know England. It does not puzzle the foreigner (as the more blatant kind
of intellectual man is too fond of boasting that it does); he simply
admires it as a rule and wonders at it always; sometimes he actually
dislikes it, but by it he knows that the thing he is reading is English
and has the savour and taste of England.

It is impossible to define it, because it is so full of stuff and so
organic a quality; but in our own time it was principally the pencil of
Charles Keene that has summed it up and presented it in a moment and at
once to the eye--the pencil of Charles Keene and that profound instinct
whereby he chose the legends for his drawing, whether he found them by
his own sympathy with the people or whether they were suggested to him
by friends.

It is the verdict of the men most competent perhaps to judge upon these
things that he had the greatest graphic power of his time, and that no
one had had that power to such an extent since Hogarth. Upon these
things the men of the trade must dispute; the layman cannot doubt that
he had here a genius and a genius comprehensively national. It is the
essence of a good draughtsman that what he wants to draw, that he draws.
The line that he desires to see upon the paper appears there as his
fingers move. It is a quality extremely rare in its perfection. And
Charles Keene had it in perfection, as in totally different manner had
the offensive and diseased talent of Beardsley.

But more important than the power to do is the quality of the thing
done, and the work of Charles Keene, multitudinous, varied, always
great, is an inheritance for English people comparable to the
inheritance they have in Dickens. It has also what Dickens had, a power
of representing, as it were, the essential English. Just that which