he aims his most boisterous fun. He
rebels, too, delightfully, against red tape and all the petty
tyrannies of officialdom. In political caricature Sir John Tenniel
(_q.v._) remained the leading artist of his day. The death of Abraham
Lincoln, Bismarck's fall from power, the tragedy of Khartum--to
subjects such as these, worthy of a great painter, Tenniel has brought
a classic simplicity and a sense of dignity unknown previously to
caricature. It is hard to say in which field Tenniel most
excels--whether in those ingenious parables in which the British Lion
and the Russian Bear, John Chinaman, Jacques Bonhomme and Uncle Sam
play their part--or in the ever-changing scenes of the great
parliamentary Comedy--or in sombre dramas of Anarchy, Famine or
Crime--or in those London extravaganzas in which the symbolic
personalities of Gog and Magog, Father Thames and the Fog Fiend, the
duke of Mudford and Mr Punch himself, have become familiar. Subjects
similar to these have been treated also for many years by Mr Linley
Sambourne in his fanciful and often beautiful designs. In the field of
humorous portraiture also, as in cartoon-designing, Mr Sambourne has
made his mark, and he may be said almost to have originated, in a
small way, that practice of illustrating the doings of parliament with
comic sketches in which Mr Furniss, Mr E.T. Reed and Sir F.C. Gould
were his most notable successors. Mr Furniss satirized the Royal
Academy as effectively as the Houses of Parliament, but he has been
above all the illustrator of parliament--the creator of Mr Gladstone's
collars, the thief of Lord Randolph Churchill's inches, the
immortalizer of so many otherwise obscure politicians who has worked
the House of Commons and its doings into so many hundreds of eccentric
designs. But Mr Furniss was never, like Sir F.C. Gould (of the
_Westminster Gazette_), a politician first and a caricaturist
afterwards. Gould is an avowed partisan, and his caricatures became
the most formidable weapons of the Radical party. Caustic, witty and
telling, not specially well drawn, but drawn well enough--the
likenesses unfailingly caught and recognizable at a glance--his
"Picture Politics" won him a place unique in the ranks of
caricaturists. There is no evidence of such strenuousness in the work
of Mr E.T. Read (of _Punch_). In his parliamentary sketches, as in
his "Animal Land" and "Prehistoric