being strong--in fact, I am to be a
caricaturist without caricature! On the other hand, no cartoon I ever
drew for _Punch_ was more popular. Non-politicians were good enough to
accept it as an antidote to the usual caricatures, and those papers on
the other side of politics were extravagantly complimentary, and I
received a large sum for the original for a private collection. I allow
the following leaderette from the _Birmingham Post_ to illustrate the
point, and at the same time to describe the cartoon. The same paper, I
may add, comments on the principal cartoon in _Punch_ that week--drawn
by Tenniel--as showing that _Punch_ "thinks little of the prospects of
the present Government":

[Illustration: REDUCTION FROM ENGRAVING IN _PUNCH_.]

"'Mr. Punch' is in 'excellent fooling' this week. Rarely has he, even
he, more happily burlesqued a political situation than in Mr. Harry
Furniss's cartoon of 'The New Cabinet.' Not a word of explanation
accompanies the picture: it is good wine, needing no bush, and making
very merry. A glance suffices to seize its meaning, for it expresses a
thought that has flitted, at one time or another, through everyone's
mind. The big moment has come when Mr. Gladstone is to reveal to his
colleagues the secret he has hitherto withheld from them, not less than
from the electorate--to submit to them, masterly, succinct, complete,
the scheme which, with unexampled courage and sublimest modesty, they
have defended on trust, for which they have sacrificed their personal
independence without knowing why, and as to which, painful to remember,
they have sometimes blundered into confident and contradictory
conjecture. We can picture the subtle excitement--in one Minister of
joyful expectation, in another of horrid misgiving--under which they
have come together. Well, Mr. Gladstone unfolds the fateful document,
and lo! it is a blank sheet. Paralysis and grim despair fall upon the
spirits of the assembly; face to face with a nightmare reality, not a
man amongst them has strength to say, 'This is a dream.' At the head of
the table, his elbows resting on the parchment, and an undipped quill
actually split upon it in his angry grasp, sits the Premier, a
never-to-be-forgotten picture of impotent ill-humour. The task with
which the Cabinet is confronted, for him as for the rest, is impossible
and yet inexorable. In the candle-flame, by an effect of hallucination