Mr. Gladstone—his pastime of tree-felling, his habit of sending post-cards, and his collars—afforded the caricaturist a very congenial subject to work upon. I still have a very malicious cartoon entitled “Khartoum _v._ Criterion,” in which the Grand Old Man is pictured holding his sides with laughter in a box at the play, whilst above is shown the death of General Gordon at Khartoum. As a matter of fact, by no possibility could Mr. Gladstone have known that the very evening on which he was going to the Criterion, Gordon was being done to death in the far-off Soudan; and whatever may have been his faults, callousness or inhumanity was most certainly not numbered amongst them. A political caricaturist of modern days, whose works I collect, is Sir F. Carruthers Gould. His wit, indeed, always of the most good-natured description, is one of the most valuable assets of the Liberal party, whilst the very moderation of his sarcasm, combined with an almost preternatural aptitude for hitting off a situation, makes the work of this talented caricaturist tell in a quite unusual degree. The best amateur caricaturist I ever knew was the late Sir Frank Lockwood, who used every year to send his friends some whimsical design of his own composition. Among the New Year’s cards which he sent me—souvenirs I still cherish—the best of a clever series is, I think, the one I received at the end of 1893. In this Old Father Time is pictured as a butler holding out a champagne bottle labelled 1894, whilst another, 1893 sec, lies empty on the ground. Underneath is written, “A fine wine, and not so dry as the last.” On another, Time—as a sportsman carrying a dead pheasant, 1895—is shown keenly eyeing an astonished young bird (1896) perched upon a milestone, the while he murmurs, “I’ll have a shot at you next, my little man.” Sir Frank Lockwood was a great loss to all his friends, for a more agreeable, clever, and cheery companion never lived. Looking over an old scrap-book of mine I came upon some Italian caricatures of the carnival at Rome in the old days, when the Pope was still an independent sovereign. These had been collected when I was travelling in Italy with my mother about the year 1842. The carnival, I remember, was not particularly gay. There were immense crowds, and a perpetual rain of confetti and dead battered flowers, which increased to a perfect storm when our carriage passed any house inhabited by our friends. The people of Rome, however, enjoyed it all immensely, and a young lady said to me, “If Paradise be half as delightful as the carnival, what can be so happy?” Some English people, however, said it was more like Purgatory! During our travels at that time, when going by sea on a Tuscan vessel from Genoa to Naples, we met Lord Vernon, who was our fellow-passenger as far as Leghorn. He talked a great deal about Dante, the study of whose works was his hobby, and also gave us a very lively description of his interview with the Pope.