There is one drawing in the _Punch_ of years ago, in
which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the
invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has
gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, and
the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep
at his side in a nightcap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine
how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across
the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene
drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity,
ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old
common jape against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky--ill-
dressed women with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised;
abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling sidelong
legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers,
'No, never was.' In all these things there is very little humour. Where
Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of
tenderness which in really fine work could never be absent from a man's
thought of a child or from his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the
subject in hand, is absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless,
we acknowledge that here is humour.
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