which delighted Charles Keene, who was the reverse of ungainly, just
as the oft-recurring tipsiness of his old gentlemen delighted him,
though he was the most abstemious of men. I am now speaking of his
middle-class people--those wonderful philistines of either sex; those
elaborately capped and corpulent old ladies; those
muttonchop-whiskered, middle-aged gentlemen with long upper lips and
florid complexions, receding chins, noses almost horizontal in their
prominence; those artless damsels who trouble themselves so little
about the latest fashions; those feeble-minded, hirsute swells with
the sloping shoulders and the broad hips and the little hats cocked on
one side; those unkempt, unspoiled, unspotted from the world brothers
of the brush, who take in their own milk, and so complacently ignore
all the rotten conventionalism of our over-civilised existence.

When he takes his subjects from the classes beneath these, he is, if
not quite so funny, at his best, I think. His costermongers and
policemen, his omnibus drivers and conductors and cabbies, are
inimitable studies; and as for his 'busses and cabs, I really cannot
find words to express my admiration of them. In these, as in his
street scenes and landscapes, he is unapproached and unapproachable.

Nor must we forget his canny Scotsmen, his Irish labourers and
peasants, his splendid English navvies, and least of all his
volunteers--he and Leech might be called the pillars of the Volunteer
movement, from the manner, so true, so sympathetic, and so humorous,
in which they have immortalised its beginning.

[Illustration: AN AFFRONT TO THE SERVICE

OMNIBUS DRIVER (_to Coster_). "Now then, Irish! pull a one side, will