“I do not know what the name of the house is,” said Phil; “but I think I could draw it.”
“There are a good lot of houses in London,” said the cabby, “and they are mostly all alike.”
“But there is a church near it,” said Phil; “and I could draw that.”
A menu card and a pencil were procured, and he drew a picture of the ordinary London house and a rather toyshop church. The cabby looked at it and said, “I know where it is; that’s Osnaburgh Terrace,” so Phil got into the cab, and then the cabby turned round to Corbould and myself and said, “That’s Phil May, ain’t it?” We said yes, and he unbuttoned his coat and put the menu card carefully in his pocket, remarking, “It will be worth something some day.”
The extraordinary thing was that any one who was so witty and such a consummate artist should have been ignored by Punch for so many years, though he became in the end one of its most honoured contributors. The editor approached him in a very curious way when he felt that he could not ignore him any longer. He did it through the firm who at that time reproduced illustrations for Punch.
Phil May was one of the best-hearted of men, generous to a fault, alike with his money and in his attitude to his rivals.
Very famous people used to come sometimes to those ultra-Bohemian gatherings in his studio, including some of the Queens of the music-hall stage.
It was Phil May, I believe, who drew the inimitable cartoon in the St. Stephen’s Review of Mr. Gladstone, with a malevolent eye, gathering primroses on the banks of the Thames on the anniversary of his illustrious rival’s death, which had for its title—
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,