"'Mr. Punch' is in 'excellent fooling' this week. Rarely has he, even he, more happily burlesqued a political situation than in Mr. Harry Furniss's cartoon of 'The New Cabinet.' Not a word of explanation accompanies the picture: it is good wine, needing no bush, and making very merry. A glance suffices to seize its meaning, for it expresses a thought that has flitted, at one time or another, through everyone's mind. The big moment has come when Mr. Gladstone is to reveal to his colleagues the secret he has hitherto withheld from them, not less than from the electorate--to submit to them, masterly, succinct, complete, the scheme which, with unexampled courage and sublimest modesty, they have defended on trust, for which they have sacrificed their personal independence without knowing why, and as to which, painful to remember, they have sometimes blundered into confident and contradictory conjecture. We can picture the subtle excitement--in one Minister of joyful expectation, in another of horrid misgiving--under which they have come together. Well, Mr. Gladstone unfolds the fateful document, and lo! it is a blank sheet. Paralysis and grim despair fall upon the spirits of the assembly; face to face with a nightmare reality, not a man amongst them has strength to say, 'This is a dream.' At the head of the table, his elbows resting on the parchment, and an undipped quill actually split upon it in his angry grasp, sits the Premier, a never-to-be-forgotten picture of impotent ill-humour. The task with which the Cabinet is confronted, for him as for the rest, is impossible and yet inexorable. In the candle-flame, by an effect of hallucination natural at such a moment, the face of Mr. O'Brien seems to limn itself out, implacable and contemptuous; and there is a fearsome shadow on the blind--the massive head of Lord Salisbury. The candle, marked '40,' is the majority, which dwindles while the Ministers are sadly musing; and over the mantelpiece, behind the Premier's chair, mutely reproachful, hangs a picture of the great Cabinet of 1880. It is distinctly the best thing Mr. Furniss has done." That impression was shared by my private friends as well, even those on _Punch_. My dear friend Mr. E. J. Milliken, a strong Radical, and a most active member of the staff, in a reply to a letter of mine, in which I intimated that I was afraid my cartoon would give offence, replied in a most flattering spirit. I had to play the "villain" in another scene in the same political drama, "Mr. Punch's Historical Cartoons" (1893), in which the same Cabinet is shown in Mr. Gladstone's room in the "Bauble Shop"--the House of Commons. Those Radicals who had not joined the Unionists again took offence. Those Radicals who had become Unionist wrote to congratulate me. From one well-known and powerful personality, a historical name in the publishing world, I received the following: