his own end of a large human bone. The brutality of the conception renders such a caricature as this far more unpleasant than the coarse, but generally good-humoured quizzes subsequently executed by Gillray on royal foibles and economy. Some of our older readers may remember these. They were published towards the end of the last century. Half-a-dozen are excellently well copied on pages 205 to 211 of Mr. Wright's second volume. There is "The Introduction "-George III. and Queen Charlotte receiving their daughter-in-law the Princess of Prussia, and bewildered with delight at the golden dowry she brings. Then we have the King toasting his muffins, and the Queen frying her sprats; and again (the best of them), the royal pair out for a walk, and majesty overwhelming an unlucky pig-feeder by a volley of interrogative iterations. But few caricatures bear description, and least of all Gillray's, where the design is often of the simplest, and the humour of the execution everything. Gillray's first attempts at caricature were on the occasion of Lord Rodney's victory over De Grasse. It will be remembered that, when the North Administration went out in 1782, one of the first acts of their Liberal successors was to recall Rodney, a stanch Tory, on pretext of his not having done all he ought to have done with the West Indian fleet. England was badgered by her numerous enemies, and her affairs looked altogether discouraging, when sudden news arrived of the triumph which established her sovereignty of the seas. Ministers found themselves in an awkward predicament. It was neither gracious nor graceful to persist in the victor's recall, and yet, what else could be done? His successor, Admiral Pigot, had already sailed. Too late, an express was sent to stop him. "A cold vote of thanks was given by both Houses to the victorious Rodney, and he was raised to the peerage, but only as a baron, and was voted a pension of but £2000 a-year." Such shabby reward for an achievement of immense importance was, of course, not suffered to pass unnoticed by the late ministry, now the Opposition. A fleet of caricatures was launched, and amongst them were two by the then unknown Gillray. In one of them, "King George runs towards the admiral, with the reward of a baron's coronet, and exclaims, (in allusion to Rodney's recall and elevation to the peerage), Hold, my dear Rodney, you have done enough! I will now make a lord of you, and you shall have the happiness of never being heard of again!' Probably these maiden efforts attracted little notice, for some time still elapsed before Gillray made much use of his pencil for the public amusement. In this same year of 1782, however, he brought out a clever caricature of Fox, who had just resigned his foreign secretaryship on Lord Shelburne's coming to be prime minister, vice Rockingham, deceased. In this print Charles James is represented, as a sort of parody on Milton's Satan, gazing with envious eye at Shelburne and Pitt, as they count their money on the treasury table. "Aside he turned For envy, yet with jealous leer malign The expression of Fox's face is excellent, and the likeness good, but yet it wants something of the raciness of Gillray's later works. Fox and Burke were the great butts of the satirists at this particular moment, and also in the following year, on the occasion of their coalition with Lord North. James Sayer, then in full force as a caricaturist, and anxious to curry favour with his patron Pitt, to whom he was subsequently indebted for more than one lucrative place, was very severe upon them; and the power of caricature at that time must have been very great, if it be true that Fox admitted the severest blow received by his India Bill to have been from a drawing of Sayer's. It was a cry of the day that Fox aimed at a sort of Indian dictatorship for himself, and the satirists gave him the nickname of Carlo Khan. In the caricature in question, entitled "Carlo Khan's Triumphant Entry into Leadenhall Street," " Fox, in his new character, is conducted to the door of the India House on the back of an elephant, which exhibits the full fare of Lord North, and he is led by Burke as his imperial trumpeter; for he had been the loudest supporter of the bill in the House of Commons. A bird of illomen croaks from above the would-be monarch's doom." On the other side of the question, several good caricatures also appeared, levelled chiefly at William Pitt, then on the eve of his prime ministership, and amongst these were three, published anonymously, which Mr. Wright is probably not mistaken in attributing to the pencil of Rowlandson. 64 The imitation of French fashions and manners, and even of French profligacy, already noticed as gaining ground in English society about the middle of the eighteenth century, had reached the highest pitch towards its close. Nothing could be more absurd than the dresses of 1785, the enormous hats and prodigious buffonts and buckram monstrosities of the women, except perhaps the rush into the opposite extreme which took place at the commencement of the French Revolution. One of the caricatures of 1787, under the title of Mademoiselle Parapluie," shows us a young lady serving as an umbrella, sheltering a whole family from a shower beneath the tremendous brim of her hat, (a regular fore-and-after), and under the protecting shadow of a protuberance, concerning whose composition (crinoline not having then been invented) future ages must remain in deplorable darkness. Then, everything was sacrificed to breadth in costume. Pass we over six or seven years, and the lady of fashion who, at their commencement, could hardly get through a moderate-sized door-way, might almost glide head-foremost through the keyhole. A thin scanty robe, cling ing close to the form, a turban and a single lofty plume, a waist close up under the arms, a watch the size of a Swedish turnip, with a profusion of seals and pendants, compose the fashionable female attire of that day. The dress of the men, is equally ridiculous, both in cut and material, the great rage then being for striped stuffs, known as Zebras, and employed for coats as well as for the absurd pantaloons, puffed out round the hips and buttoned tight on the leg, in vogue amongst the beaux of the period. The modes that succeeded these were equally exaggerated and ugly. And the frivolity and extravagance of the time kept pace with the follies of dress. There was a rage for strange sights and extraordinary exhibitions; and the Londoners, especially, carried this passion to an extent that rendered them easy dupes of charlatans and impostors. "It stands recorded in the newspapers of the time, on the 9th of September 1785,- Handbills were distributed this morning that a bold adventurer meant to walk upon the Thames from Riley's Tea Gardens. We are further informed that, at the hour appointed, thousands of people had crowded to the spot, and the river was so thickly covered with boats, that it was no easy matter to find enough water uncovered to walk upon." Of course the thing was a mere trick, and the Cockneys had their disappointment for their pains. Then balloons were the crotchet of the hour, and they also came from France, where they had been brought to a certain degree of perfection, but where it was soon found they were more positively dangerous than probably useful; for in May 1784, "a royal ordonnance forbade the construction or sending up of any aërostatic machine,' without an express permission from the king, on account of the various dangers attendant upon them; intimating, however, that this precaution was not intended to let the sublime discovery' fall into neglect, but only to confine the experiments to the direction of intelligent persons." In England, the fancy for them increased, and was the subject of various caricatures and pamphlets, until the death of a couple of Frenchmen, thrown to the earth from an immense height, cooled the soaring courage of the aeronauts. A more destructive and permanent folly was the passion for gambling, which, in spite of the attacks of the press, of grave censure and cutting satire, pervaded all ranks of society. There was a perfect fury for faro; and ladies of high fashion, and of aristocratic na:ne, thought it not beneath them to convert their houses into hells. Three of these sporting dames, who had made themselves a name as keepers of banks, to which they enticed young men of fortune, were popularly known as "Faro's daugh ters." Lord Kenyon, when deciding of invincibility which she gathered from subsequent victories in the field; and the positive assertions of France, that she had but to throw an army on the English coast to secure prompt and powerful co-operation from the Jacobin party, caused considerable alarm in the country. To kindle true patriotism, and raise the courage of the nation, recourse was had to loyal songs, and anti-French caricatures. The anti-Jacobin lent efficient aid, on a gambling case, pledged himself, in a moment of virtuous indignation, to sentence the first ladies in the land to the pillory, should any be brought before him for a similar offence. Not long afterwards, several titled gamblers were actually arraigned at his tribunal, but he forgot his threat, and let them off with a fine. The hint, however, was enough for Gillray, then in his glory, and for his brothers of the comic brush, and the moral and Gillray put his shoulder to the exposure and castigation which Faro's daughters' endured at the hands of the caricaturists, can have been hardly less stinging and annoying than actual exposure to the hooting and pelting of the mob. General demoralization, the natural consequence of gambling, characterised this period. Men and women, ruined at the board of green cloth, recruited their finances as best they might; and when no other resource remained, the latter bartered their reputation, and the former took to the road. Those were the palmy days of highway robbery. "We are in a state of war at home that is shocking," writes Horace Walpole in 1782. "I mean from the enormous profusion of housebreakers, highwaymen, and footpads; and, what is worse, from the savage barbarities of the two latter, who commit the most wanton cruelties. The grievance is so crying, that one dares not stir out after dinner but well armed. If one goes abroad to dinner, you would think he was going to the relief of Gibraltar." Sixty-two years ago, in January 1786," the mail was stopped in Pall Mall, close to the palace, and deliberately pillaged, at so early an hour as a quarter past eight in the evening." After having for some years drawn their principal themes for satire from the social follies and political dissensions of their countrymen, the English caricaturists and song-writers found "fresh fields and pastures new" in foreign menaces and threatened invasion. In their usual presumptuous tone, French newspapers and proclamations spoke of the conquest of England by the conqueror of Italy, as of a project whose realization admitted not the smallest doubt. This country had not then that confidence wheel. The periodical and the sallies of patriotism; sometimes they came forth in the shape of national playbills, sometimes they were coarse and laughable dialogues between the Corsican and John Bull." Libels on Buonaparte, burlesques on his acts, parodies of his bulletins, accounts of the atrocities of his armies, were daily put forth, mingled with countless songs and tracts of encouragement and defiance. Some of these were spirited, but, generally, the substance and intention were better than the form at least so they now appear to us, who read them without the additional savour imparted by the appropriateness of their time of production. Gillray keeps better, and one still must smile at his John Bull, standing in mid-Channel with trousers tucked up to his thighs, offering a fair fight to his meagre enemy, who contemplates him with a visage of grim dismay from above the triple batteries of the French coast. It is said that Buonaparte was much annoyed by personalities levelled at himself and his family, in some of the caricatures of 1803. They were often very coarse, and conveyed unhandsome imputations on the conduct of his fe. male relatives; some of whom-rather flighty dames, if all tales be true gave by their conduct plausible grounds for such attacks. Napoleon himself was represented in every odious and contemptible shape that could be devised,-as a butcher, a pigmy, an ogre, and even as a fiddle, transformed by an abominable pun into a base villain, upon which John Bull, a complacent smile upon his honest face, plays with sword instead of bow. This was after Maida, when the British army had begun to share the high esteem in which repeated victories had long caused our fleets to be held. A droll caricature, by Woodward, represents Napoleon abusing his master-shipwright for not keeping him better supplied with ships; whilst the unfortunate constructor, with hair on end and a shrug to his ears, excuses himself upon the ground that, as fast as he builds, the English capture. It is to be remarked that hardly any of the caricatures of Napoleon attempt a likeness of him. They usually represent him as a lantern-jawed, disconsolate-looking wretch, with a prodigious cockedhat and plume of feathers-that is to say, quite the contrary, both in head and head-dress, of what he really was. Both Gillray and his successors seem to have preferred sketching him as the received personification of a Frenchman, to giving a burlesque portrait or real caricature of the man. We trace this peculiarity in many instances, up to the year 1814, when George Cruikshank, in depicting a Cossack "snuffing out Boney," (an allusion to French disasters in Russia), still represents the then plump Emperor as a lean, long-chinned scarecrow, with sash and feathers. Rowlandson does nearly the same thing, in his vulgar print of Napoleon's reception in the Island of Elba; and the only caricature reproduced by Mr. Fairholt, in which is preserved the general character of the Emperor's head, is an anonymous one, where the head is placed on a dog's shoulders, and 66 Blucher the Brave," by a rough grasp on the nape of the quadruped's neck, extracts "the groan of abdication from the Corsican Bloodhound." Probably the classic regularity of Napoleon's countenance discouraged the caricaturists from attempting his likeness. They were deterred by the difficulty of burlesquing a face whose grave expression and perfect propor tion gave no hold to ridicule, and made it pretty certain that the general resemblance would be sacrificed to the exaggeration of even a single feature. A PARCEL FROM PARIS. IT is some time since we had a gossip about French literature and bitterateurs. The fact is, that, since the blessed days of February drove crestfallen monarchy from France, and began the pleasant state of things under which that country has since so notably flourished, literature has been at a complete stand-still in the land beyond the Channel. We refer especially to the light and amusing class of books it has been our habit occasionally to notice and extract from. With these the revolution has played the very mischief. Feuilletons have made way for bulletins of barricade contests, for reports of state trials, for the new dictator's edicts and proclamations. The rush at the Cabinets de Lecture has been for lists of genuine killed and wounded, not for imaginary massacres, by M. Dumas' heroes, of hosts of refractory plebeians, or for the full and particular account of the gallant defence of Bussy d'Amboise, against a quarter of a hundred hired assassins-all picked men-at-arms, and all setting on him at once, but of whom, nevertheless, he slays twenty-four, and only by the twenty-fifth is slain. And, by the bye, what pity it is that a few of our friend Alexander's redoubted swordsmen could not have been summoned from their laurel shaded repose in Père la Chaise, to avert the recent catastrophe of the house of Orleans. Just a brace and a half of his king-making mousquetaires would have done the trick in a trice. Rumour certainly says that, in February last, a tall dark complexioned gentleman, with a brannew African Kepi on his martial brow, a foil, freshly unbuttoned, in his strong right hand, and a yell of liberty upon his massive lips, was seen to head a furious assault upon the Tuileries, at a time when that palace was undefended. Ill-natured tongues have asserted that this adventurous forlorn-hope leader was no other than the author of Monte Christo; but of this we credit not a syllable. It is notorious that M. Dumas is under the deepest obligations to the ex-king of the French, to whose kind and efficacious patronage (when Duke of Or leans) his first very sudden, very brilliant, and not altogether deserved success as a dramatist was mainly due. Equally well known is it that the popular writer was the favoured and intimate associate of two of Louis Philippe's sons-the Dukes of Orleans and Montpensier. Take, in conjunction with these facts, M. Dumas' established reputation for steady consistency, gravity, and gratitude, and of course it is impossible to believe that he ever acted so basely to his benefactors. But, even admitting republican predilections on his part, his love of liberty would assuredly prevent his constraining those well-known stanch supporters of the right divine, Messrs. Athos, Artagnan, and Company, who, if set down in Paris in 1848, would have played the very deuce with the young republic. The giant Porthos would have stridden along the boulevards, kicking over the barricades as easily as he raised, singlehanded, the stone which six of the degenerate inhabitants of Bellisle were unable to lift, (Vide "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne,") whilst the astute Gascon Artagnan would have packed General Cavaignac in a magnified bonbon-box, with air-holes in the lid, and Copahine-Mège or Chocolat-Cuillier on the label; and would have conveyed him on board a fishing smack, there detaining him till he pledged his honour that the king should have his own again. And, upon the whole, and whatever budding honours and civic crowns M. Dumas may anticipate under the genial reign of republicanism, it would have been more to his present interest to have stuck to narchy, and led his legions to its rescue. Under the new regime his occupation is gone; his literary merchandize vainly seeks a market. Paris, engrossed by domestic broils and political discussions, by its anarchy, its misery, and its hunger-no longer cares for the fabulous ploits of Gascon paladins, and of privates in the Guards, who make thrones to totter, and armies to fly, by the prowess of their single arm. But M. Dumas is not disheartened. When the drama languishes, and the feuilleton mo ex |