of those good, generous, honourable, brave, stupid young fellows whom Mr Thackeray has given to our acquaintance. Our readers will also find a most interesting epic, which has not as yet reached its concluding part, in Mr Leech's volumes-the "History of Mr Briggs."-How he emerges into public life on the occasion of having his house repaired how "a few bricks and a little mortar' turn all his respectable household upside down-how he becomes a sporting character-rides a steeple-chase, and follows the hounds with infinite pluck and spirit, cowed by no misadventures, except on that unfortunate occasion when Mrs Briggs finds his hunting-cap,—may be learned in the pleasantest fashion in the world from the sketches of his biographer. His misfortunes in horses; his feats of riding, of fishing, of deer-stalking; his jolly good-humour and unabated spirit throughout, all are capital-we only wish there had been a little more of him-for Mr Briggs is very well worthy of the separate publication to which, we trust, he will by-and-by attain.

And nobody like Leech can do justice to those dainty little dandies, the incipient swells of the rising generation nor to their pretty sisters, who laugh, tease, and sympathise with Gus. and Fred. The young ladies of Bloomsbury and Belgravia owe no small amount of gratitude to Mr Leech; the delicate little figures, fair faces, and pretty fashions, in which our artist delights, may show all the world how high is our standard of domestic beautybeauty "not too bright and good for human nature's daily food." The very Bloomers are so dainty, so trim, so elegant the female policemen, flunkies, and omnibus-conductors so pretty and refined, that we are sure the most strong-minded of women could not find in her heart to denounce the saucy artist who gives these pretty masqueraders so many charms. Then the sea-side scenes, with their delightful groups of girls and children-who would not be Paterfamilias, even though he be stout, bald-headed, and irascible, and the young fellows make fun of him," to have unquestioned possession of

all those chubby little cherubs, and to be teased, provoked, and delighted by the pretty saucy faces under those round hats, and the precocious Toms and Charlies, who take Grandmamma and the girls out for a row? One has such a confidence, too, that the girls are good girls, in spite of their little wiles and vanities

that Charlie and Tom will grow up fine fellows; and that those abundant households, with their heaps of children, nursemaids, and hangers-on, and all the disagreeables incident thereto, are pleasant families, warm-hearted and social, whom one would like to know. He makes fun of us openly, this Mr Leech

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exposes our amiable pretences, laughs even at our little personal peculiarities and innocent foibles-does not spare us, old or young, fair or ugly-yet, odd enough, we not only like the artist all the better, but are actually stirred with feelings of increased regard towards neighbours, victims like ourselves of the same blithe mockery. Even those little imps of evil, the London boys-even that small chivalrous wretch of a crossing-sweeper, who adjures the astonished swell, "If you doubt my honour, hold my broom!" -find favour in one's eyes and a kinder consideration; and who would not rejoice to go down to the sea-side with the girls and Grandmamma, or to accept an invitation to dinner from Mr Briggs?

And everybody, of course, has admired the landscapes by which all this fun, good-humour, and kindness are so often surrounded — the sea-views, so fresh, vigorous, and true -the hunting scenes, with their stretch of sky and country, windy, open, and exhilarating. Mr Leech is no niggard. He does not hoard up his powers for great efforts, but goes into everything he touches liberally and with all his heart. Mr Punch is an important personage in these days, and his work an institution potent and acknowledged; but though he does a great many clever things in the way of literature, he has no such staff and support as the pencil of Leech.

Almost the only defect-as it is also one of the additional attractions

of these pleasant pictures-lies, as we have already said, in the fact that it is London life and character, and not any wider range, which they illustrate. For Paterfamilias, though he has his yearly holiday-though you may find him in Brighton or in Paris, on the Rhine or at the Pyramids has always, without any doubt, his house and established habitation somewhere near Russell Square; and we are much inclined to believe that Mr Briggs lives in St John's Wood; and the reckless fox-hunter, who calls to the poor man in the ditch, "Keep still there! we shall clear you," rides languidly, when it is the proper time for such recreations, in Rotten Row. is a fact, too, that London fun often falls very flat in what London calls "the country," and that London cabmen, policemen, and flunkies, are not so entertaining and attractive to all the world as they might be. Granting this, however, it is not to be disputed that London gathers more and more to itself those craftsmen, both of pen and pencil, who provide for the entertainment of the country, and that it is natural to find in their productions the scenes and people among whom they live. Ephemeral literature of all descriptions, hastens like other arts to the centre of modern activity; and the busy art of everyday illustration may be said to exist only in the crowd and bustle of this metropolis. It answers very well in Leech's sketches-too well almost in the popular fiction of the time; but it would be rather a pity to find, in place of all the humble humour of England and of Scotland-humour so full of character and individual expression-only the bad grammar of Pleaseman X. and John Thomas of Belgravy-the chaffing of London gamins and crossing-sweepers. A great deal of it is very clever, witty,

and wicked, but we do not gain by it half so much as we lose.

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By this time, however, we are all tolerably well tired of Christmas: the holly-berries are withered; the glossy leaves have gathered dust the mistletoe has dropped to pieces; the dreary falling of the year-that wintry décadence and despondency which it seems somehow Christianlike to interrupt and defy at its darkest by the heartiest and most genial of all festivals-has yielded and given way to the new year. Already, though there is not much of the sunshine, there is in the freshened air and softened skies the sentiment of the spring. The turn of the year is over; we are on the sunny side again, looking out for the first primrose, and lingering no longer over the snow-cold leaflets of the Christmas rose. These pretty books, however, each and all, are Christmas flowers, more permanent than the feeble wintry blossoms of the soil-admirable memorials of the season in which we sober British people, whether we call our feast the Christmas or the New Year, take our most thorough and honest holiday; and of all the affection, neighbourship, and kindness which reach their spring-tide at this time. It is pleasant to think they should reach their spring-tide when everything below the level of our humanity is at its farthest ebb and lowest level. We have gathered ourselves together close, to bid defiance once more to all the elements and influences of this old tyrant Time, who assails us yearly with his wintry chill and apathy; and now that we have outdone the ancient rogue, and made his darkest day our brightest, we loose hands lightly for the milder season-spring, that struggles forward with us, smiling and weeping, the perpetual renewal, the unfailing hope!

WHEN old Mr Gilfil died, thirty years ago, there was general sorrow in Shepperton; and if black cloth had not been hung round the pulpit and reading-desk, by order of his nephew and principal legatee, the parishioners would certainly have subscribed the necessary sum out of their own pockets, rather than allow such a tribute of respect to be wanting. All the farmers' wives brought out their black bombasines; and Mrs Jennings, at the Wharf, by appearing the first Sunday after Mr Gilfil's death in her salmon-coloured ribbons and green shawl, excited the severest remark. To be sure, Mrs Jennings was a new-comer, and town-bred, so that she could hardly be expected to have very clear notions of what was proper; but, as Mrs Liggins observed in an under-tone to Mrs Parrot when they were coming out of church, "Her husband, who had been born i' the parish, might ha' told her better." An unreadiness to put on black on all available occasions, or too great an alacrity in putting it off, argued, in Mrs Liggins's opinion, a dangerous levity of character, and an unnatural insensibility to the essential fitness of things.

"Some folks can't a-bear to put off their colours," she remarked; "but that was never the way i' my family. Why, Mrs Parrot, from the time I was married till Mr Liggins died, nine years ago come Candlemas, I niver was out o' black two year together!"

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"Ah," said Mrs Parrot, who was conscious of inferiority in this respect, "there isn't many families as have had so many deaths as yours, Mrs Liggins."

Mrs Liggins, who was an elderly widow "well left," reflected with complacency that Mrs Parrot's observation was no more than just, and that Mrs Jennings very likely belonged to a family which had had no funerals to speak of.

Even dirty Dame Fripp, who was a very rare church-goer, had been to Mrs Hackit to beg a bit of old crape, and with this sign of grief pinned on her little coal-scuttle bonnet, was seen dropping her curtsey opposite the reading-desk. This manifestation of respect towards Mr Gilfil's memory on the part of Dame Fripp had no theological bearing whatever. It was due to an event which had occurred some years back, and which, I am sorry to say, had left that grimy old lady as indifferent to the means of grace as ever. Dame Fripp kept leeches, and was understood to have such remarkable influence over those wilful animals in inducing them to bite under the most unpromising circumstances, that though her own leeches were usually rejected, from a suspicion that they had lost their appetite, she herself was constantly called in to apply the more lively individuals furnished from Mr Pillgrim's surgery, when, as was very often the case, one of that clever man's paying patients was attacked with inflammation. Thus Dame Fripp, in addition to "property" supposed to yield her no less than half-a-crown a-week, was in the receipt of professional fees, the gross amount of which was vaguely estimated by her neighbours as

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pouns an' pouns." Moreover, she drove a brisk trade in lollipop with epicurean urchins, who recklessly purchased that luxury at the rate of two hundred per cent. Nevertheless, with all these notorious sources of income, the shameless old woman constantly pleaded poverty, and begged for scraps at Mrs Hackit's, who, though she always said Mrs Fripp was as false as two folks," and no better than a miser and a heathen, had yet a leaning towards her as an old neighbour.

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"There's that case-hardened old Judy a-coming after the tea-leaves again," Mrs Hackit would say; "an'

I'm fool enough to give 'em her, though Sally wants 'em all the while to sweep the floors with!"

Such was Dame Fripp, whom Mr Gilfil, riding leisurely in top-boots and spurs from doing duty at Knebley one warm Sunday afternoon, observed sitting in the dry ditch near her cottage, and by her side a large pig, who, with that ease and confidence belonging to perfect friendship, was lying with his head in her lap, and making no effort to play the agreeable beyond an occasional grunt.

Why, Mistress Fripp," said the Vicar, "I didn't know you had such a fine pig. You'll have some rare flitches at Christmas!"

O, he picks a bit hisself wi' rootin', and I dooant mind doin' wi’out to gie him summat. A bit o' coompany's meat an' drink too, an' he follers me about, an' grunts when I spake to'm, just like a Christian.”

Mr Gilfil laughed, and I am obliged to admit that he said goodby to Dame Fripp without asking her why she had not been to church, or making the slightest effort for her spiritual edification. But the next day he ordered his man David to take her a great piece of bacon, with a message, saying, the parson wanted to make sure that Mrs Fripp would know the taste of bacon-fat again. So, when Mr Gilfil died, Dame Fripp manifested her gratitude and reverence in the simple dingy fashion I have mentioned.

You already suspect that the Vicar did not shine in the more spiritual functions of his office; and indeed, the utmost I can say for him in this respect is, that he performed those functions with undeviating attention to brevity and despatch. He had a large heap of short sermons, rather yellow and worn at the edges, from which he took two every Sunday, securing perfect impartiality

in the selection by taking them as they came without reference to topics; and having preached one of these sermons at Shepperton in the morning, he mounted his horse and rode hastily with the other in his pocket to Knebley, where he officiated in a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles, with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls. Here, in an absence of mind to which he was prone, Mr Gilfil would sometimes forget to take off his spurs before putting on his surplice, and only become aware of the omission by feeling something mysteriously tugging at the skirts of that garment as he stepped into the reading desk. But the Knebley farmers would as soon have thought of criticising the moon as their pastor. He belonged to the course of nature, like markets and toll-gates and dirty bank-notes; and being a vicar, his claim on their veneration had never been counteracted by an exasperating claim on their pockets. Some of them, who did not indulge in the superfluity of a covered cart without springs, had dined half an hour earlier than usual-that is to say, at twelve o'clock-in order to have time for their long walk through miry lanes, and present themselves duly in their places at two o'clock, when Mr Oldinport and Lady Felicia, to whom Knebley Church was a sort of family temple, made their way among the bows and curtsies of their dependants to a carved and canopied pew in the chancel, diffusing as they went a delicate odour of Indian roses on the unsusceptible nostrils of the congregation.

The farmers' wives and children sate on the dark oaken benches, but the husbands usually chose the distinctive dignity of a stall under one of the twelve apostles, where, when the alternation of prayers and responses had given place to the agreeable monotony of the sermon, Pater

familias might be seen or heard sinking into a pleasant doze, from which he infallibly woke up at the sound of the concluding doxology. And then they made their way back again through the miry lanes, perhaps almost as much the better for this simple weekly tribute to what they knew of good and right, as many a more wakeful and critical congregation of the present day.

Mr Gilfil, too, used to make his way home in the later years of his life, for he had given up the habit of dining at Knebley Abbey on a Sunday, having, I am sorry to say, had a very bitter quarrel with Mr Oldinport, the cousin and predecessor of the Mr Oldinport who flourished in the Rev. Amos Barton's time. That quarrel was a sad pity, for the two had had many a good day's hunting together when they were younger, and in those friendly times not a few members of the hunt envied Mr Oldinport the excellent terms he was on with his Vicar; for, as Sir Jasper Sitwell observed, "next to a man's wife, there's nobody can be such an infernal plague to you as a parson, always under your nose on your own estate."

I fancy the original difference which led to the rupture was very slight; but Mr Gilfil was of an extremely caustic turn, his satire having a flavour of originality which was quite wanting in his sermons; and as Mr Oldinport's armour of conscious virtue presented some considerable and conspicuous gaps, the Vicar's keen-edged retorts probably made a few incisions too deep to be forgiven. Such, at least, was the view of the case presented by Mr Hackit, who knew as much of the matter as any third person. For, the very week after the quarrel, when presiding at the annual dinner of the Association for the Prosecution of Felons, held at the Oldinport Arms, he contributed an additional zest to the conviviality on that occasion by informing the company that "the parson had given the squire a lick with the rough side of his tongue." The detection of the person or persons who had driven off Mr Parrot's heifer, could hardly have been more welcome news to the Shepperton tenantry,

with whom Mr Oldinport was in the worst odour as a landlord, having kept up his rents in spite of falling prices, and not being in the least stung to emulation by paragraphs in the provincial newspapers, stating that the Honourable Augustus Purrwell, or Viscount Blethers, had made a return of ten per cent on their last rent-day. The fact was, Mr Oldinport had not the slightest intention of standing for Parliament, whereas he had the strongest intention of adding to his unentailed estate. Hence, to the Shepperton farmers it was as good as lemon with their grog to know that the Vicar had thrown out sarcasms against the squire's charities, as little better than those of the man who stole a goose, and gave away the giblets in alms. For Shepperton, you observe, was in a state of Attic culture compared with Knebley; it had turnpike roads and a public opinion, whereas, in the Boeotian Knebley, men's minds and waggons alike moved in the deepest of ruts, and the landlord was only grumbled at as a necessary and unalterable evil, like the weather, the weevils, and the turnip-fly.

Thus in Shepperton this breach with Mr Oldinport tended only to heighten that good understanding which the Vicar had always enjoyed with the rest of his parishioners, from the generation whose children he had christened a quarter of a century before, down to that hopeful generation represented by little Tommy Bond, who had recently quitted frocks and trousers for the severe simplicity of a tight suit of corduroys, relieved by numerous brass buttons. Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of reverence, and excessively addicted to humming-tops and marbles, with which recreative resources he was in the habit of immoderately distending the pockets of his corduroys. One day, spinning his top on the garden-walk, and seeing the Vicar advance directly towards it, at that exciting moment when it was beginning to "sleep" magnificently, he shouted out with all the force of his lungs "Stop! don't knock my top down, now!" From that day "little corduroys" had been an especial favourite with Mr Gilfil, who