"I recollect once on the terrace of the House of Commons he was sketching a lady of foreign extraction, the wife of a gentleman well-known to the Irish Party, with a profile something like this. I made the sketch, unfortunately, on the marble tea-table. When H. F.'s friends were leaving, he found he could not rub this off the table, and what embarrassed him more was the fact that some Irish Members were bearing down to take possession of the table as soon as we left. I had a rapid vision of our guv'nor floating in the Thames, being hurled over by the infuriated Members from the Emerald Isle; so I quickly transformed the lady into something resembling a popular Member of Parliament at the time, and, as we were leaving, I overheard an Irish Member say, 'Bedad! and Furniss has been dhrawin' that owld beauty, Mundella!'
MUNDELLA.
"Have you anything new?" asked the Pen. "May I look? I know that St. Stephen's is your happy hunting ground."
"Ah, yes," responded the Pencil, "I know it well. But I can tell you it is not altogether a bed of roses. When we come across Members who have taken liberties with their personal appearance during the recess, H. F. and I resent it, I can tell you."
"Naturally," observed the Pen in a voice of the utmost sympathy, "for it means more work."
"Of course," continued the Pencil. "Now I have always held that model M. P.'s have no right to alter. They are the property of the political caricaturist, and what on earth is to become of him if the bearded men begin to shave and the smooth-faced to disguise themselves in 'mutton-chops' or 'Dundrearys'? Yet they will do it. We may draw them in their new guise, but the public won't have them at any price. They want their old favourites, and if they miss a well-known 'Imperial,' a moustache, a pair of dyed whiskers, or other such hall-mark in the picture, or on the other hand find a set of familiar chins concealed beneath an incipient Newgate fringe, a nose and chin which have been accustomed to meet for many a long year suddenly divided by the intrusion of a bristly moustache, or a delightfully asinine expression lost under the influence of a pair of bushy side-whiskers, recognition becomes impossible and the caricature falls flat. The fact is, my friend Pen, it is not only their features, but their characteristic attitudes which we make familiar, and their political differences cause the artistic effect. To me it is marvellous to note how differently artists draw the same head. Expression of course varies, but the construction of the head must always remain the same. Yet I have seen no less a head than that of Mr. Gladstone so altered in appearance in the work of different artists that I have been forcibly reminded of the old story of St. Peter's skull. A tourist travelling in Italy was shown a cranium at Rome which he was assured was the veritable relic. In Florence he was shown another, and somewhere else he was shown a third. Upon his remonstrating the guide observed, 'It is quite right, sir: the skull you saw at Rome was that of St. Peter when he was a boy; that at Florence was his when he was a young man, and this was his skull when he died.'
"Then again, familiarity with the subject is only arrived at by continually watching and sketching a Member. A few years ago I was lying down in my berth in the sketch-book which was in H. F.'s pocket, when I overheard a conversation between him and Mr. Labouchere upon Parliamentary portraits."
"What did H. F. say about them?" asked the Pen. "He ought to know the alphabet of Parliamentary portraiture at all events by this time."