of their graves, to see Grisi queen of
Covent Garden, and Jullien lord of
Drury Lane! Theatrical opposition
is a thing nobody now dreams of, un-
less it be between a French vaude
ville company and an English troop
of low comedians. And were a con-
test to arise between the English
theatres, it would most likely be of
the nature of that which occurred in
the reign of George the First, between
the rival harlequins, when it was
common enough for the two great
theatres to bring out pantomimes
founded on the same subject-as in
1723, when Harlequin Dr. Faustus had
great success at both Drury Lane
and Covent Garden. That was also
the period of the first introduction, on
the English stage, of wild beasts, dra-
gons, monsters, and goblins of various
kinds, besides mountebanks, tumblers,
Even
and rope-dancers.
Garrick,

and Lord Trentham, the government candidate, was accused of favouring and protecting them. He spoke French well, and was said to affect French manners; and all this, of course, was made the most of for electioneering purposes. He was lampooned as "the champion of the French strollers ;" and the mob, with their usual wisdom and admirable logic, said, "that learning to talk French was only a step towards the introduction of French tyranny." A deluge of ballads descended upon the heads of the candidate and his assumed protégés; and the quality of the poetry seems to have been on a par with the liberality of the sentiments-to judge, at least, from the following brilliant specimen :

"Our natives are starving, whom Nature has made

chance,

The worst of all mortals, the strollers from
France."

This is wretched enough, even for an election ditty. And we are little disposed to join in the regret expressed in Mr. Wright's preface, that no one, as far as he has been able to discover, "has made any considerable collection of political songs, satires, and

the last century and the present;" since the wit and the merit of those he has been able to get together are in general so exceedingly small. He is, very judiciously, sparing of his extracts, except when he stumbles upon a really good song, or set of verses, a few of which are scattered through his volumes.

however, did not disdain the panto- Whilst apes are caress'd, which God made by The brightest of wits, and to comedy bred; mime, when he saw in it the means to annoy and injure a rival. At the beginning of 1750 he brought out a new pantomime, entitled Queen Mab, in which Woodward acted the part of harlequin. The great success of this piece, which drew crowded houses for forty nights, without intermission, gave rise to a very popular caricature, entitled The Theatrical Steelyard, in which Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Woffington, Quin, and Barry, are outweighed by other such tracts, published during Woodward's Harlequin and Garrick's Queen Mab. Rich, (the Covent-Garden manager,) dressed in the garb of harlequin, lies on the ground expiring." Excepting in the two important particulars, that good actors were then as plentiful as they now are scarce, and that the two great theatres were occupied by Shakspeare and Englishmen, instead of by fiddlers and foreigners, there is much coincidence between some recent occurrences in the theatrical world and others a hundred years old. Then, as now, attempts were made to drive French actors from the country. These attempts arose, however, from no apprehension of foreigners injuring or eclipsing native talent, then so superior to such fears, but from the antiGallican feeling abroad at the time. During the Westminster election of 1749 a company of French players were performing at the Haymarket,

To return to the mob-hatred of the French. After the Westminster election, this feeling was kept up by squib and caricature; and in November 1755, Garrick having occasion to employ some French dancers, in a grand spectacle brought out at Drury Lane under the title of The Chinese Festival, a theatre row was the result. It was kept up for five nights; and on the sixth the mob smashed the lamps, demolished the scenery, and did several thousand pounds' worth of damage This popular antipathy to the French did not, however, extend

sole rebuke was by throwing her own
veil over the immodest beauty. The
host of caricatures to which this gave
rise, and the grossness of many of
them, in that day of great pictorial
license, are easily imagined. After
this there were very few masquerades
during ten or twelve years, at the
end of which time the court again set
the fashion of them, soon after George
the Third's accession. Towards 1770,
Mrs. Cornelys got up her "Harmonic
Meetings," at Carlisle House in Soho
Square. These subscription balls and
masquerades were attended by most
of the nobility and leaders of the ton;
and, at one of them, we learn the pre-
sence of "two royal dukes, and nearly
all the fashionable portion of the aris-
tocracy. On this occasion, Colonel
Luttrell (the same who had opposed
Wilkes in the election for Middlesex)
appeared as a dead corpse in a shroud,
in his coffin." Much used, from the
very first, for purposes of intrigue,
these assemblies soon became unbear-
ably licentious. The company fell off,
both in numbers and respectability,
until the only way to fill the rooms
was by the admission of bad charac-
ters. This made them sink lower and
lower, until " we read in the St. James's
Chronicle of April 23, 1795, the remark
that No amusement seems to have
fallen into greater contempt, in this
country than the masquerades.
They have been lately mere assem-
blages of the idle and profligate of
both sexes, who made up in indecency
what they wanted in wit.'" A descrip-
tion that has ever since been appli-
cable to London masquerades, which
still continue, we apprehend, to be
mere pretexts for debauchery; whilst
even in Paris, whose atmosphere, and
the character of whose inhabitants,
have generally been found more fa-
vourable to that class of amusements,
the famed opera balls have sunk, with-
in the last twenty years, into the
saturnalia of idle students, profligate
apprentices, and ladies of uncertain
virtue.

to the produce of France, or prevent circumstance, that her royal mistress's the higher classes from patronising and importing French luxuries of all kinds as well as a host of milliners, governesses, quacks, valets, and professors of other menial and decorative arts. The Gallomania of the fashionable world offered a fine field to the caricaturists, who made the most of it, to the great delight of the populace. French fashions, cookery, education, and nicknacks, were alternately taken as targets for the shafts of ridicule. Mr. Wright transfers to his pages a ludicrous fragment of a print by Boitard, entitled "The Imports of Great Britain from France," in which an Englishwoman of quality is seen embracing and caressing a French female dancer, and assuring her that her arrival is to the honour and delight of England. And the mob of that day went so far as to believe that it was the love of the aristocracy for French perfumes and delicacies, cooks and coiffeurs, which prevented English ministers from properly protecting the national honour, and avenging the insults put upon us by our neighbours. The real evil, far more important than the consumption of French finery and cosmetics, was the importation of French corruption and immorality, so prevalent in England during the whole reign of George II., and during a portion of that of his successor. By this time the masquerades and ridottos, which had kept their ground in spite of the moralists, had grown so flagrant in their excesses and indecencies that, about the end of 1755, they were nearly suppressed; the earthquake at Lisbon having come to the aid of the anti-maskers, who took advantage of the panic it caused in London, to represent it as a judgment on the profligacy of the age. Previously to that, masquerades-not only those at public establishments, such as Vauxhall and Renelagh, but at the private houses of persons of rank and fashion -offered glaring examples of indecorum-to use the very mildest worduntil at last Miss Chudleigh, maid of honour to the Princess of Wales, and afterwards Duchess of Kingston, showed herself at the Venetian ambassador's in a close-fitting dress of flesh-coloured silk. We may judge of the court morals of the time from the

It would be unjust to leave out Samuel Foote, in a work treating of the satires and caricatures of the last century. Possessing neither the brush of Hogarth nor the pen of Churchill, he wielded a weapon as formidable in

its way-that, namely, of dramatic mimicry, or stage satire; and he is properly named by Mr. Wright the great theatrical caricaturist of the age. For a time, the reckless and vindictive wit was the terror of the town: an affront to him, real or imaginary, caused the unlucky offender to be paraded before the world, under some fictitious name, upon the boards of his theatre, which, at first, was the "little" one in the Haymarket. For some time Foote and Macklin had it between them, but, disagreeing, Macklin left, whereupon his ex-partner immediately caricatured him upon the very stage he had so lately trodden. "The Haymarket was an unlicensed theatre, and Foote evaded the law by serving his audience with tea, and calling the performance in the bills 'Mr. Foote's giving tea to his friends.' His advertisement ian, Mr. Foote presents his compliments to his friends and the public, and desires them to drink tea at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, every morning, at playhouse prices.' The house was always crowded, and Foote came forward and said, that as he had some young actors in training, he would go on with his instructions whilst the tea was preparing." Afterwards he got a license, and rebuilt the theatre. But his bitter wit and gross personalities continually got him into trouble, frequently caused his pieces to be prohibited; exposed him to threatened, if not to actual castigation; and, finally, were the indirect cause of his death, accelerated, it is generally believed, by shame and vexation at the false but revolting charge brought against him by a clergyman he had savagely lampooned.

a sure and cowardly wound. But Hogarth caricatured others till others learned to caricature him, with less talent, certainly, but with sufficient malice to annoy and harass the artist, and finally, it is said, to break his heart. His constant practice," says Mr. Wright, "of introducing contemporaries into his moral satires, had procured him a host of enemies in the town; whilst his vain egotism, and the scornful tone in which he spoke of the other artists of the age, offended and irritated them." How seldom do satirists preserve temper and coolness under the retort of their own aggression! After more than a quarter of a century passed in turning his neighbours into ridicule, Hogarth might be thought able to endure a rub or two in his turn, and even to receive them with good grace and a smiling countenance. But many a veteran has found, to his cost, that a life passed in the field does not render bullet-proof. Hogarth made good fight to the last, but his offensive arms were better than his defensive ones; his enemies' shot fell thick and fast, and all he could do was to die upon his guns. For the last twelve or fifteen years of his life he appears to have been particularly unpopular, and continually caricatured. His Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753, drew upon him a great deal of ridicule; and in 1758, his opposition to the foundation of an Academy of Fine Art was the signal for a shower of abuse and caricatures, more or less witty-oftener less than more. But the campaign that finished him—the Waterloo of the unlucky humoristwas one he rashly undertook against Wilkes and Churchill, previously his friends. This was imprudent in the extreme; for he might be sure that all the minor curs, who had so long yelped at his heels, would redouble their wearisome assaults when reinforced by such formidable champions as the North Briton and "Bruiser" Churchill. Wilkes warned Hogarth that he would not be kicked unresistingly, but the painter persevered; and Wilkes kept his word. No.

The fate of Hogarth was not dissimilar to that of Foote, with the differ ence that the painter was slain literally with his own weapons. Foote's victims had neither the ability nor the opportunity to expose him, as he did them, upon the stage. The Methodists, Dr. Johnson, the East India Company, and the Duchess of Kingston, each in turn subjected to his vicious attacks, retorted as best they might by pamphlets and cudgels, but apparently made little impression 17 of the North Briton was stingon the player's tough epidermis, until a disreputable parson devised the poisoned dart with which to inflict

ing retaliation for No. 1 of The Times; and Churchill's "Epistle to William Hogarth" was at least as