John Leech and other papers

180 Horce Subsecivce,
genuine sympathy, unsparing, truthful, inevitable,
but with love and the love of goodness and true
loving-kindness over-arching and indeed animating
it all. It was well said by Brimley, in his subtle and
just estimate of our great author in his Essays, that
he could not have painted ' Vanity Fair as he has,
unless Eden had been shining in his inner eye.' It
was this sense of an all-perfect good, of a strict good-
ness laid upon each one of us as an unescapable law,
it was this glimpse into the Paradise, not lost, of the
lovely and the pure, which quickened his fell insight
into the vileness, the vanity, the shortcomings, the
pitifulness of us all, of himself not less than of any
son of time. But as we once heard him say, he was
created with a sense of the ugly, of the odd, of the
meanly false, the desperately wicked ; he laid them
bare : them under all disguises he hunted to the
death. And is not this something to have done?
Something inestimable, though at times dreadful
and sharp ? It purges the soul by terror and pity.
This, with his truthfulness, his scorn of exaggera-
tion in thought or word, and his wide, deep, living
sympathy for the entire round of human wants and
miseries, goes far to make his works in the best,
because a practical sense, wholesome, moral, honest,
and of ' good report.'
It is needless to enumerate his works. We not
only all know and possess them, — they possess tcs ;