VILLAGE HAMPDEN (_"who with dauntless breast" has undertaken for
sixpence to keep off the other boys_). "If any of yer wants to see
what we're a Paintin' of it's a 'Alfpenny a 'Ead, but you marn't make
no Remarks."--_Punch_, May 4, 1867.]

The little actors on Leech's stage are nearly all of them every-day
people--types one is constantly meeting. High or low, tipsy or sober,
vulgar or refined, pleasant or the reverse, we knew them all before
Leech ever drew them; and our recognition of them on his page is full
of delight at meeting old familiar friends and seeing them made fun of
for our amusement.

Whereas a great many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar
and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity,
they are characters themselves, rather than types of English
characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they
really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the
depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with life
just as it is?

[Illustration: "NONE O' YOUR LARKS"

GIGANTIC NAVVY: "Let's walk between yer, Gents; folks 'll think you've
took up a Deserter."--_Punch_, October 19, 1861.]

They are often comic, with their exquisitely drawn faces so full of
subtlety--intensely comic! Their enormous perplexities about nothing,
their utter guilelessness, their innocence of the wicked world and its
ways, make them engaging sometimes in spite of a certain ungainliness
of gesture, dress, and general behaviour that belongs to them, and