always a mere reflection of the parents' vulgarity. None the less it is
an unintelligible thing that even the rankest vulgarity of father or
mother should be resented, in the child, with the implacable resentment
of derision.

John Leech used the caricature of a baby for the purposes of a scorn that
was not angry, but familiar. It is true that the poor child had first
been burlesqued by the unchildish aspect imposed upon him by his dress,
which presented him, without the beauties of art or nature, to all the
unnatural ironies. Leech did but finish him in the same spirit, with
dots for the childish eyes, and a certain form of face which is best
described as a fat square containing two circles--the inordinate cheeks
of that ignominious baby. That is the child as _Punch_ in Leech's day
preserved him, the latest figure of the then prevailing domestic raillery
of the domestic.

In like manner did Thackeray and Dickens, despite all their sentiment.
Children were made to serve both the sentiment and the irony between
which those two writers, alike in this, stood double-minded. Thackeray,
writing of his snobs, wreaks himself upon a child; there is no worse snob
than his snob-child. There are snob-children not only in the book
dedicated to their parents, but in nearly all his novels. There is a
female snob-child in "Lovel the Widower," who may be taken as a type, and
there are snob-children at frequent intervals in "Philip." It is not
certain that Thackeray intended the children of Pendennis himself to be
innocent and exempt.

In one of Dickens's early sketches there is a plot amongst the humorous
_dramatis personae_, to avenge themselves on a little boy for the lack
of tact whereby his parents have brought him with them to a party on the