The nomination of Blaine in 1884 was a fresh breeze on the half-dead embers of the Mulligan letters. _Harper's Weekly_ and other periodicals published them with damaging explanatory remarks. Campaign committees spread them abroad in pamphlet form. Attention was directed to such phrases as "I do not feel that I shall prove a dead-head" and "I see various channels in which I know I can be useful." Hostile cartoonists used the phrases with an infinite variety of innuendo. But the most powerful evidence was still to come. On September 15, 1884, Fisher and Mulligan made public additional letters which Blaine had not possessed at the time of his defence in 1876. The most damaging of these was one in which Blaine had drawn up a letter completely exonerating himself, which he asked Fisher to sign and make public as his own. Blaine had marked his request "confidential" and had written at the bottom "Burn this letter." Fisher had neither written the letter which was requested nor burned Blaine's. Meanwhile it was recalled that Blaine had earlier characterized the reformers as "upstarts, conceited, foolish, vain" and as "noisy but not numerous, pharisaical but not practical, ambitious but not wise," and the already intemperate campaign became more personal than ever. Thomas Nast's able pencil caricatured Blaine in _Harper's Weekly_ as a magnetic candidate too heavy for the party elephant to carry; _Puck_ portrayed him as the "tattooed man" covered all over with "Little Rock," "Mulligan Letters" and the like. _Life_ described him as a Take all I can gettery, Mulligan lettery, Solid for Blaine old man.