The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-07 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF TEE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

NV hen the Florida arrived at Bahia she had a crew
of 17 efficers and 129 men, of whom 5 officers and 71
men (incluliug the 6 who swam ashore at the time
of her capture) were on shore, and consequently pre.
served their liberty. The other 12 officers and 58
men were either captured, killed, cr wounded. The
names of these 12 officers are—First Lieutenant
Thomas K. Porter, Second Lieutenant S. G. Stone,
First Assistant Surgeon S. J. Charlton, Chief En-
gineer W. S. Thompson, Acting Masters R. S.
Floyd, G. I). Bryan, and T. T. Hunter, jun., As-
r.;gtant-Surgeon Thames Emory, Midshipman G..T.
jun., First Assistant-Eogineer %V. Ahern,

Death of a Great National Favourite.
The following epigram—the two last lines of
which are admirable—we are indebted for to a
correspondent of oar able contemporary the
Examiner, an epigrammatist signing himself " D."

29TH OCTOBER, 1864,
Death may laugh now athwart the glooms of Earth,
And make his aspect horrible with smiles;
For he has struck a blow that murders mirth,
And silences the laughter of the isles.
ii,EVIEW.—!t Would be only
pedantry to compare the late and lamented John
Leech either with his contemporaries or his pre.
decessors as a caricaturist. A caricaturist he was
not ; and if he is to be reduced to a single type,
Hogarth is the only artist—and Hogarth only par-
tially—to whom he can be at all likened. Chrono-
logically, of course, Leech stood in legitimate suc-
cession as the representative humonrist artist of the
day, in that series which comprises the names of
Bunbury, Gilray, Rowlandson, H. 8., and George
Cruikshank. But the range of each and of all
these artists was cotifiaed, and their aim compare•
tively narrow. Bunbary attached himse:f to fashion-
able life, but he was a mere caricaturist, or distort

tionist. Gilray, with wonderful fertility of invention,
chiefly occupied himself with politics. He was a par-
tisan, and a coarse one. Occasionally he almost hit
the sublime, as in the Worship of the Sans Culotte
Deity ; but he must have been a man of fiery tem-
perament and strong passions. Rowlandson, who
was a real artist when he chose, must have been a
man of nasty ideas—so coarse, so swinish, so bestial
are his subjects. And if he satirised the worst animal
passions, it was not without a sneaking sympathy
with them. H. B. confined himself, we believe, to
political portraits, which were not deficient in cha-
racter ; but they were cold, and the wit usually re-
quired a scholiast. Cruileshank, though a genius of
the first rank, and of wonderful fertility in invention
and unrivalled in subjects of diablerie and grim
fancy, is absolutely without a sense of beauty. It
has been reserved for Leech to pour out in unabated
succession for more than 20 years, week after week,
works of real art,which are certainly not caricatures,
but rather humouristic pictures, illustrating the ac-
tual life of the times, its political and social facts,
with a precision and versatility and originality—
and, above all, with a real moral goodness—which
presents a new chapter in the history of the pencil.
Hogarth's aim, it must be admitted, was much the
same; and he had the unapproachable merit of ori-
ginating a new function for art. He brought art
hilme to living men by showing it concerned with
living life—with the vices, follies, and facts of the
times as they were. The "Enraged Musician"
might have been one of Leech's own subjects;
" Beer Lane" and " Gin Alley" might appear in
next week's Punch ; and if Hogarth's chef fame
depends upon his two great pictorial epics, it is only
by reason of a change in taste that Leech was
precluded from scourging the Fast Life of oar
own days with the vigour of the immortal
painter of the Georgian Rakes and Harlots. Ho-
garth attacked sin rather than folly ; while Leech
confined himself to the pettinesses weak-
nesses of mankind. At any rate it is something
to be proud of that neither our Hogarth nor our
Leech prostituted their gifts by the sort of apotheo-
sis of the demimonde and Lerettism which forms
the main attraction of the Charivari. Leech, how-
ever had advantages which were &nisei to Hogarth.
The brush or the etching-needle were Hogarth's
only tools ; woodcutting is to a prolific draughtsmen
what the railway is to the traveller. Leech's works
divide themselves naturally into two great groups
—the political aid the social " peeciliings," as he
thought proper, and with all modesty, to call them.
Political epigrams with the pencil were impossible
in Hogarth's days. There was
.not a congregation
for the pictorial preacher to address. Nor are we
aware that the thing itself was in Hogarth's way.
Besides which, the weekly epigram on Punch's full
page only epitomises the limes' articles of the week.
It compresses, as with an hydraulic power, the floats
ing sentiment of the day—presents it with admir-
able point, and in the neatest and most memorable
shape. But Leech, as a politician, is hardly ever
original, He only claims to reflect and to represent
the general public judgment on men and things.
Hence there is a certain timidity in his obsequious
following suit to the popular voice, At the time of
the Papal aggression he was a strong anti-Catholic ;
but as the popular fanaticism began to cool, he ven-
tured on one of his moat memorable hits—Lord John
chalking up No Popery and then running away. If
all the world had not agreed that the same Lord
John's official powers %ere limited, we should nut
have had the Page who was "not strong enough for
the place." Had not a gust of gossip surmised that
Lord Brougham was, some 20 years ago, intriguing
for place, we should not have had to laugh at that
mostcomic of sketches,the ex- Chancellor as theMerry-
man in the Circus, ready "for to come, for to go, for to
fetch, for to carry." But to say this is no disparage-
ment to Leech. He secures impersonality by the
palpable abeyance of his own private views. Gilray
dashed and daubed under the inspiration of strong
personal feelings, in his fierce attacks on the French
Revolution. Bat Leech gains in force and impres-
siveness by merging the man in the chronicler. His
commentaries on public things are party commen•
taries, but they do not effect to be his own. They
are the current interpretation of regular politicians ;
they only claim to represent with point and defi-
niteness the judgment, on public men and public
events, of a least half the nation. And this has its
value—the value, that is, of all contemporary judg-
ments, with their incompleteness, their rapidity,
their one-sidedness, their inexactness. To the Ma-
caulay that is to be, a volume of Punch's political
pencillings will stand him in good stead for a file
of the Times. But in one thing Leech must be
credited with personal merits of no slight character
in his political sketches. Personal in one sense he
must be, in the other he is not. It is always
open to the political satirist to treat his sub-
ject in the spirit of the early John Bull and
the manner of Theodore Rook. This is
what Leech never did. Private character was to
him a sacred territory. He never listened at key-
holes, or subsidised butlers and lady's-maids for the
barb of his epigrams. And if it should be said
that the taste of our own days would not bear the
revival of the Age and Satirist, it may be owing to
such as Leech that the Age and Satirist are now-a-
days impossible. After all, however, it was not by
his political satire that Leech made himself a per-
sonal friend and intimate of all English circles.
He was one of ourselves. He entered into our
common domestic life, with all its little funny
affectations, its grotesqueness, its foibles, its weak•
nese, and its strength. Leech shot folly as it flies;
bat he was never bitter, seldom cynical. He was
not a mere Thackerav, with a theory of life that we
all have a dark cupboard, that there is a spectre
always hovering over the hearth, and some vice or
crime that we dare hardly to confess to ourselves.
Leech had all the human sympathies; a sense of the
beauties of nature, both in men and the external
world
largeorld; sympathy acertain confidence in his kind, and
It with the great humanities.
was not, as in Thackeray's case, that
the satirist took a solitary foible or a pettis
ness and expanded it into the representation of a
class. Leech really did assume the class and then
limn the individual. He was rather the Theophrase
tus than the Timon of Art. Ha could not, even
had he- been capable of writing, have invented a
Becky Sharp ; but it is no disparagement to
Thackeray to say that be could not have imagined
Leech's Mr. Briggs, or his ideal " servant-gal," or
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a wisdom of impertinence which nearly reaches the
sublime. Nor must it be forgotten how wide was
the range of Leech's keen observation. In the
hunting-field, at the watering-place, on the river
bank, in the drawing-room, in London streets, on
the solitary moor, at home or abroad, far out at sea,
in the next garret, sumptuous or squalid, high or
low—it mattered not what was his subject, he was