Churchill, Randolph Henry Spencer, Lord, 1849-1895
Abuse was retorted on his head in vain. ‘“Yahoo Churchill,”’ ‘Little
Randy,’ ‘Cheeky Randy,’ ‘the music-hall cad,’ ‘the Champagne Charley of
politics,’ were designations which measured at once his popularity and
the rising fury of his foes. His fierce moustache and ‘note of
interrogation’ head lent themselves to caricature. He was drawn as a
pigmy, a pug dog, a gnat, a wasp, a ribald and vicious monkey, so
habitually, that nearly everyone, who had not seen him in the flesh,
believed that his physical proportions were far below the common
standards of humanity; but the contrast between his reputed stature and
the majestic outlines of Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt only
enhanced his fighting qualities in the public eye. ‘Give it ’em hot,
Randy,’ cried the crowds in the streets and at the meetings, till he
himself was forced to complain that he was expected to salute his
opponents with every species of vituperation. But, to tell the truth, he
responded to the public demand with inexhaustible generosity. He spared
no one. Neither persons nor principles escaped an all-embracing
ridicule. The most venerated leaders of the Liberal party, famous in the
great days of its rise, fared no better at his hands than the crudest
and most violent of the New Radicals. One by one Mr. Bright, Mr.
Gladstone, Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, Sir Charles Dilke, Mr.
Chamberlain, Mr. Bradlaugh, and Mr. Schnadhorst were summoned before
that irreverent tribunal and exhibited to popular censure and derision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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