makes people say (with some truth) that Dickens never drew a gentleman
would make them say with equal truth that what was interesting in the
gentlemen of Charles Keene (and he perpetually drew them) was not the
externals upon which gentlemen so pride themselves, but the soul. Thus I
have in mind one picture wherein Keene drew a gentleman; true, he was a
gentleman who had just swallowed a bad oyster, and therefore he was a
man as well. I recall another of an old gentleman complaining of the
caterpillar on his chop: he is a gentleman of the professional rather
than the territorial classes, and, great heavens! what a power of line!
All you see beneath the round of his hat is the end of his nose, the
curve of his mouth, and two bushy ends of whiskers. Yet one can tell all
about that man; one could write a book on him. One knows his economics,
his religion, his accent, and what he thought of the Third Napoleon and
what of Garibaldi. I have called draughtsmanship of this quality an
inheritance--I might have called it perhaps with better propriety a
monument. It is possible that England in the near future will look back
with great envy, as she will certainly look back with great pride, to
the generation preceding our own: they were a solid and a happy
community of men. How much they owed to fortune, how much to themselves,
it is not the place of such random stuff as mine to consider.

They were nearly impregnable in their island; they were not bellicose.
They made and sold for all the world. Whether the very different future
which we are now entering is to be laid to their door or to our own,
that generation will still remain one of the principal things in English
history, like the Elizabethan generation, or the group of men who
organized the Seven Years' War, or the group of men who fought in the
Peninsula. And of that generation the note of health and of stability is
represented by its humour. I am not sure that of all things educational
to young men with no personal memory of that time, and especially to