A MIDSUMMER DAY’S DREAM.
PUCK, August 10th, 1881.
Bright as is the idea which inspires this cartoon, it inspires only the interest of reminiscence. Puck’s chief cartoonist figures himself as falling asleep upon a hot midsummer day, so soundly that during his slumber the subjects of his facile pencil invade his studio and use his drawing materials to depict themselves according to their own conceit. Thus Roscoe Conkling, practically withdrawn from active politics, portrays himself as a Jupiter Tonans in the prime of life, and Mr. Whitelaw Reid, who was at the time accused of dallying with æsthetic dandyism, appears as a figure somewhat like Mr. Gilbert’s Bunthorne. Peter Cooper appears as a young and auburn-whiskered man; and Mr. Tilden, even then in the feebleness of old age, sketches himself as an ambitious athlete. Mr. James Gordon Bennett sketches himself as the Apollo Belvidere. A subtle pun is here intended. Mr. Bennett was then prominent through his efforts to introduce the game of polo into this country. The patch on his nose marks the wound he is supposed to have received in his mysterious encounter with Mr. Frederick May, a disreputable man-about-town, with whom Mr. Bennett was at one time intimate. Mr. John Kelly draws himself as a fashion-plate model; and Mr. Beecher, whose lineaments age had made somewhat gross, paints for his picture the likeness of the young man whose eloquence and originality waked a new fire in the religious circles of the West. Mr. Talmage draws himself as he perhaps would have liked to have people think he looked. General Grant sketches a mighty emperor who bears his features. And that curious political tramp, General Benjamin F. Butler, uses the canvas to straighten out his curious, ugly mug into the likeness of a good-looking man. The picture curiously suggests what General Butler might have been had he been anything but the queer and unpleasant thing he was.