py
bird which was left for a short while alone with a monkey, and which,
when the owner returned to the room and found his bird clean plucked of
its feathers by the monkey--all but a single plume in the tail--looked
up dejectedly, and croaked in tones of almost voiceless horror, "I've
been having a doose of a time!" The remarks were caught at by Mr.
Burnand as a happy thought, and the new idea was tossed like a ball from
one to another until there issued from it the well-known design of the
monkey in its coronet, as the House of Lords, having plucked the
cockatoo-Bill of most of its feather-clauses--a drawing which, under the
title of "The Parish Councils Cockatoo," hit off the situation with
singular felicity, and reaped the reward of the public applause. In a
similar manner there developed Mr. Sambourne's peculiarly happy "Cartoon
Junior," representing Mr. Gladstone, newly retired, looking up from the
perusal of the first speech made by Lord Rosebery on his promotion to
the Premiership--a speech some of the points of which he afterwards had
to withdraw or explain away--with the words, "Pity a Prime Minister
should be so ambiguous!" In the arrangement of these second cartoons,
which, as is elsewhere described, immediately follows the handing of the
written-out subject of the main picture to Sir John Tenniel, a contrast
is always the first thing sought for. If the first deals with foreign
politics, the second must treat of home matters, political or social; if
the "senior" is social, the "junior" will be political; if Sir John is
realistic, Mr. Sambourne is idealistic. And if it is impossible so to
differentiate them, the prominent figures at least which appear in the
one are carefully avoided in the other.

But in the early years of _Punch_ the method was not so democratic. The
matter was discussed, but the preponderance of two or three of the Staff
made their opinions felt to such a degree that when a subject was
proposed by one of them, that subject, when it appeared, was
unmistakably theirs and nobody else's. I have before me the full details
of these matters during a considerable period, and I find that on the
whole Douglas Jerrold was the most prolific of suggestors, while Henry
Mayhew (so long as he remained), Gilbert Abbot a Beckett, Mark Lemon,
and Horace Mayhew, roughly speaking, divided the honours between them.
Thackeray seldom made a suggestion, and it is not very often that the
entry "Leech _solus_" is cre