express and communicate the perennial charm they have for him, that
the veriest bookworm becomes a sportsman through sheer sympathy--by
the mere fact of looking at them.

And how many people and things he loves that most of us love!--it
would take all night to enumerate them--the good authoritative pater-
and materfamilias; the delightful little girls; the charming cheeky
school-boys; the jolly little street Arabs, who fill old gentlemen's
letter-boxes with oyster-shells and gooseberry-skins; the cabmen, the
busmen; the policemen with the old-fashioned chimney-pot hat; the old
bathing-women, and Jack-ashores, and jolly old tars--his British tar
is irresistible, whether he is hooking a sixty-four pounder out of the
Black Sea, or riding a Turk, or drinking tea instead of grog and
complaining of its strength! There seems to be hardly a mirthful
corner of English life that Leech has not seen and loved and painted
in this singularly genial and optimistic manner.

[Illustration: "THE JOLLY LITTLE STREET ARABS"

From the original drawing for _Punch_ in possession of John Kendrick
Bangs, Esq.]

His loves are many and his hates are few--but he is a good hater all
the same. He hates Mawworm and Stiggins, and so do we. He hates the
foreigner--whom he does not know, as heartily as Thackeray does, who
seems to know him so well--with a hatred that seems to me a little
unjust, perhaps: all France is not in Leicester Square; many Frenchmen
can dress and ride, drive and shoot as well as anybody; and they began
to use the tub very soon after we did--a dozen years or so,
perhaps--say after the _coup d'état_ in 1851.