This
permitted him to do as much work as he chose for other papers; but it
made him feel, at the same time, that he was not flesh of their flesh,
while he suspected himself of getting into a cast-iron groove from which
he sought to free himself. So, after a minor "misunderstanding" had been
put right, Mr. Furniss quitted his old friend _Punch_, and forthwith set
about starting a monthly magazine of his own. This enterprise, in the
course of evolution, was considerably modified; and for a time the
weekly "Lika Joko" soon emerged into open rivalry with the paper which
for nearly fourteen years had made the name of Furniss as celebrated
throughout all English-speaking lands as that of any of his colleagues.

And such is the Passing of Furniss, whose extraordinary powers of
observation (he was the first, by the way, to detect and represent
truthfully Mr. Gladstone's loss of a digit) and of catching a likeness
in its essential lines, and whose unbounded and buoyant good-humour
early justified Mr. Burnand's selection. Though he so soon drifted into
Parliamentary sketching, there is no class of work, except the
officially-recognised political "cartoons," which he did not attempt;
and he romped through _Punch's_ pages with unlimited invention and
inexhaustible resource--with comedy and farce, with drama and tragedy,
and sometimes with work startling in its truth and touching in its
pathos.

[Illustration: "A HAPPY RELEASE."--A REJECTED SKETCH.

(_Drawn by C. J. Lillie._)]

* * * * *

The men who immediately followed Mr. Harry Furniss did not come to stay.
In December, 1880, a sketch of "Cherry Unripe"--a clever parody on Sir
John Millais' famous picture--was contributed by Mr. Stowers, who then
rested on his laurels. Mr. Finch Mason contributed three sporting cuts
in 1881, three in 1882, and one in the following year, and then Mr.
Charles J. Lillie appeared on the scene. Mr. Lillie's principal
victories have been won in the field of poster-designing, his favourite
achievement being the design of a young lady in bathing costume who,
being wrecked, succeeded by the aid of Somebody's Soap, with the
cleverness of her sex, in "washing herself ashore." At the time when Mr.
Herkomer was designing his famous poster for the "Magazine of Art," Mr.
Lillie submitted to _Punch_ a set of humorous sketches nominally adapted
to similar advertisements of wines. Thus, "Port: Old and Crusty," was of
course a t