The Land of Liberty.
"When the meal is done and cigars and pipes are duly lighted, subjects are deliberately proposed in half a dozen quarters, until quite a number may be before the Staff. They are fought all round the Table, and unless obviously and strikingly good, are probably rejected or attacked with good-humored ridicule or withering scorn.... And when the subject of a cartoon is a political one, the debate grows hot and the fun more furious, and it usually ends by Tories and Radicals accepting a compromise, for the parties are pretty evenly balanced at the Table; while Mr. Burnand assails both sides with perfect indifference. At last, when the intellectual tug-of-war, lasting usually from half-past eight for just an hour and three-quarters by the clock, is brought to a conclusion, the cartoon in all its details is discussed and determined; and then comes the fight over the title and the 'cackle,' amid all the good-natured chaff and banter of a pack of boisterous, high-spirited schoolboys."
"What? You young Yankee-Noodle, strike your own Father!"
Louis Philippe as "The Napoleon of Peace."
From the collection of the New York Public Library.
Down to the close of the period covered in the present chapter, the cartoon played a relatively small part in the weekly contents of Punch, averaging barely one a week, and being omitted altogether from many numbers. During these years the dominating spirit was unquestionably John Leech, who produced no less than two hundred and twenty-three cartoons out of a total of three hundred and fourteen, or more than twice as many as all the other contributors put together. He first appeared with a pageful of "Foreign Affairs" in the fourth issue of Punch—a picture of some huddled groups of foreign refugees—a design remembered chiefly because it for the first time introduced to the world the artist's sign-manual, a leech wriggling in a water bottle.