practice of drawing from memory has its drawbacks; for the
things remembered are apt to grow old-fashioned. The Flying Dutchman was
running when Sir John's locomotive still had the odour of Puffing Bilfy
about it. His indifference to that "actuality" which is the
characteristic of Mr. Sambourne has often raised the howl of the
specialist. When in an excellently drawn cartoon full of point
(November, 1893), entitled "A Bicycle made for Two," he grafted the
features of a modern roadster on to the type of 1860, the cycling world
fluttered in a manner that must have been very encouraging to the
artist. His machine, they said, was the most wonderful one ever placed
on the market. Sir H. H. Fowler, it was said, was sitting on a
half-inch tube without a saddle, and "working with his heels on pedals
shaped like a Mexican gaucho's stirrup"--but his critics had clearly
never seen a gaucho's stirrup. "Nor has the lady--riding behind, instead
of in front--better accommodation, being in suspension over a frame that
lacks a backstay, and above a wheel that buckles under her weight; while
the handles are thrown up instead of down, and their bars so slender
that they must inevitably break." The gear-case is on one side of the
frame and the chain on the other, and the frame itself was a marvel of
ingenuity misapplied. Thus did the cyclists moan in many newspapers,
taking the matter _au grand serieux_, with quite unusual regard for
mechanical accuracy, and a total disregard for the political allusion
and point. Similarly in January of the same year the "Forlorn Maiden" of
trade was shown lying across the railway lines while an engine is
bearing down upon her. But "there are five rails in sight, all at equal
distances apart, though the railway gauge is four feet eight inches and
a half, and the locomotive is running on the six-foot way." The girl,
too, stretches across it, and spans it from waist to ankles, not
counting a bend at the knees, so that at the lowest estimate she is ten
feet high. This violated the public conscience even more than the fact
that the engine rushes along the inside line of the two sets of rails;
and they declared that never before had the maxim _ars longa_ been more
triumphantly indicated than in the maiden's figure. But what of it all?
Is it not a striking commentary on our English temperament, that while
an inaccuracy of a purely mechanical description raises the protests of
thousands who have no idea beyond the