"Your cartoon p. 95 delights us all. I have looked at it twenty times and seen fresh points in it. Nothing for years, I should say, has so entirely caught the very spirit of a great crisis.
"We shall owe something to you for this felicitous exposure of Gladstone's insane Bill. Alas! the miners and the brickies, the costermongers and the dust-cart drivers, have now the power. The middle class has been out-numbered, and if it were not that some labouring men and artisans have hard heads enough to comprehend the position we should be landed in a pretty pickle next September.
"It is a pity traitors' heads are nowadays their own copyright."
A "copyright" in heads is a good suggestion, and coming from a publisher too! But apart from "traitors," there are others known to a caricaturist. The House of Commons at one time was rich in them. Some such works of art suffer in being translated. Indeed, what the poet "Ballyhooley" wrote of one might apply to others:
"Darwin MacNeill.
"Darwin MacNeill, all the papers are hot on you,
Darwin MacNeill, they are writing a lot on you.
What in the world sort of face have you got on you?
Send us your photograph, Darwin MacNeill.
Surely you must be both lovely and pure!
Have you got fatures that nothing can cure?
Let's have the first of it,
Let's know the worst of it:
Is your face only a caricature?
Here's a health to you, Darwin MacNeill,
Let penny canes all your enemies feel;
Show me the crature would slander a fature
Of the beautiful Mimber for ould Donegal.
"Our childhers are dull, and we wish to be brightening them
Send us your picture and we'll be enlightening them,
Maybe 'twill only be useful for frightening them;
Still let us have it, dear Darwin MacNeill.
Shut up the slander and talk they are at,
Show us the head you've got under your hat;
True every particle, genuine article,
Send us your picture in answer to that.
Here's a health to you, etc.
"I hear that the Queen she has simply gone crazy, man;
Says she to Gladstone, 'Get out, you old lazy man!
Cannot you see that I'll never be aisy, man,
Till I've a portrait of Darwin MacNeill?'
When of that picture she first got a sight,
She held it up, so they say, to the light,
Looked at the head of it, then all she said of it,
'I'm of opinion that Darwin is right.'
Here's a health to you, etc.
"There's just arrived now, to give great content to us,
A lovely picture, which someone has sent to us.
We know the worst now, for there has been sent to us
What's called a portrait of Darwin MacNeill.
If it's a likeness, I just tell you what,
That you have acted in ways you should not.
Don't try a turn of fists
On with the journalists;
Thrash those who gave you the head you have got.
But here's a health to you, Darwin MacNeill!
Only just manage new fatures to steal,
Then show me the crature would slander a fature
Of the beautiful Mimber for ould Donegal."
