e. Nor did the Academicians, whom
some thought would have been annoyed at the fun, as a body resent it.
They were not so silly, though a minority muttered. Most of them saw
that Mr. Furniss was not animated by any desire to hold them up to
contempt, but his parodies were perfectly good-natured, that he had
served all alike, and that he had only sought the advancement of English
art. During the whole season the gallery was crushed to overflowing, the
coldest critics were dazzled, the public charmed, and literally all
London laughed. It furnished the journalistic critics of the country
with material for reams of descriptive articles and showers of personal
paragraphs, and whether relished or disrelished by particular members of
the artistic profession, at least proved to them, as to the world at
large, the varied powers (in some phases hitherto unsuspected) and
exuberant energies of the Harry Furniss whose name was now on the tongue
and whose bold signature was familiar to the eyes of that not easily
impressed entity, the General Public._

_"In fact, London had never seen anything so original as Harry Furniss's
Royal Academy. The work of one man, and that man one of the busiest
professional men in town. Indeed it might be thought that at the age of
thirty, with all the foremost magazines and journals waiting on his
leisure, with a handsome income and an enviable social position assured,
ambition could hardly live in the bosom of an artist in black and white.
Unlike Alexander, our hero did not sit down and weep that no kingdom
remained to conquer, but set quietly to work to create a new realm all
his own. His Royal Academy, although presented by himself to the public
as an 'artistic joke,' showed that he could not only use the brush on a
large scale, but that he could compose to perfection, and after the
exuberant humour of the show, nothing delighted and surprised the
public more than the artistic quality and finished technique in much of
the work, a finish far and away above the work of any caricaturist of
our time."_

[Illustration]

The idea first occurred to me at a friend's house, when my host after
dinner took me into the picture gallery to show me a portrait of his
wife just completed by Mr. Slapdash, R.A. It stood at the end of the
gallery, the massive frame draped with artistic care, while attendants
stood obsequiously round, holding lights so as to display the _chef
d'[oe]uvre_ to the utmost advantage. As I