Righteousness" who was "always on the right side of every moral question". Legacy As Nast had in the US, Bengough succeeded in establishing editorial cartooning as a force in journalism in the late 19th century. The church minister and Queen's College principal George Monro Grant called Bengough "the most honest interpreter of current events to have" and declared he had "no malice in him" but had "a merry heart, and that doeth good like medicine". The reformist English newspaper editor William Thomas Stead considered Bengough "one of the ablest cartoonists in the world". Outlets for political cartoons were mostly limited to illustrated magazines until they found a home in daily newspapers in the 20th century. Bengough's busy, moralizing style began to fall out of favour by the 1890s in contrast to the cleaner style practised by such cartoonists as Henri Julien and Sam Hunter. His caricatures nevertheless left an impression on the public consciousness in Canada for generations to follow. Bengough's caricatures continue to illustrate Canadian texts—examples in which they are prominent include Creighton's biography John A. Macdonald (1952–55), Armstrong and Nelles' The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company: Sunday Streetcars and Municipal Reform in Toronto, 1888–1897 (1977), and Waite's Arduous Destiny: Canada 1874–1896 (1971). Historians use the cartoons to demonstrate issues and attitudes of Bengough's era, as well as for their artistic qualities, removed from their satirical contexts. Historian Peter Busby Waite considered Grip "one of the most interesting sources for the social history of Ontario in the latter nineteenth century". Bengough's artistic legacy rests chiefly on his caricatures of Macdonald. To Peter Desbarats and Terry Mosher, Bengough's bulbous-nosed caricatures of Macdonald as "ungainly, boozy, and corrupt ... engraved itself on the public mind, particularly in the days before newspapers published photographs of politicians". Macdonald nevertheless deflated much of the power his caricaturists might have had as he often made light of his own alcoholism. Bengough met the prime minister in person only once. Though his cartoons have continued to thrive, Bengough's life and career as a writer has drawn far less attention. Bengough biographer Stanley Paul Kutcher considered his poetry "undistiguished". Historian George Ramsay Cook commended Bengough's approach to have "nurtured the growth of social criticism in late Victorian Canada without much of that humourless self-righteousness that so often characterizes reformers". Historian Carman Cumming's Sketches of a Young Country provides an in-depth analysis of Grips politics. The town