parts of a bicycle or the width of
a railway gauge, a score of artistic beauties pass unnoticed and
unchallenged?

And so Tenniel worked his way upwards. The fact that in a fencing bout
he had partially lost his sight, through the button of his father's foil
dropping off, whereupon he received the point in his eye, was not the
slightest deterrent. He regarded it merely as an annoying, though not a
very important, incident. Being satisfied that the Almighty had only
given us _two_ eyes as a measure of precaution, to provide against such
vexatious little accidents as he had experienced, he went on working as
if nothing had happened. "It's a curious thing, is it not," he said one
day to the writer, "that two of the principal men on _Punch_, du Maurier
and I, have only two eyes between them?" Yet it only made him the more
careful. Free from mannerism, he never allowed carefulness to interfere
with fun, and his cartoon of Britannia discovering the source of the
Nile, and of Lord Beaconsfield as a peri entering the Paradise of
Premiership, are among the memorably funny things of _Punch_. His
elevation to the leading position on the paper has thus been gradual and
certain; not of his own assumption, however, but the ready tribute of
his colleagues, who have always regarded him not only as the great
artist, but as the link incarnate of the tradition of _Punch_ of the
present with the past. So he is the favourite of the band, to whom he is
the beloved "Jack[=i]d[=e]s" of Shirley Brooks's christening. It was
Mark Lemon who, at the Dinner, first applied to him the burlesque
line--"No longer Jack, henceforth Jack[=i]d[=e]s call;" but it was
Brooks who confirmed the practice of according to him the _sobriquet_
which _Punch_ (p. 148, Vol. XLV.) had previously conferred on Lord John
Russell, "England's Briefest Peer."

It was a startling proof of his extraordinary, and by him
half-unsuspected, popularity, that when Tenniel's knighthood became
known the honour was received with loud and general applause--with an
enthusiasm quite unusual in its command of popular approval. "I am
receiving shoals of letters and telegrams," he wrote to me on the day of
the announcement; "I suppose you know the reason Y." It is said that
Lord Salisbury had intended to make the recommendation himself, but that
the nomination was delayed and forgotten; but when Mr. Gladstone came
into office the new Premier repaired the neglect of the old, and at the
same