nitt--Mr. Montagu Blatchford--Mr. Harry Furniss--Origin of Mr.
Gladstone's Collars--A Favourite Ruse--How It's Done--Mr. Furniss
and the Irish Members--The Lobby Incident--Clever Retaliation--Mr.
Furniss's Withdrawal--Mr. Lillie--Mr. Storey, A.R.A.--Mr. Alfred
Bryan.

[Illustration: LINLEY SAMBOURNE.

(_From a Drawing by Himself._)]

One day when Mr. Linley Sambourne made a successful appearance as
Admiral Van Tromp at a fancy-dress ball, Mr. W S. Gilbert drily
observed, "One Dutch of Sambourne makes the whole world grin!" The jest
was wider in its application than he who made it, probably, had
intended. The humour of the artist, his quaintness of fancy, wit, and
touch, are appreciated by whoever looks for something more, even in a
professedly comic design, than that which is at first and immediately
obvious. When, early in 1867, Mark Lemon fell into admiration of a
little drawing that was luckily thrust into his hand, and declared that
the young draughtsman who wrought it had a great future before him, he
proved himself possessed of a faculty of critical insight, or of an
easy-going artistic conscience, uncommon even among editors. Few who saw
Mr. Linley Sambourne's early work, even throughout the first two or
three years of his practice, would have imagined that behind those
woodcuts, for all their cleverness, there lay power and even genius, or
that the man himself would soon come to be regarded as one of the
greatest masters of pure line of his time.

At that time Mr. Sambourne had been working in the engineering
draughtsmen's office of Messrs. Penn and Sons, of Greenwich. But the
work was not congenial; the "pupil" spent most of his time in sketching,
and there is a story--doubtless as apocryphal as it is malicious--that
in one of his designs for a steam-engine, he sacrificed so much to
"effect" as to carry his steam-pipe through the spokes of the fly-wheel.
It was his office companion in misfortune, Mr. Alfred Reed, who secured
his friend's release from the thraldom of the iron-bound profession, by
seizing the sketch already alluded to and showing it to his father,
German Reed. By that gentleman it was submitted to his friend Mark
Lemon, who had about that time been writing an "entertainment" for the
company at the "Gallery of Illustrations." The result was an editorial
summons to the sketcher, and an engagement which has lasted to the
present day. Thus it was that, with a sketch of John