The year 1880 is memorable for the enlistment of Mr. Harry Furniss. Mr. E. J. Wheeler was the other arrival, and he still (1895) spreads over Punch's pages his bright little theatrical sketches and initials, as well as illustrations to Mr. Burnand's own literary contributions. His drawings are unmistakable, as much by their rather old-fashioned method as by the well-known monogram of later years, or by the appropriate sign-manual of a "four-Wheeler" in his earlier contributions.

HARRY FURNISS.
(From a Photograph by Debenham and Gould.)

In Mr. Harry Furniss Punch found an artist who was destined to become, during the fourteen years of his connection, a considerable factor in his career. Mr. Furniss was bred up in the Punch tradition. While still a boy at school in Ireland—where, through a mistake on Time's part, he was born, of English and Scotch parents—he produced, edited, and illustrated "The Schoolboys' Punch" in manuscript, in careful imitation of the original, drawing the cartoon as well. One of these "big cuts" represented himself as the performer in a cabinet-trick—(the sensation of the Davenport Brothers was before the public at the time)—in which the cabinet was the school, and the ropes that bound him the curriculum; while from another cabinet he emerges in full blaze of scholastic triumph. He soon began drawing, and engraving his own designs, for Mr. A. M. Sullivan's Irish version of Punch; and having met Tom Taylor—who then reigned in Whitefriars—and been by him applauded for his sketches, he accepted the hint that he might send in drawings to the original Hunchback of Fleet Street. But when they came, Taylor declined them on the ground that the ideas were unsuitable; yet, curiously enough, they several times appeared, re-drawn by members of the Staff. One of these, re-drawn by Mr. du Maurier in February, 1877, represented a scene witnessed by Mr. Furniss from the railway—a flooded field navigated by two men in a boat, who are reading a notice-board indicating that the submerged "highly-eligible site" was "To be Let or Sold for Building." Mr. Furniss thereupon decided to have done with Punch during that editorship; and came to London to seek his artistic fortune. He speedily made such way on leading journals, especially on the "Illustrated London News," that Mr. Burnand, on succeeding to his office, invited the young draughtsman, then aged twenty-six, to become a regular contributor. Mr. Furniss's first sketch (published on p. 204, Vol. LXXIX., 1880) was a skit on what is ignorantly called the Temple Bar Griffin—(it is really an heraldic dragon, designed by Horace Jones)—executed by his friend C. B. Birch, A.R.A.

BISHOP PUNCH.
(By Harry Furniss.)
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At that time Mr. Henry W. Lucy had just been summoned to reinforce Punch's Staff, and to take over the "Essence of Parliament," since Shirley Brooks's death so ponderously distilled by the late Tom Taylor, and to him was left the selection of an illustrator of his "Toby's Diaries." In selecting Mr. Furniss he made a wise choice, for the "Lika Joko" of later times had been a close student of politics, and seemed cut out for the post. How he justified himself is sufficiently known; he achieved for himself a great popularity, and unquestionably acquired for Punch a unique position among journals, as representing to the people that personal side of Parliamentary life, the familiar aspect and the vie intime of the House of Commons, not to be found elsewhere. No doubt, here and there some offence was taken; and wives would at times protest against the caricatures of husbands' figures, clothes, or faces; but as a rule the "truthful falsehood" was appreciated by Mr. Furniss's victims—many of whom would ask to be included in his pictures—and few frequenters of the Lobby were more popular than he.

"Mr. Gladstone's collars" are a by-word in the land; and Mr. Furniss made them. It is generally recognised that Mr. Gladstone wore no such collars. Nevertheless, his favourite sitting attitude in the House was one very low down, his chin buried in his chest; and the more tired or depressed he was—the more weary or dejected at the course of the debate—the more his head would sink within his collar, and the more the linen rose. This fact gave Mr. Furniss the idea, in the course of a few sessions, of his drawing of "Mr. Gladstone's Choler Getting Up;" and thereon was based his popular fiction. Similarly, the representation of Lord Randolph Churchill as a small boy of irrepressible "cheek" was at first intended to typify the noble lord's irrepressible unimportance in the Chamber (that was before he had risen from the Fourth Party leadership to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer); while the creation of the complacent, many-chinned descendant of the Plantagenets in "The House of Harcourts"—a page imagined and drawn in greatest haste straight on to the wood-block, to fill up—was received with uproarious delight by the public as a true piece of satirical humour. But of all his "types" the funniest, as well as the easiest, was the ungainly but side-splitting caricature of Sir Richard Temple—which helped not a little to spread his fame throughout the land. All these men took the fun in the best of good part, Sir William Harcourt only protesting—not when Harry Furniss endowed him with an extra chin, but when he did not credit him with the full complement of hair.