d M.P.
came up to H. F. one day in the Lobby of the House of Commons when a new
Parliament had assembled for the first time, and said to him, 'Well, you
have a rich harvest for your pencil (that was me). I never saw such odd
specimens of humanity assembled together before.'

[Illustration: THE M.P. REAL AND IDEAL.]

"'That may be so,' replied H. F., 'but mark my words, after a session or
two, my comic sketches of the Members--for which, by the way, the
specimens you are looking at are merely notes, and which you are now
good enough to call faithful portraits--will become so familiar to you
that they will cease to amuse you. And you may even come to pronounce
them gross libels. In other words, you will find that their frequent
repetition will rob them in your eyes of their comic character
altogether, just as in the case with the attendants at the Zoo, on whose
faces you will fail to detect the ghost of a smile at the most
outrageous pranks of the monkeys, although you shall see everyone else
in the place convulsed with laughter.'"

"But surely, Mr. Pencil," argued the Pen, "you lose friends by
caricaturing them?"

"Not those who are worthy of friendship," replied the Pencil, with a
solemn air. "And those who cannot take a joke are not worthy of it. H.
F. is not a portrait painter. It makes the lead turn in my case to
witness the snobbishness which exists nowadays among certain
thin-skinned artists and writers. The Society grub has eaten the heart
out of all true artistic ambitions. An honest satirist has no chance
nowadays. He must not draw what he sees, or write what he really thinks
about it. Pleasing wishy-washiness is idolised, whilst Hogarth is voted
coarse. Great Scott! How this age of cigarettes and lemon squash would
have stirred the pulse and nerved the brush of the greatest of English
caricaturists!"

[Illustration: THE PHOTO. AS HE REALLY IS.]

Then as the Pencil wiped away a tear of regret for the decadence of
English satirical art the Pen jotted down the following lines culled
from the old tomb-stone at Chiswick:

"If Genius fire thee Stranger stay,
If Nature touch thee, drop a tear.
If neither move thee, turn away,
For Hogarth's honoured dust lies here."

"When he has not seen a Member, and has no reference to go by, how does
he manage?"

"He does not find photography of much use. Sometimes, if he has to draw
a man for some special