This confession of one of my "chosen familiars" I have the pluck to reprint, as an answer to those unknown strangers who so frequently write me down as "a conventional comic draughtsman of funny ill-drawn little figures." "What shall I call him?" said one; "a master of hieroglyphics?" Well, if I am commissioned to draw humorous hieroglyphics, I do my best to master their difficulties. Caricature pure and simple is not the art I either care for or succeed in practising as well as I do in my less known more serious and more finished work. When I joined _Punch_, at the age of twenty-six, I had had nine-tenths of my time previous to that occupied (ever since I was fifteen years of age) in drawing far more elaborate and finished work than would be in keeping in a periodical such as _Punch_. _Punch_ required "funny little figures," and I supplied them; but my _metier_, I must confess, was work requiring more demand upon direct draughtsmanship and power. I am a funny man, a caricaturist, by force of circumstances; an artist, a satirist, and a cartoonist by nature and training. The one requires technical knowledge--in the other, "drawing doesn't count." The more amateurish the work, the funnier the public consider it. The serious confession I have to make is that I have been mistaken for a caricaturist in the accepted and limited meaning of the term. "It is the ambition of every low comedian to play Hamlet, that of every caricaturist to be able to paint a picture which shall be worthy of a place on the walls of the National Gallery," are my own words on the platform; but I do not essay to play Hamlet on the platform, nor do I paint pictures for posterity in my studio. Therefore I do not place myself in the category of either, for I am neither a low comedian nor am I strictly and solely a mere caricaturist. This fact is perhaps not generally known to the public, but it is known to the publishers, and when a Society Church paper wished to present a series of supplements--portraits of the leading clergy--I was selected as the artist. The portrait of Canon Liddon, which is here very much reduced, is one of these. [Illustration: CANON LIDDON. A SKETCH FROM LIFE.] And furthermore I received a commission from General Booth, which unfortunately, through pressure of work, I was unable to undertake, to make a study of Mrs. Booth, who was at the time on her death-bed, suffering from cancer, which the General was "exceedingly anxious" to reproduce and issue to his Army, as he had "never yet been able to secure a good photograph, although frequent attempts had been made by eminent London photographers."