instead of trusting to memory and imagination--had been the artistic
order of the day. Men and women, horses and dogs, landscapes and
seascapes, all one can make pictures of, even chairs and tables and
teacups and saucers, must be studied from the life--from the
still-life, if you will--by whoever aspired to draw on wood; even
angels and demons and cherubs and centaurs and mermaids must be
closely imitated from nature--or at least as much of them as could be
got from the living model.

_Once a Week_ had just appeared, and _The Cornhill Magazine_. Sir John
Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton were then drawing on wood just like
the ordinary mortals; Frederick Walker had just started on his brief
but splendid career; Frederick Sandys had burst on the black-and-white
world like a meteor; and Charles Keene, who was illustrating the
_Cloister and the Hearth_ in the intervals of his _Punch_ work, had,
after long and patient labour, attained that consummate mastery of
line and effect in wood draughtsmanship that will be for ever
associated with his name; and his work in _Punch_, if only by virtue
of its extraordinary technical ability, made Leech's by contrast
appear slight and almost amateurish in spite of its ease and boldness.

So that with all my admiration for Leech it was at the feet of Charles
Keene that I found myself sitting; besides which we were much together
in those days, talking endless shop, taking long walks, riding side by
side on the knife-boards of omnibuses, dining at cheap restaurants,
making music at each other's studios. His personal charm was great, as
great in its way as Leech's; he was democratic and so was I, as one is
bound to be when one is impecunious and the world is one's oyster to
open with the fragile point of a lead-pencil. His bohemian world was
mine--and I found it a very good world and very much to my taste--a