drawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if she
is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was." In all
these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was
in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really
fine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or from
his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is
absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge that
there is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when they
are not caricatures, and certainly in "Robert," the City waiter of
"Punch." But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all
Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally upon
her. Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never for the
social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always for
her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies
and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights. If this is the shopkeeper
the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the
Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular form
of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which
some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is
not reproached through his sex. But the vulgarity of which I have
written here was distinctively English--the most English thing that
England had in days when she bragged of many another--and it was not able
to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France. It
was the chief immorality destroyed by the French novel.