; how he would have treated poor old Jorrocks when he fell into the