Leech stayed but a short time with the pigeon-fancying Whittle, whom he left to be placed under Dr. John Cockle, afterwards Physician to the Royal Free Hospital. Leech seems to have been a pretty regular attendant at anatomical and other lectures, and it goes without saying that his notes were garnished with sketches, for which his fellow-students sat unconsciously; and plenty of them remain to prove the impossibility of checking an inclination so strongly implanted in such a genuine artist as John Leech. CHAPTER II. EARLY WORK. It was at St. Bartholomew's that Leech made acquaintance, which soon ripened into friendship, with Albert Smith, Percival Leigh (a future comrade on the _Punch_ Staff, and author of the "Comic Latin Grammar," "Pips' Diary," etc.), Gilbert à Beckett and many others, all or most of whom served as models for that unerring pencil. The impecunious condition of Leech senior before John had reached his eighteenth year was such as to make his chances of getting a living by medicine or surgery, even if successful, so remote as to place them beyond consideration. No doubt the elder Leech's misfortunes were "blessings in disguise," for we owe to them the necessity that compelled the younger man to devote himself to art. The art of drawing upon wood, to which Leech in his later years almost entirely confined himself, dates back from very early times. Lithography, or drawing upon stone, is a comparatively modern invention, and, until the introduction of photography, was used for varieties of artistic reproduction. It was to that process we owe the first published work of Leech. The artist was eighteen years old when "Etchings and Sketchings," by A. Pen, Esq., price 2s. plain, 3s. coloured, was offered tremblingly to the public. The work was in the shape of four quarto sheets, which were covered with sketches, more or less caricatures, of cabmen, policemen, street musicians, hackney coachmen with their vehicles and the peculiar breed of animal attached to them, and other varieties of life and character common to the streets of London. This work is now very rarely to be met with; it consisted chiefly, I believe, of characteristic heads and half-length figures. To "Etchings and Sketchings" the young artist added some political caricatures, also in lithography, of considerable merit. With these, or, rather, with the heavy stones on which they were drawn, we may imagine the weary wanderings from publisher to publisher; the painful anxiety with which the verdict, on which so much depended, was waited for; the hopes that brightened at a word of commendation, only to be scattered by a few stereotyped phrases, such as, "Ah, very clever, but these sort of things are not in our way, you see; there is no demand," and so on. 1836, when Leech was still a boy, saw the production of works called "The Boy's Own Series," "Studies from Nature," "Amateur Originals," "The Ups and Downs of Life; or, The Vicissitudes of a Swell," etc.