himself in every
character he chose to assume, or on any subject to which he condescended
to give his attention, _facile princeps_. Here we find him figuring in
turn as an English Lord Chancellor, a German student, a French subject,
a French National Guard, an American citizen, a Bedouin Arab, a
Carmelite monk, a Chinese mandarin, an Osmanli, a red Indian, a Scottish
shepherd, and by the unmistakable nose and self-complacent smirk on his
countenance, it is clear that in each and every character Henry Lord
Brougham feels himself thoroughly at home. _The Sleeping Beauty_ is a
clever composition. "Beauty," by the way, is Lord John Russell, and
amongst the sleeping attendants may be recognised the Duke of
Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, Colonel Sibthorpe, and Lord William
Bentinck; while the ever indispensable Brougham of course puts in an
appearance, this time in the character of a jester.

Richard Doyle, as we have seen, was young when he joined the ranks of
the _Punch_ staff. Young men are apt to "dream dreams," and one of
Richard Doyle's was in truth a charming one. In _Ireland: a Dream of the
Future_, he shows us our Queen gazing into the depths of an Irish lake,
wherein she beholds prosperous towns, smiling fields, a contented
peasantry, flourishing homesteads, a land flowing with milk and honey.
On the opposite bank sit in dreary solitude a starving cottier and his
family. This was Richard Doyle's dream in 1849. He did not live to wake
to the reality of 1884: half a dozen "Gladstone" bags filled with
American dynamite, the property of subjects of a republic who allows her
mongrel murderers to plot the deaths of thousands of the people of a
friendly nation without lifting a hand or a finger to restrain them. A
home government too weak to pass a law which would stop these outrages
by hanging these foreign miscreants as high as Haman. These formed no
part of course of the young artist's dream. He delighted in sunshine.
The year 1850 was memorable for the repeal of the window tax, one of the
most extraordinary impositions which ever crossed the inventive mind of
a Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Hollo! old fellow," says a workman to
his family, hailing the unwonted appearance of the sunbeams in their
dark and dreary apartment, "Hollo! old fellow; we're _glad_ to see you
here."

Among the numerous illustrations which Doyle designed for _Punch_,
probably the most original were the series entitled "Manners and Customs
of ye