on any account miss those twin jokes--for they are both of them
good and in their essence identical--of John Leech and Mr. du Maurier.

In Mr. du Maurier's version we have a poor woman touting for a bottle of
wine for her sick husband. The doctor had recommended port, she
says--"and it doesn't matter how _old_ it is, sir!" In Leech's the host
is impressing on his youthful guest that "that wine has been in my
cellar four-and-twenty years come last Christmas--four-and-twenty years,
sir!" And the guileless youth gushingly makes answer, in the belief that
he is making himself remarkably pleasant, "Has it really, sir? _What it
must have been when it was new!_"

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Compare Shirley Brooks's couplet (1857):--

"MARRY (AND DON'T) COME UP.

"A fellow that's single, a fine fellow's he;
But a fellow that's married's a _felo de se_."

[14] See _Punch_, p. 235, Vol. LXI., 1861.

[15] See p. 191.

CHAPTER VII.

CARTOONS--CARTOONISTS AND THEIR WORK.

The Cartoon takes Shape--"The Parish Councils
Cockatoo"--Cartoonists and their Relative Achievements--John
Leech's First--Rapidity in Design "General Fevrier turned
Traitor"--"The United Service"--Sir John Tenniel's Animal
Types--"The British Lion Smells a Rat"--The Indian Mutiny--A
Cartoon of Vengeance--_Punch_ and Cousin Jonathan--"Ave
Caesar!"--The Franco-Prussian War--The Russo-Turkish War--"The
Political 'Mrs. Gummidge'"--"Dropping the Pilot," its Origin and
Present Ownership--"Forlorn Hope"--"The Old Crusaders"--Troubles of
the Cartoonist--The Obituary Cartoon.

In describing the _Punch_ Dinner I show how the merry meeting lapses, by
a natural transition, from pleasure to work, and ends with the evolution
of the cartoon; how the mist of talk, vague perhaps and undecided at
first, slowly develops a bright nebulous point, round which the
discussion revolves and revolves, until at last it takes form, slowly
and carefully, though changed a dozen times, and finally, after being
threshed and threshed again, stands in the ultimate form in which next
week it meets the public eye.

For 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 the good-humoured ridicule and