Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/373

 Dictionary': 'an unsightly crawling thing'!), Captain Marryal's 'Alas, Poor Jack'! and Turpis Ainsworth's 'Guy Fox':—

So little merit had this critical periodical itself, that some rare etchings by Hablot Knight Browne and Leech to a novel entitled "The Diurnal Revolutions of David Diddledoff," which appeared in its pages, failed to keep the dreary serial alive, and a quarrel ensuing between the proprietors and himself, Browne was dismissed and Leech supplied his place. Leech's caricature of Mulready's postage envelope, already mentioned, appears to have led to others, and among them one by "Phiz," a circumstance which is referred to in the following attack: "Phiz has found a lower deep in the lowest depths of meanness. When Leech's admirable caricature of Mulready's postage envelope was pirated by every tenth-rate sketcher, Phiz steps in to complete the work of injustice, and advertises his caricature of the same subject at sixpence, thus both borrowing the design and underselling the artist upon whose brains he is preying as the fly upon the elk's. Well might Leech exclaim, 'Et tu, Brute!' (and you, you brute!) Leech is a genuine artist, while Phiz is only a bad engraver." By way of answer to this vulgar abuse, Phiz almost immediately afterwards produced his admirable illustration of Quilp and the Dog, in No. 18 of "Master Humphrey's Clock."

In the pages of this defunct periodical we find a long and virulent article on Benjamin D'Israeli, the late Lord Beaconsfield, from which we have disinterred the following remarkable prophecy. After referring to his celebrated parliamentary fiasco, and his own prophetic words on that memorable occasion: "You won't hear me now; but the time will come when you shall hear me!" the writer goes on to say: "That time has never since arrived. In vain did Benjamin parody Sheridan's celebrated saying ('It's in me, and by G—— it shall be out of me!'). He renewed his efforts repeatedly . . . But though, in consequence of his (sic) moderating his tone into a semblance of humility, he is sometimes just listened to, he has never A A