| The Duke of Gloucester goes into Mourning for his Little Nephews. |
“‘Hallo!’ cried the King, ‘who gave you leave to put that on? I think you might have left it alone till I’ve done with it.’”
The savage and hypocritical character of Richard III. afforded Leech an opportunity for satire in his design of that monarch, when still Duke of Gloucester, in the shape of a crocodile shedding tears for the death of the two Princes in the Tower.
“Richard,” says the chronicler, “by whom the outward decencies of life were very scrupulously observed, in order to make up for the inner deficiencies of his mind, determined to go into mourning for the young Princes, and repaired to the same maison de deuil which he had honoured with his presence on a former occasion when requiring the ‘trappings of woe’ for himself and his retainers on the death of his dear brother.”
With the escape of Mary, Queen of Scots, I must close the extracts from the “Comic History of England.”
“When the Queen was imprisoned at Lochleven, a certain George Douglas,” says the historian, “with the sentimentality peculiar to seventeen, fell sheepishly in love with the handsome Mary. She gave some encouragement to the gawky youth, but rather with a view of getting him to aid her in her escape than out of any regard to the over-sensitive stripling. Going to his brother’s bedroom in the night, the boy took the keys from the basket in which they were deposited, and, letting Mary out, he handed her to a skiff and took her for a row, without thinking of the row his conduct was leading to.”
| Mary’s Elopement. |
A considerable interval of time elapsed between the publication of à Beckett’s “Comic English Grammar” and the same writer’s “Comic History of England,” the former being produced in 1840, and the latter seven years afterwards; but as there is little or no appreciable difference between the two works, either as regards the literary or artistic merit, I have thought it well to introduce them in this place.
These efforts show but one side of Leech’s many-sided power. It was in “The Children of the Mobility,” a satire on a production just then published, in which the children of the nobility were put before the world in all the splendour of their aristocratic surroundings, that Leech’s genius had full play, the little Duke affording an instructive contrast to the street arab, and the shivering, half-naked beggar-girl becoming infinitely pathetic in her rags. This work was executed in lithography, consisting of seven prints; and though, as works of art, they bear no comparison to the wood-drawings of a later time—they are not even so good as the “Fly-Leaves” published at the Punch Office later on—still, comparatively imperfectly as they are rendered, they show the artist’s intense sympathy with suffering childhood, as well as enjoyment in the games and “larks” by which the sufferings are for a time at least forgotten.