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

The Capture of the Confederate Steamer

Florida.

SOUTHAMPTON, Saturday.
CAptain C. M. Morris and Paymaster R. Taylor,
of tbo Confederates States Navy, late of the Florida
steamer, arrived here this evening in the Royal
mail steamship Magdalena, from Bahia. An inter-
view since held with Mr. Taylor at Kelway's Hotel,
supplemented by information received from Bahia,
enables me to furnish you with the following par.
titulars connected with the capture of the Florida
by the Federal steamer of war Wachusetts, of which
a telegraphic announcement has been received via

L'sbon
It appears that the Florida arrived at Bahia at 9
p.m. on Oct. 4, having put in at that port for a sup-
ply of sores and coals, and to effect some slight re-
p Airs in her machinery. Soon after she had anchored
in the outer harbour a boat went alongside and de-

minded the name of the vessel. The answer was

given, " The Confederate States steamer Florida,"
end a person in the boat called ont, "This boat is

from her Britannic Majesty's steamer Curlew." The
next morning it was found that neither the Curlew
nor au other British steamer of war was at the
pert, and the officers of the Florida came to the
opinion that the boat must have been sent from the
Federal steamer Wachusstts, which was lying in
the harbour. _ _

On the morning of the sth the Florida was visited
by a Brazilian naval officer, to whom Capt. Morris
stated his requirements, and the officer told the
captain that he wculd carry his message to the
Governor of the Province, but until an answer was
received from that official the Florida must not com-
municate with the shore. At 12 o'clock at noon a
letter from the Governor was received by Captain
Morris informing him that he was then ready to
rcc3ive him. The captain immediately went on
shore and had an interview with the Governor, who

ipfsgAßcLlgaStiaikAm would be allowed 48 hours to
auu LULU, ouvur,ca cut, repairs

_
for that purpose. The Governor was very urgent in
his request that Captain Morris would strictly ob-

serve the laws of neutrality during his stay, and
informed the captain that the American Consul,
Mr. Wilson, had given him his word of honour
that the Wachusetts would not violate the laws of
neutrality within the Brazilian waters. Capt. Mor-
ris gave the Governor the same assurance on the
part of the Florida. An admiral of the Brazilian
navy was present during this interview, and when
Captain Morris requested that he should be allowed
to move the Florida from the outer to the inner
roads, so as to be out of danger and to facilitate
coaling operations as well, the admiral said, " Oh,
yes, move her in and come inside of me, and you
will be out of all danger." Immediately after the
interview the Florida was removed to the berth des
signated for her, having two Brazilian vessels of war
between her and the Wachusetts, and close under
the guns of a steamer of war and a Brazilian fort.
The Brazilian engineer who examined the broken
machinery of the Florida reported that it cou'd not
be repaired in less than four days, and Captain
Morris at once came to the determination to let part
of his crew go ashore for liberty for twelve hours.
A number of the men accordingly went ashore in
the evening. Just after dark, about 7 o'clock, a
boat went alongside the Florida, and on being hailed
the reply was that she was from the Wachusetts,
with the United States Consul on board, who had
au effieial communication from the captain of that
ship to the captain of the Florida. The Consul
sent up his card with the letter, which was addressed
" Captain Morris, sloop Florida." The letter was
sent back to the Consul, who was told that it could
not be received, as it was not properly addressed
but that any communication addressed to Captain
ALrris, of the Confederate States navy, would be
c7.iv:d. The beat then left.
01 the morning of the 6th a Mr Da Vidiky went
on board the Florida, having received a letter from
the United States' Consul enclosing one to Captain
Morris. Mr Da Vidiky read to the captain his
letter from the Consul, requesting him to deliver
the enclosed challenge to Capt. Morris, and offering
to use his influence with the Brazilian Government
to have the Florida fitted out quickly if he would an
cept the challenge to go out and fight the Wachusette.
The latter to Capt. Morris was improperly directed
as before and that gentleman declined to receive it,
but told Mr De Vidiky to say that he had come to
Bahia for a special purpose, which being accom-
bed, ho should leave again—that he should
miter setk nor avoid a contest with the Wachu-
setts, bat should he meet her he would try to de-
stroy her. Hiving received this answer Mr. De
Vidiky left. The same afternoon, the first batch of
liberty men having returned to the Florida, the
starboard watch was released, and Captain Morris,
end some of the officers also, went ashore at the

plis

same time.
On© of the six men who subsequently swam
ashore stated that about 3 15 a.m. on the 7tb, Act-
ing•master T. T. Hunter, jun., being in charge of
the deck, the Wachusetts left her anchorage, and
taking advantage of the darkness, steered for the
Florida, from whom she could not be seen until she
was close to her: She was hailed by Acting-master
Hunter, who received no answer, and he cense-
fluently called hands to quarters. Before the officers
aid crew could all get cn deck the Wachusetts
struck the Florida on the starboard quarter, cutting
her rail down to the deck and carrying away her
rniz2nmast. At the same time the Wachusetts
poured a volley of musketry and a charge of canister
from her forecastle pivot gun upon the Florida's
decks. The Wachusetts then backed off, and
demanded a surrender, to which Lieutenant Porter
declined to accede. The Wachusetts fired again
and again, which was returned by the officers and
crew of the Florida. Another demand was made to
surrender, and Lieutenant Porter answered "I
will surrender conditionally." Theyrachusetts then
ceased firing, and the commander called out for
Captain Morris to come on board her. Lieutenant
Porter answered that he was on shore, but that
he, as commanding officer, would come as soon
as he could get a boat ready. A number of
armed boots were then sent from the Wachusetts
to take possession of the Florida. As soon as Lieu.
tenant Porter was heard to say that he would sur-
render, 15 of the Florida's crew jumped overboard
to escape capture, of whom only six succeeded in
reaching the shore, the other nine it is alleged being
shot in the water by men on the forecastle and in the
boats of the Wachusetts. Mr Hunter was wounded,
and a number of men killed. The Wachusetts then
made fast a hawser to the foremast of the Florida,
and after slipping her cable towed her out to sea.
While this was being done a boat from the Brazilian
flagship went alongside the Wachusetts and ordered
her to return to her anchoring ground, and a reply
was given telling the boat to keep off, as she was
about to go back to her anchorage. Capt .Morris
Was sleeping ashore, at an hotel overlooking the
water, and when called up by persons at the hotel,
• who suspected that something wrong was going on
by hearing the report of guns, he got down just in
time to make out what in the darkness appeared to
be the vessels steaming out of the harbour.
On the 12th tilt, the Wachusette, with the Florida
in tow, passed within sight of Pernambuco.
Mr De Vidiky wrote a letter to Captain Morris
on the 7th, expressing his regret at having accepted
the mission from the American Consul, whom he
could not find on his return from the Florida to
hand him back the letters, and stating that after
what had transpired he believed the challenge had
Lot ben made in good faith.
The Florida had only 25 tons of coaldust on
board at the time of her captuso. The machinery to
be repaired—viz., the pipe of her donkeynngine
and freshwater condenser—is still on shore at the
larEz lian arsenal at Bahia.

—ceaseless labour had been telling upon the artist for years
past; his whole nervous system fell into a state of ex-
treme irritability, threatening complete loss of power and
physical exhaustion, unless thorough rest could set it steady
again. Debility of this sort had so great an effect upon
Leech, that at times the slightest noise caused him great
suffering, and he fled in vain from that annoyance which
others bear with bitter resignation or transient anger. His
sufferings may provoke sympathy for other over-wrought
intellects. So vast an amount of intellectual labour as
that referred to would seem enough for the life of a man
long past the prime of his days. Few out of Leech's im-
mediate circle knew, however, that this was supplemented,
as it were, to an education in the medical profession, to
hospital studies and apprenticeship to a surgeon, with prac-
tice such as students seek and have, and that, ere Leech
called himself an artist, he was qualified to be a doctor.
Such was the case. Leech added authorship to his many
accomplishments, and the pages of Punch retain occasional
papers by the artist who did so much for its success. His
personal habits may be described here. He was an ardent
fisher and rider, fond of studying as well as sharing in
athletic sports, and, although not gifted with a remarks
ably strong physique, sustained, by his energetic and
nervous temperament, a great deal of fatigue. As to
Leech's method, or rather habit of practising his art,
we may say that all his friends knew the never-failing
little note-book, which contained wealth of sketches of ex-
pression, bits of composition, effect, and humour, such as
the artist met in his walks and visits. Did an odd or char-
acteristic face pass him by, out would Come the little
book as soon as he was unobserved, and its pages re-
corded the impression of the observer with extraordinary
facility and felicity, These notes often suggested themes,
or were used as occasion required and the fertile memory of
the artist brought them forth. A few lines will record
Leech's earthly career. He was of Irish descent, born, in
the city of London, in 1817. At an unusually early age he
went to the Charterhouse School, where he remained eight
years, under Dr Russell, and during the stay of Thackeray
in that place. Several of his schoolfellows are now, or have
been, distinguished in many ways. Even in childhood
Leech practised drawing ; he was an able sketcher while at
school ; all the teaching he got in art was of the common
sort wasted upon boys at school in those days. Beyond some
temporary counsel, from Mr Millais, with regard to the
practice of painting in oil,—required when it was conteme
.
platedto produce the well-known gallery of painted designs
frov2..rjr-eisieWeliP,l2,4P,WlßSLAttiftkLeE vreimrclit%
the whole of his life. Yielding, it is believed, to the wishes
of others, Leech, on quitting the Chartethouse, commenced
to study medicine and surgery under Mr Stanley, and
entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital as a student : he re-
mained there until his own inclination for Art found en-
couragement by the advice of some judicious friends, and
he essayed to draw on wood for publication. Punch
seemed created as a field for the display of his
ability. From this period our subject has been before the
world : what his labours were we have said. It is satisfacs
tory, in a melancholy way, to know that a time for rest was
near at hand for Leech, and that we might still have had
him amongst us, kindly, and as much a true gentleman as
ever, had the attack which bereft us not proved fatal. Ar-
rangements had been made by which he would have had
many months of entire repose and obtained new health, it
was hoped. The provision was too late; for some time
past the artist's health was in a depressed and exceedingly
feverish state ;, he was receiving medical advice and known
to be seriously affected, but not, it was thought, in any
dangerous way, although the anxiety of his friends made
them watch him heedfuly. His greatest misery was lack
of sleep : for three nights together it was no uncommon
thing for the artist who pleased so many of us to get not a
moment's rest. lie had been to consult Dr Quain on Fri-
day: there seemed no unusually alarming symptoms to be
dreaded in his case. On Saturday he was worse, but not
markedly so; some few children, friends of his children,
were gathered at his house, so little expected was the event
we deplore; the evening found him still worse, and
a succession of nervous fits ended in death. He was
buried at_ Kensal Green on Friday. Two children sur-
vive him. The best portrait of Leech is that exhibited by
Mr Millais at the Royal Academy in 1835, No. 1,t)88. It
was executed in water colours, and is in the puss scion of
the family of the deceased. A small statuette was shown
in Trafalgar-equare at the last Exhibition. Leech's last im-
portant effort for the recovery of his health was a visit to
Baden-Baden and Homburg: this was connected with a
series of sketches of life at the gaming tables that were
to form an important addition to the published works of the
artist,

always at home. And, somehow or other, one never
thought worse of one's kind even in their absurdities
and vanities and oddities after they had been quizzed
by Leech. He always contrived to leave some subtle
trace of sympathy with the objects of his pencil.
He wielded only summer lightning, which played
genially round its subject, but seldom scorched it.
His victims, if they may be called victims, never
became disagreeable or offensive. Once, and once
only, if we remember right, he put forth his full
strength when he drew a hideous and almost awful
group of French prostitutes—the foreigners whom
we could spare ; but somehow there seemed to be
hardly enough of sincerity in the public mind to be
grateful for, or to appreciate, this sterner stuff. It
was not understood, and Leech never ventured again
out of the region of the playful and sportive. It
was in him to have been a Crabbe or Swift ;. public
taste compelled him to be elegant rather than austere.
No doubt he was, in some class portraits, monotone
ous. His girls, fresh, honest, pretty, and unitellec-
tual, are true to fact, but as a class—which perhaps
makes them more true to fact—they are slightly tire-
some. Yet there was always heart in them ; their
ankles might be impossible, but they represented the
right stuff out of which wives and mothers are to
be made. In all this we have been, however
slightly and superficially, only touching on the
moral characteristics of Leech as an illustrator of
extant English life. But it must not be forgotten
that he was really a very great artist. It may be
that his artistic versatility is to be traced to the
circumstance that he was not regularly trained to
art as Hogarth was. It may sound something like
treason to the received canons if we say that Ho
garth's professional training, slight as it was,
cramped his genius. Leech, at any rate, by trying
all branches of art, found the vast range of his
powers. We are not aware that Hogarth ever
went beyond character-drawing and expression by
the human figure. Of landscape he seems to have
known little. Bat Leech was equally at home
when he had to hint the subtle sense, the mixed
motive, the suppressed emotion, the unspoken wit-
ticism in his Peels or his Cobens, his O'Connells or
his Disraelis, or when he had to convey the vast-
ness of immeasurable stretches of ocean, or the
depths of a wood, or the lengthening distance of
miles after miles of fiat inland scenery by a few but
cis It real ale teer feta aceara uleause• he cideasion-
ally reached even to something of Turner's sense of
space. His horses are as well defined, and bear
witness to as careful study, and as well satisfy the
skilful in horse flesh and horse points, as those of
Alken ; and in accuracy of drawing not inferior to
the more legitimate disciples of the historical
schools. The only wonder is how any man, com-
pelled or induced to be so prolific, could find time
for his largeness and versatility of study ; and it
could only have been by the hardest work that he so
seldom repeated himself, and was for so many years
a genial student of life, and its conceits and follies,
its strength and weakness. But his soul and
strength were in his work, and it has been given
to few with the same loving heart to feel, and with
easy hand to transcribe, the powers of scenery, the
mountain and flood, the deep equelchy ploughed
fields, the blackness of night, the curl of the break-
ing sea, or the dulness of the moor. Of course,
he paid the penalty for all this hard work. Nobody
can work week after week,and year after year with-
out intermission, and not suffr loss of the sub-
stance of life. Leech, it seems, was—or he cou d
never have done what he did—susceptible,
delicately organised, impatient cf the little
worries of life. He fell an early victim
to over work. His powers never failed ;
they seldom do in the case of a lover of work, find a
conscientious high-minded character. His inven-
tion did not wax feeble, nor did his facility dege-
nerate into mannerism and vapid iteration. But he
sacrifices life for the means of life, or at least for
the work of life. If he had taken a six months'
holiday, he might have lived to a riper age; and
though it may be an exaggeration to say that he
was killed by the detestable organ-grinders, it is
not too macli to say that he was worked to death,
and that, to a man in his excitable and probably
morbid state, organ-grinding, or any other petty
misery of human life dwelt upon and acutely
realised, accelerated the crisis which only rest
could have averted.
THE ATHENEUM —" Speak no evil of the dead,''
would be superfluous caution to the biographer of
John Leech. It would be hard indeed to find any-
thing evil to say of a man so generous, genial,
affectionate, and tender-hearted—one so full of self-
sacrifice that his existence presents the ideal of a
gentleman rut into practice,—one who, with all the
temptations of a subtle wit and relish for the ridi-
culous in human conduct, seems never to have hesi-
tated between his friend and hisjoke, but in a sense
contrary to the first application. of this famous
phrase. Of a man in Leech's pos.ton tz is impos-
sible :o tell a more honourable thing than that we
have looked at hundreds, one might say thousands,
of his sketches of chrracter and satiric delineations,
yet never found him on the side of passion, party.
prejudice or r love, never the servant of a cliquish
whim, never spiteful, never meretricious, and
justifying his least purposeful humour by truth of
characterisation that is deVoid of ill will. To this
testimony of a negative sort to be found in his
works, there must be added one which is.poiitive,
i.e., that he was often the active advocate of good
things, and usually on the thoughtful and kindly
side of any popular question. He wielded, in his
appropriate way, ti really great power to influence
opinion—one of his cartoons often so aptly and stre-
nuously expressed a tone of public feeling that hosts
of men, whose minds had not echoed it ere Leech
took up the theme, gave their consent to the thought
he treated so truthfully. Looking at many hundreds
of this true artisa's works, no one thing strikes us
with so much force as the fact, that he was so un-
ceasingly found on the side of Right, as English-
men receive it. Oae of the earliest sketches in
Punch, contributed by Leech, will illustrate this
point and his genial way of dealing with a theme. 4
It was styled " Foreign Affairs," and published in 1
August, 1841, showing a considerable number of
heads and faces of French and German scamps, such
as take refuge in London--'-these were drawn with
considerable: skill, and their knavish or grimy
characteristics stringently delineated ; lest this ap-
plication of the lash, however, should seem British
prejudice, the reader was warned by a footnote that
these affairs must not be considered as representa-
tives of foreign gentlemen. In 1841 the caution was
more needed than it would be now. To show that
there was often a deeper thought than that which
purposed to hit the flying folly of the hour, we need
only ask the reader to turn to such cartoons as "A
Case of Real Distress," in the recently republished
"Early Pencillings," and compare the theme of the
design with the figure of the wretched boy, who, in
need of food, housing, teaching, and raiment, stands
vulgarly grinning in the corner of the com-
position ; turn also to " The Home of the
Rick-Burner," for something out of the run of
shallow thought, to " The Rivals—Prize Peasant
and Prize Pig," and to " The Educational Ques-
tion," the young rustic who, between the stools of
state and voluntary education, comes to the ground.
Of the purely witty class, among a thousand more,
let us recall to the reader's mind, selecting from one
volume of Leech's works, and a few from a multi.
trade, the well-known Peace,' Louis Philippe look-
ing askant into the chamber of a gun. ' A great
Demonstration," My Lord Assassin Clarendon mur-
dering the Irish,' Shall I hold your Horse, Sir ?'
concerning the ridiculous Wellington horse-statue
which is still a disgrace to the western entrance to
London; The Last Appeal,' Sir R. Inglis and a
gentleman of the Hebrew persuasion ; and 'The
Protection Dodge.' We have but recently spoken of
the artistic merit of Leech's works, that by which
he held a position among the first artists of the age,
and which would, as one of the witnesses before
the recent Royal Academy Commission averred,
in any other country than ours, have secured hon-
ours for him, We need not repeat this opinion.
One of the most extraordinary things connected
with the life of Leech is the number of his works,
attesting, as it does, the energy, fertility,and diver-
sity of his mind, and the extent of his observation
of character and nature. He did not deal more
happily with men and women than with landscape;
some of his backgrounds are true pictures in the
best sense of the word, wealthy in incident, light
and shade, and " colour," as artists style the almost
indescribable manner, of which Leech was a master,
of representing that quality of nature by black
and white : he owed this power to his large as
well as intricate knowledge of efftct and detail.
It was almost equally Leech's merit that he dealt
happily with morning, noon, evening, moonlight or
darkness without, or artificial light within, in his
drawings. Every observer can recall examples of
this singular faculty, and none can say he repeated
himself therein. Of the vast number of his works
—the quality of which, be it noted, did not dete-
riorate, but continued to improve as he grew older
and worked harder—let it suffice to say, that
the ' Pictures of Life and Character' alone, being
but selections from the artist's contributions to
Punch, and by no means the whole of his multi-
farious drawings in that publication, amount to not
fewer than two thousand five hundred in all. To
these dre to be added countless designs, such as the
illustrations to' Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour, and
other not very worthy works of that class, the
' Comic History of England,' the Ingoldsby
Legends,' and minor boots, which would, if collected, form
a small library. How arduous must have been the labours
of a man so fertile of intellect as this multitude of produc-
tions shows Leech to have been, may be surmised now,
however lightly it might have impressed those who de-
lighted in the results, and had small thought that such toil
was wearing down a brain thus prolific, and urging into an
early grave a man so much beloved, Thus it was, however

TilE LONDON REVIEW,—Wit, which is in itself the
brightest and most nimble emanation of life, seems to have
some strange affinity wish death. Whether it be that the
wit and humorist can only be such by virtue of some ex.
qutsite delicacy of organization which is seldom able to
withstand for long the rough usage of the world,--or
whether the perpetual creativeness of genius exhausts the
animal energies in the process, drawing, as it were, through
the fine electric agency of the nerves, all the spirit and sap
of a man's life, and expending it inbeautiful and silty forms
—certain it is that men of conspicuous ability in the gay
and joyous world of fancy are generally short-lived. Shak-
epere dying at 52 is a type of the fate that seems reserved for
all who, whether iu literature or in what is technically called
art, have any share in the mental power which created Fal-
staff. Of Shakspere's dramatic contemporaries, not many
lived to be elderly. Philosophers last out their eight or
nine decades, and are vigorous almost to the end; statesmen
and lawyers are conspicuous in the records of longevity ;
epic poets and high art painters not unfrcquently hold on
until 70 or 80 ; but the humorist is most fragile, and dies
young. Thomas hood and Mackworth Praed are instances
in point, and of those who founded _lunch three-and-twenty
years ago but few now remain. A'Beckett died at 40,
Albert Smith at not much later, Jerrold at 54, Thackeray
at 52. And now we have to mourn the loss of one who has
dono more perhaps than any of those brilliant writers to
create and sustain the unexampled popularity of our weekly
satirist. At the early age of 47, John Lerch is dead. The
announcement of his decease, which was made in some of
the morning papers on Monday, came like an astonishment
on all who had learnt to regard the sketches of this genial
and gifted man as a part of the appointed and unfailing sun-
shine of their lives. For more than twenty years he had,
indeed, been almost as regular in his appearances as the sun
itself. Scarcely a week passed during all that period in
which his pleasant fancies did not shine out from the pages
of _Punch, and not seldom from other pages too. We came
at length to expect them like some natural lariesse of the
earth or elements, and, it is to be feared, took them too
much as a matter of curse, ungratefully forgetting the
enormous labour of such productiveness. It is said of
some men that we cannot associate with them the idea cf
with him who has
yeBc3ould draw sad and
and happy-making,
; yet his sketches, for
jdnesatthd;epaanrdtetdhifsrowcaas
ouprresnaemidisnte.ntHl
English life, that we
the mast
touching,paaryt,,
brightawndereevseonliggrhatndantdhings
the solemn twilight of
t
we hoped to see him work-
snoe
vbearl 1
tbhootohg
h oft tohfe
their vigour
originator nd os ionf
mortality. We knew, too, that ho was still in the prime of life,
quarter of a century.
ainngd iffowr eocuarlcduelalitgehdtchdannrienegs all, we
Yet already he is gone. The current number of funds,
published on Wednesday, contains a sketch of his, full of
his wonted spirit, humour, observation of life, are] easy
mastery of touch; but, on the previous Saturday evening,
the hand that drew it dropped cold in death. Some five-
and- twenty years must have passed since Mr Leech_then
a medical student and a friend of Albert Smith, who
was also qualifying himself for the same profession—began
to make little droll sketches of life and character, which
were published in some of the periodicals of the day.
Though full of humour and keen appreciation of social
oddities, they were somewhat course in execution, partak-
ing of the extravagant caricaturiem of the time, and pro-
bably few she looked at titans
Anticipated that the artist
would at no very distar t day attain the consummate power
which he afterwards displayed. Some of his early etchings
on steel, in illustration of stories published in Bentley's
Miscellany about the year 1811, were indeed sufficiently
poor—and, though he afterwards improved greatly even in
this respect, and produced some good effects of colour on
steel, his real calling was for sketches on wood. Ho had
the good sense to know this, and to keep mainly to that
line. There are certain things which are specially adapted
to call forth a man's peculiar faculty ; and happy is ho
who meets with the very
develope all that -is in him, The establishment of _Punch
was a singularly fortunate circumstance for Leech. No
other publication, except one of the same kind, could have
employment best calculated to
been so admirably fitted for the particular talent of the man
It helped to educate him ; it was partly made by him, and
partly made him. lie
joined it in the second month of its
existence, and very few numbers haveaaPPaared, from that
August, 1841, to this present November., 1864, that have
not been gladdened and enriched by the creations of his
exhaustless brain. In earlier years, he did many of the
political caricatures ; but of late he abandoned that species
of work, entirely, and confined himself to those sketches of
social manner and character in which he has never had an
equal, and seems to have left no successor. When it is borne
in mind that these drawings were almost entirely pure exer-
cises of the fancy—based indeed on certain general condi-
tions in the outer world, but not suggested by actual oc-
currences, and therefore requiring an immense amount of
invention to bring them forth in a palpable and " telling"
shape—
the most inexperienced will be able to form some
idea of the tremendous draught on a man's spirits and
energy implied in the prcduction of such pictures, week
after week, year after, in sickness and in health, in de-
spondency as well as in natural mirth, and whether the
season were prolific or sterile in suggestive matter
That Mr Leech sometimes " repeated himself" is
doubtless perfectly true. He had a manner of his own, as
all men of genius have, and he had his pot subjects and hie
favourite types of face. But within the circle which cir-
cumscribed him, as it circumscribes the greatest—and his
very devotees do not claim for him a position among the
chosen few—how rich was the variety, how admirable the
skill! What artist has yet so felicitously united the rough
oddity of caricature with an overmastering perception of
truth and a sanctifying sense of beauty ? Leech gave us
the humours of the streets, and did not disgust ; he sketched
the frivolities of the drawing roam, and did not weary.
Whether he were reproducing the poor little errand boy,
with his gambols, his mischief, and his harmless slang, or
the terrible human offteourings of St, Giles's kennels, or

THE bVN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, 'NOVEMBER 7, 1864.

the gent out for a holiday, or the exquisite at his club or
in the parks, or the lady of fashion at dinner or ball, or
jauntily ashorseback in bewitching hat and feather, or the
Paterfamilias and Materfamilies of middle-class life at home
or by the seaside, surrounded by the girls and boys, or the
footman of Belgravia, or the " servant gal" of Paddington,
or the garotting ruffian, or the foreigner whom he detested,
or the whole tribe of huntsmen, sportsmen. and anglers
whom he loved—in all he was equally at home, for the
quick eye for truth and nature, and the cunning hand to
interpret what the eye had seen, were never wanting. What
a heaped measure and overplus of life do we find in these
amazing sketches I What a reflex of our age I What a
miniature England I For not only did he give us character
and life to excess, but he" threw in," as a sort of careless
make-weight, horses and dogs and donkeys, all discrimi-
nated with the touch of a master in that special walk ;
and not content with this, but adding wealth to wealth, ho
would dash on to the block, as mere backgrounds, and often
effected by a few rough strokes, landscapes and sea-
scapes and sky-scapes, wherein we saw the tangled
brakes and hedgerows of our land, the long flat fields, the
soft retirement of distant hills, the rivers drowsy with
muffling sedge and reedy overgrowth, the heavy heat
August noons, the wiry trees of M trek scratching and
quivering in a keen air from the north, or a wild coast
in autumn with the wind in visible motion on the frothy
billows and the scudding clouds, and in the streaming
hair and skirts of ladies on the share, At this present
moment, with the shock of the artist's death fresh upon
us, we cannot pretend to enter into anything like an ana-
lytical criticism on his genius, or to show wherein he
failed, or what were the limitations of his powers. We
glance in imagination over the long achievements of years,
and can only note the wonderful panorama which they
unfold. But one point should be specially mentioned
the tender, almost touching, sense which Mr Leech pos-
sessed of the beauty of women and children. And when-
ever we look again at those beautiful sketches of fresh young
life, we shall recollect with a sad interest that, on the
very evening when he breathed his last, a child's party
had assembled at his house, and was hastily dismissed by
the approach of death, The writer of the admirable
obituary notice in the Times hints that the melancholy
end of Mr Leech was accelerated by the agony he endured
from the organ men whom he so often satirised ; and a
letter from Mr Mark Lemon is quoted to that effect. Our
street musicians have already enough to answer for in dis-
turbing the peace of studious men, but this is surely an
sorts of noises ; but thetrstZatellgreregi Riidiqraele
the first causes of his death. The truth—the sad truth
--is, that he worked his delicate organisation until the
whole nervous system gave way. The man was struck
down by excessive toil, yet he went on toiling. A form
of heart disease supervened, and while his years were
still in all their vigour, and not a little in their freshness,
he was taken from the place he filled only too well, and
which we do not expect to see filled again.
THE SPECTATOR.--The death of John Leech is a
great loss to the public, but not exactly for the reason which
is to-day upon everybody's lip. He was not a great cari-
caturist, or a caricaturist at all. He might possibly have
become one, though we do not think his genius lay spec'ally
in that direction, but he never seriously tried, at least in the
many years during which he delighted the public who now
misdescribe him. Satirist he was occasionally, and, if he
himself thought out some of the sketches he drew, ho could
rise to a high level of pictorial pathos, but his true function
was that of a social humourist, a man who used his pencil
instead of his pen to make the humorous side of ordinary
life clear to the least observant, to reflect the ways and the
whims and the follies current in English society. Gifted
with a rare sense of the ludicrous element always discern-
ible in artificial life, and specially visible in the pushing
life of the English middle class, and with a still more rare
felicity of expressiou, he generally contrived to make his
sketches comic, but they were never caricatures. The
essence of caricature is the exaggeration of some details,
some part of an idea on which the draughtsman perceives
that the impression of the whole idea res's, in which he de-
tects, to use the phrase of another art, the point which all
other men have missed. Leech, if he exaggerated at all,
which he very rarely did, exaggerated the whole meaning,
not the figures by'which he was making his meaning clear.
The boys of the young generation, for example, seldom do
things quite so mannish as the acts Leech loved to ascribe
to them, and there was therefore exaggeration iu the idea of
all that series of pictures, but the boys themselves were not
exaggerated. On the contrary, the very essence of the fun
was the lifelike rendering of lads who were doing things
which lads according to popular judgment ought to leave
to men,, or which only men could do. Cruikelnenk
would have made the boys' figures express the pom-
posity, precocity, or affectation which Leech con-
veyed through the design and the written scroll. In
many of his pictures, perhaps the majority, the whole force
consists in the realistic rendering of a comic incident, and
the spirit of caricature is not only absent, but it would if
present entirely destroy the effect. Nothing more laugh-
able, for example, can be conceived than a sketch now before
us, An Advertising Medium,' or animated sandwich, re-
gularly enclosed in placards, standing iu the Strand while a
wicked little street Arab, his face as full of fun, and mis-
chief, and rascality as if Murillo had painted him, tickles
the unfortunate's nose with a long straw, but a touch
of caricature in any of the figures would simply have
spoilt the design. In another, which ma-7e all London
laugh, the joke is not in the picture at all, which
shows simply two street lads pointing at one of those
dressed-up errand boys whom pretentious people call pages,
but in the letter-press, " I say Jim, here's Bill been and
got the influeeza, and broke cut all over buttons." Very
often Mr Leech threw aside camcdy altoge• her, and relied
for effect simply en realism—pretty sketches of pretty girls
in the attitudes in which they are most commonly seen, but
which painters of Academy pictures studiously avoid, and
which so to speak excite the memory to a smi!e. No man
indeed illustrated more strongly the difference between the
tendency of the ultimate tendencies of caricature and of
pictorial humour. The tendency of the former is towards
the grotesque, ending in fantastic but weird dreams like
the "Dance of Death;" of the latter towards the common-
place, ending in sketches like the vapidities published in
London dociety, and it was into this that Leech was always
in danger of falling. That he did not fall was owing
partly to his admirable skill as a draughtsman, partly to a
rich store of native humour, of true genial fun, such as
only Englishmen and Italians fully appreciate, partly
to some very keen antipathies—witness the series of
" Flunkeiana " and all sketches of foreigners—and
partly to an unusually wide experience. A man who
is London litterateur, artist, tourist, and sportsman all
at once has scope for the exercise of what faculty of obser-
vation nature may have have bestowed on him, and nature
had given Leech a considerable one. Into the respective
merits of the two kinds of power it is not now necessary to
enter. Caricature as an art has almost ceased to be prac-
tised in England, and the rising generation scarcely under"
stand the estimation in which the few professors like Cruik-
shank left among us were once held by their countrymen.
Here and there a few thinkers ore left who regret the deca-
dence of a great art, who will tell you, and tell 3 ou truly,
that the caricaturist is as much greater than the humorist
as the poet is greater than the special correspondent, that
the one creates and the other only copies, that ono requires
imagination and gives scope to genius, the other needs only
a skilful hand and eye, and leaves room only for a faculty
of power which is to genius what shrewdness is to intellec-
lectual power, but the public voice is against them. The
taste of the day is for realism in this as in all other branches
of art, and as the taste is not unsound but only narrow,
there is neither object nor use in contending too vehemently
against it. The suciaess of Mr Leech—a very real success,
or half England would not have read the announcement of
his death with a sense of personal loss—was due to the readi-
ness with which he perceived the change, and seized on the
new path it opened to artists like himself, gifted with a per-
ception almost amounting to genius, teat skill in design,
and facility in very rapid execution. We question if Mr
Leech, had Punch not existed, would have gained a great
place in art, but Punch unquestionably owes to Mr Leech a
debt no amount of money would ever repay. In his own
walk, the representation of common incidents from the
humorous point of view, he was almost matchless. Whether
the subject were Mr Briggs hugging his first salmon out
of the water, or two Frenchman discussing English
voracity, or Edwin slightly bored by Augelina's exageamce,
or the street Arab quizzing the street sentry, or the foot-
man giving in his " resignation," or the nouveau riche
giving a party with greengrocers for servants, no one could
give to the realistic rendering of the simplest accidents so
exquisite a flavour of absurdity. There is nothing that we
know of particularly absurd in fly-fishing in the rain, or a
footman dropping a plate over an exquisite's whiskers, or
an angry old gentleman rating a conductor. or a child
bathing in water too cold for him—but only look at Leech's
sketches of the victims of those occurrences. You can
see the oath in the old gentleman's mouth, the groan of
tho exquisite, and the shudder of the child, and gain an
idea somehow of a slight unreasonableness in all three. The
joke was never over the head of the public for
whom it was intended, yet never coarse, and never tainted
by malice. Leech was with his pencil thoroughly good•
humoured, except when depicting foreigners, whom he de-
tested and always represents in some grotesquely ridiculous
light. In other cases his antipathies, which extended to whole
classes such as footmen, the unrefined wealthy, cabmen, and
old maids, merely gave hiswork a slight flavour of sarcasm,
which it occasionally required to keep it from insipidity.
He represented on paper precisely the view .Punch's
good-humoured John Bull sometimes takes, and always
wishes to take, of the incidents around him, and the spec-
tator was pleased by finding his own pleasantest thoughts
realised before him. If no laugh was to be had his pretty
girls were an unfailing resource, and were, on the whole,
more popular than the comic sketches. 'We are not at-
tempting to estimate Mr Leech's rank as an artist, but if
any one wishes to compare him with other humorous
draughtsmen let him study the girls in Punch, and in any
of its rivals. lair Leech could draw girls who were pretty,
and ladylike, yet belonged to the middle class, and were
pursuing ordinary, or it might be undignified, occupations
—a feat in which at least five-sixths of our comic artists
fail. The truth seems to have been that, unlike most men
who think much of the ludicrous side of life, Mr Leech not
only understood refinement but sympathised with it, and
could therefore give it expression almost at will—in artiZ Ina,
f>r example, as fully as in the Guardsmen he was fond Of

" taking down." It is a str;king but not altogether melan-
choly fact to record that a man gifted in such a way and to
such a degree shotald have died at 47, a victim to overwork.
That seems to have been the truth. His morbid hatred of
organ-grinders, and indeed of all causes of noise, was merely
a symptom of the nervous irritability produced by continu•
ous and exhausting labour. To say, as has been said every-
where, that he was killed by organ-grinders is absurd. He
was killed by the cause which kills half the literary men in
London, and everywhere else except Germany, a continuous
strain upon the mental powers producing in him nervous
sensitiveness and ultimately disease of the heart, as it pro-
duces in others paralysis and in a few the habit of intoxica •
tion. There is no cure for that disease excepting idleness,
and we do not know why writer or artist should be blamed
for not skulking work any more than the soldier is blamed
for not skulking the bullets. It is only for us that it is im-
moral to die rather than put off harness? Among reflecting
men the manner of Mr Leech's death will increase their
sense of the vacancy caused by the fact, for it proves that
he laboured in his vocation with loving zeal, that his genial
I drawings were no result of accidental facility, but of that
absorption, that energetic, persistent struggle to do the very
best circumstances will admit that separates the true artist
from the man gifted with powers which will never yield to
the world the result those powers were given him to pro-
duce. Mr Leech's death, like his best work in life, was a
protest against pretension.
THE READER.—John Leech, one of the greatest of
English artists, one of the bravest and tenderest of English
gentlemen, died in his prime on Saturday evening. The
announcement of his death shocked us as when we learn
of some great calamity. To his friends his loss is, indeed,
irreparable; but it will also be felt through the length and
breadth of the land. All will comprehend that a great
light has been quenched. A pure as well as a great light,
set up on high to show us what sort of mon and women we
are in the nineteenth century, his place may be occupied,
but it is too great to be filled by any of his living contem-
poraries. Like his schoolfellow Thackeray, he has met his
death in the plentitude of his powers, while engaged
in producing his most carefully considered works
with what appeared to be extraordinary fertility of
invention and ease. Yet we know that he had
been ailing for some time, that his system had become sub-
ject to a nervous irritability which deprived him of rest and
induced a peculiar susceptibility to noise. He has often
been heard to complain bitterly of the pain to which he was
subjected by the presence of street-organs in his neighbour-
aeea • c,,,1 1,. F.-n his& revenge, though not 1118 remedy, m
the drawings by which he illustrated this form of street
nuisance in the pages of _Punch.. The torments he endured
from the grinding of these instruments were beyond his
powers of endurance; and to these and the never-ceasing
monotonous hammering of some small mechanic in his
neighbOurhood, acting upon an overwrought brain, his
death is attributed. If an artist is to be measured
by the ideas he is able to express without reference to
the materials with which he works, it would be difficult to
assign limits to the claims of John Leech to public recogni-
tion ; but, if there are clearly-defined limits in which his
position may be fixed as an artist, let us remember that he
was a great teacher, as sensitive as he was humorous,
open to all genial and healthy influences, always steering
clear of sentimentality, on the one hand, and coarseness on
the other. He epitomised the life of his generation, seizing
with the true instinct of genius the types of the various
classes of which the community is composed. Nor was his
intuition ever at fault in the representations of any part of
the subject he selected for his sketch. He was Hogarthian
in the truth and meaning with which all the salient points
of the scene ho represented were touched ; he was equally
at home in the hunting-field or at the seaside, in
a lady's boudoir or a costermonger's club, in the park or
on a cab.rank, in the kitchen or in the nursery; and the
atmosphere, as it were, of each was expressed by a few,
mysterious touches which give the sense of dulness or of
brightness, of summer breezes or of autumnal glooming.
Of his humour it is almost unnecessary to speak, because
it is just that part of his nature which was widely, almost
universally, appreciated. But, although he was one of the
greatesthumorists of this or of any age, his faculty was always
restrained, so to speak, by the presence of a genial sympathy.
He struck at all our follies, vices, affectations, and conceits
—but with no cynical arm, and in no misanthropical spirit.
He held the " mirror up to nature ;" and in it we might Fee
ourselves reflected, and take the truth to our hearts that there
were classes and conditions of life, in this society cf ours,
besides our own supreme individualities and cliques, the
existence of which may serve to teach a lesson as well as
to provoke a laugh; and that such reflections can be sug-
gested by sketches it which the lessen is veiled behind the
fun is the sign of a power of which, as far as we know.
Hogarth is, in another manner, the only previous example.
How John Leech passed from the rank of a caricaturist into
that of an artist may best be seen by a reference to the
back numbers of Punch. The pages of this periodical eon-
taia the chief records of his artistic life ; and his death will
prove, it is to bo feared, an irreparable loss to those with
whom he hai been so long associated. The sketches which
he produced twenty years ago bear witness to the inborn
faculty—the native humour which found its vent in a
prof,esion for the exercise of which he had never been
qualified by education, yet in which, with a rare in-
stinct, ho at once cultivated and restrained his powers,
to the end that he might attain the greatest pos
sills results within the restricted bounds which the limited
materials at his command imposed. In all his earlier
sketches the humour is paramount, and it is expressed by
means of that exaggeration of drawing and character which
distinguish the mere caricaturist; but with this position, a
native-born artist like John Leech could never rest con-
tent; and we find that he gradually but surely advanced
to a higher level, ever progressing, and never so great as at
the time of his death—his lamented death at the early age
of forty-seven, in the full brightness of his powers, cut
down, as it were, like a 'tree full of sap, and bearing
fruit a hundredfold. We may easily count the living
artists who may fairly be said to take a higher position
than John Leech. Seen in one aspect, he takes pre •
eminence of all, for he has rescued his generation
from oblivion. A collection of his works will be for
our childen's children a record of cur customs, our habits,
our fashions, our social relations, and even our figure of
speech. We shall speak again through him to those who
shall come after ns ; and, in this view, his versatility and
the multitude of his productions leave little room for the
regret that has sometimes been expressed that such rare
faculties should not have found a worthier medium of ex-
pression than rough woodcuts in the pages of Puneh. It is
as an artist, even more than as a humorist, that John Leech
is rightly appreciated among his brethren, and it would be
well that the public at large should understand fully the
greatness of the loss that we deplore. The difference be-
tween his drawings and those of his imitators is one of kind
and not only one of degree. He did not merely reproduce
a street incident selected for the illustration of a bit of
popular slang, or a huntin3-field in order to depict
the scrapes of a Mr Briggs, or a Scotch salmon river
or hill side on purpose to sot forth in a ridiculous
light the accidents to which sporting tourists are liable ;
such incidents he took, indeed, for his subjects, and deli-
neated them with wonderful truth and inexhaustible
humour ; but they are also set forth with a graphic power
that places the author in the first rank among the artists of
his time. There is now no one left among us who can re-
present not merely the incidents and humour of a hunting-
field, but who can, as it were, carry us into the field with
him—make us partakers .in the excitement of the sport
and sensitive to the very atmosphere of the scene; there is
no ono lett who can set before us the real aspect of an Eng.
lish or Continental watering •place so that we iastinctively
recognise its truthfulness, and this not merely in one or two
particulars, but as a whole—the bright sunlight, the move-
ment of the sea, the scudding clouds, being all suggested
by a few scratches which he knew how to make infi-
nitely suggestive, The images of the persons and of the
things ho represented were photographed on his brain, and
lea drawings were representations of real living people en-
gaged in the pursuit of business or pleaeuro, and not of a
mere collection of models brought together to act parts
according to the common recipe of picture-making. ' In his
keen observation, which nothing escaped, and in the power
of retaining and turning the fruits of it to account, lay the
secret of his influence and his success. His active brain
seems latterly to have acted upon his nerves, and he was
unable to sleep or rest ; and, though he had been ailing for
some time, he died unexpectedly and suddenly at his own
house on Saturday evening about 7 o'clock. He has re-
joined his old friend and schoolfellow Thackeray, and we
are left to mouta his less, and to recall the shadow of the
grave, gentle face and dignified presence that have vanished
from amongst us like a dream.
THE EXAMINER.—After four-and-twenty years of ser-
vice to the public, John Leech is now resting from his
labour. Death only could take the pencil from his busy
hand. There had been no pause in the genial current of
his wit. -His health had failed, he had been to see his doc-
tor on the previous day, but last Saturday evening there
was a children's party in his house, and he died then with
the voices of the children in his ears. Upon them, and
upon all that is good and graceful and belongs to the true
cheerfulness of life, he had laid a loving touch in all his
work. He found his place in the world early, went straight
to it, and held by it firmly to the last. He was not to be
terns ted into a second seat at what was thought a higher table
of the oil painters. Among them, however good his work, he
could have had little influence on the main body of his coun-
trymen. Knowing thevalue and use of his skill as a caricatu-
rist of the follies of the day he waged a wholesome war against
that which Fielding at the outset of his own career de,
dared to be the only fit subject of ridicule, affectation;
provoking laughter against all forms, whether in child
or man, of the endeavour to appear what one is not. But
always it was a kindly laughter of good fellowship, telling
many a truth whimsically and wisely in few strokes of
simple outline, through which he seemed to express cha-
racter, and criticise it too, in every light turn of the hand
that answered with so wonderful an aptitude to each
directing movement of his wit. He drew, indeed, 'vin-
dictively when he attacked the organ grinders by whom
his sensitive brain was tortured, and by whom he was
driven out of a comfortable house in Brunswick-square to
the doubtful quiet of Kensington-. How much distress he
suffered from their discordant grinding noise was told,
only too truly we now feel, in Mr Mark Lemon's,
letter addressed to Mr Bass, when he was about to
bring into Parliament his bill for the regulation
of street music (already published in :Ike ',Sun).

It is over now. Torment of discord jars no more upon the
mind that was but a few days since delighting us with
fine harmonies of mirth whereby John. Leech has won tho
place of his own in the history of art. He it was who Ot
dissevered caricature from the harsh spirit of scorn, shraOki
from the grotesque of ugliness, and as a friendly
our follies blended his laughter with a keen sense of al
beauty of the sea or sky, of the graces of life, the trall(l4.li
comforts of an English home, the heartiness of a true octet
fellowship. As he was in his pictures so was he in his ife'
kindly shrewd, manly in all his tastes, but with the efine'
ment of the purest artist nature, and a refinement yet deePer
and more sacred than that in its source, giving a charm to
censor 0
all his intercourse with others. The oldest and the younge.Sh
could share with his comrades frank and never failing bit'
in him, for with all that he found kindly he had ayn3Pr
thies, with all he was alike unaffected and sincere.