Punch" in manuscript, in careful
imitation of the original, drawing the cartoon as well. One of these
"big cuts" represented himself as the performer in a cabinet-trick--(the
sensation of the Davenport Brothers was before the public at the
time)--in which the cabinet was the school, and the ropes that bound him
the curriculum; while from another cabinet he emerges in full blaze of
scholastic triumph. He soon began drawing, and engraving his own
designs, for Mr. A. M. Sullivan's Irish version of _Punch_; and having
met Tom Taylor--who then reigned in Whitefriars--and been by him
applauded for his sketches, he accepted the hint that he might send in
drawings to the original Hunchback of Fleet Street. But when they came,
Taylor declined them on the ground that the ideas were unsuitable; yet,
curiously enough, they several times appeared, re-drawn by members of
the Staff. One of these, re-drawn by Mr. du Maurier in February, 1877,
represented a scene witnessed by Mr. Furniss from the railway--a flooded
field navigated by two men in a boat, who are reading a notice-board
indicating that the submerged "highly-eligible site" was "To be Let or
Sold for Building." Mr. Furniss thereupon decided to have done with
_Punch_ during that editorship; and came to London to seek his artistic
fortune. He speedily made such way on leading journals, especially on
the "Illustrated London News," that Mr. Burnand, on succeeding to his
office, invited the young draughtsman, then aged twenty-six, to become a
regular contributor. Mr. Furniss's first sketch (published on p. 204,
Vol. LXXIX., 1880) was a skit on what is ignorantly called the Temple
Bar Griffin--(it is really an heraldic dragon, designed by Horace
Jones)--executed by his friend C. B. Birch, A.R.A.

At that time Mr. Henry W. Lucy had just been summoned to reinforce
_Punch's_ Staff, and to take over the "Essence of Parliament," since
Shirley Brooks's death so ponderously distilled by the late Tom Taylor,
and to him was left the selection of an illustrator of his "Toby's
Diaries." In selecting Mr. Furniss he made a wise choice, for the "Lika
Joko" of later times had been a close student of politics, and seemed
cut out for the post. How he justified himself is sufficiently known; he
achieved for himself a great popularity, and unquestionably acquired for
_Punch_ a unique position among journals, as representing to the people
that personal side of Parliamentary life, the familiar aspect an