There are men still alive who remember the six-bottle period and all its strenuous vulgarities, the period when the whole strength of the empire was put forth in the Bonaparte wars. William Chambers, who was born when George Cruikshank was a boy of eight, speaks of those years as a time of universal violence. Children, ruled by violence at home and by cruelty at school, pummeled and bullied one another in turn, besides practicing habitual cruelty toward birds and beasts, hunting cats, pelting dogs, plundering birds' nests. He tells us of a carter who used to turn out his horses to die on the common of his native town, where the boys, in the sight of the people, and without being admonished by them, would daily amuse themselves by stoning the helpless creatures till they had battered the life out of them. The news that roused the people was all of bloodshed on land and sea. The only pleasures that were held to be entirely worthy of men were hard riding and deep drinking. Those diaries of persons who flourished in the first half of George Cruikshank's life, of which so many volumes have been published lately—those, for example, of Moore, Greville, Jerdan, and Young—what are they but a monotonous record of dinner anecdotes? Marryat's novels preserve a popular exhibition of that fighting age, and we perceive from his memoirs that he did not exaggerate its more savage characteristics. Several of his most brutal incidents were transcripts from his own experience.

Comic art, which the amelioration of manners has purified, has done much in its turn to strengthen and diffuse that amelioration. Isaac Cruikshank was among the last of the old school. He seems to have kept his pencil on hire, for we have caricatures of his on all sides of the politics of his time, from conservative to radical. In 1795 he represented William Pitt as the royal extinguisher putting out the flame of sedition; but in 1797 he exhibited the same minister in the character of a showman deceiving the people with regard to the condition of the country. "Observe," says "Billy," "what a busy scene presents itself. The ports are filled with shipping, riches are flowing in from every quarter." But the countrymen standing around declare that they can see nothing but "a woide plain with some mountains and mole-hills upon't," and conjecture that the fine things which Billy sees must be behind one of the mole-hills. During the same year we find him caricaturing Fox, the leader of the Opposition, as having laid a train for the purpose of blowing up the Constitution, and then leaving to others the risk of touching it off. On both sides of the Irish questions of his day he employed his pencil, ridiculing in some pictures the Irish discontents, and in others the measures proposed by ministers for quieting them. When the old king was losing his reason, he drew him as a "farthing rush-light," around which were the Prince of Wales, Fox, Sheridan, and their friends, all trying to blow out the flickering flame. At length, in 1810, he caricatured the Burdett riots in a manner to please the most "advanced" radical. This picture, however, may have been a tribute to the mere audacity of the member for Westminster, who barricaded his house for four days against the officers of the House of Commons ordered to arrest him.

It was while Isaac Cruikshank was occasionally drawing such caricatures as these that he "kindly allowed" his son George, "a mere boy," to "play at etching on some of his copper-plates." The first real work done by the lad was of a very modest character, but he speaks of them in a way to make us regret that even they should have been lost. "Many of my first productions, such as half-penny lottery books and books for little children, can never be known or seen, having been destroyed long, long ago by the dear little ones who had them to play with."

Men who write so of little children that tore up their picture-books seventy years before are not formed for the strife of politics. George Cruikshank early in life withdrew from political caricature, but not before he had executed a few pictures of which he might reasonably boast in his old age, after time had justified their severity. This aged artist, who has lived to see the laws repealed which restricted the importation of grain into England, was just coming of age when those laws were passed, and he expressed his opinion of them in a caricature called "The Blessings of Peace; or, The Curse of the Corn Bill." It was in 1815—the year that consigned Bonaparte to St. Helena, and gave peace to Europe. A vessel laden with grain has arrived from a foreign port, and the supercargo, holding out a handful, says, "Here is the best for fifty shillings." But on the shore stands a store-house filled with home-grown grain, tight shut, in front of which is a group of British land-owners, one of whom waves the foreign trader away, saying: "We won't have it at any price. We are determined to keep up our own to eighty shillings, and if the poor can't buy it at that price, why, they must starve." The foreign grain is thrown overboard, while a starving family looks on, and the father says, "No, no, masters, I'll not starve, but quit my native country, where the poor are crushed by those they labor to support, and retire to one more hospitable, and where the arts of the rich do not interpose to defeat the providence of God."

Such is the Protective System: an interested few, having the ear of the Government, thriving at the expense of the many who have not the ear of the Government! This young man saw the point in 1815 as clearly as Cobden, Peel, or Mill in 1846.

In the same year he aimed a caricature at the ministry who took off the income tax, and lessened the taxes upon property without diminishing those which bore more directly upon the poor. Many pictures in a similar spirit followed; but while he was still a young man he followed the bent of his disposition, and has ever since employed his pencil in what his great master Hogarth once styled "moral comedies," wherein humor appears as the ally and teacher of morals.

John Doyle, who reigned next in the shop-windows of Great Britain, and continued to bear sway for twenty years—1829 to 1849—was not known by name to the generation which he amused. It chanced one day that two I's, in a printing-office where he was, stood close to two D's, and he observed that the conjunction formed a figure resembling HB symbol.. He adopted this as the mark or signature of his caricatures, and consequently he was always spoken of as H. B. down to the time of his death, which occurred about the year 1869. He, too, shared the spirit of the better time. Collectors number his published caricatures at nine hundred and seventeen, which have been re-issued in eleven volumes; but in none of his works is there any thing of the savage vulgarity of the caricatures produced during the Bonaparte wars. It was a custom with English print-sellers to keep port-folios of his innocent and amusing pictures to let out by the evening to families about to engage in the arduous work of entertaining their friends at dinner. He excelled greatly in his portraits, many of which, it is said by contemporaries, are the best ever taken of the noted men of that day, and may be safely accepted as historical. Brougham, Peel, O'Connell, Hume, Russell, Palmerston, and others appear in his works as they were in their prime, with little distortion or exaggeration, the humor of the pictures being in the situation portrayed. Thus, after a debate in which allusion was made to an ancient egg anecdote, HB symbol. produced a caricature in which the leaders of parties were drawn as hens sitting upon eggs. The whole interest of the picture lies in the speaking likenesses of the men. An air of refinement pervades his designs. His humor is not aggressive. It was remarked at the time in the Westminster Review that the great hits of Gillray, on being put up for the first time in Mrs. Humphrey's window, were received by the crowd with shouts of approval, but that the kindlier humor of HB symbol. only elicited silent smiles.

Seeing caricatures from childhood has induced a habit in many persons of surveying life in the spirit of caricature, and has developed some tolerable private wielders of the satiric pencil. Mrs. Trollope was, perhaps, a case in point. Her volumes upon the "Domestic Manners of the Americans," the literary sensation of 1832, were illustrated by a dozen or more of very amusing caricatures, some of which were fair hits, and were of actual service in improving popular manners. There are persons still alive who remember hearing the cry of "Trollope! Trollope!" raised in our theatres when a man ventured to take off his coat on a hot night, or sat with his feet too high in the air.[39] Her whole work, pictures and all, was a purposed political caricature, as she frankly confesses in her preface, where she says that her chief object was to warn her countrymen of "the jarring tumult and universal degradation which invariably follow the wild scheme of placing all the power of the State in the hands of the populace." She was, besides, exceedingly uncomfortable during her three years' residence in the United States, except when she was so happy as to be served by slaves. "On entering a slave State," she remarks, "I was immediately comfortable and at my ease, and felt that the intercourse between me and those who served me was profitable to both parties and painful to neither."

Besides the specimen of her caricaturing powers given in this chapter, there are several others which have, at least, some interest as curiosities of insular judgment. Mrs. Trollope, the daughter of a clergyman of the English Church, and the wife of an English lawyer of aristocratic family, entered the United States, in 1827, by the Mississippi, and spent a year or two in its newly settled valley. She saw the Western people engaged in a life-and-death struggle with untamed nature—the forest, wild men and beasts, the swamp, the flood, the fever, a trying climate, and interminable distances. A partial conquest had been won. Some fair towns had risen. A few counties were subdued. The log school-house was a familiar object. To a mind of continental compass, although Western life was still rough, rude, and haggard, the prospect was hopeful; it was evident that civilization was winning the day, and was destined, in the course of a century or two, to make the victory complete. The worst that a person of liberal mind could say, or can now say, of such a scene, would be this: "See what it costs to transplant human families from the parish to the wilderness!"

Even cabbage plants wither when only transferred from the hot-bed to the garden; but the transplanting of families from the organized society of an old country to a wild new land is a process under which all sicken, many degenerate, and many die.

Our curate's daughter, on the contrary, after a long and close survey of this interesting scene, could only discover that life on the banks of the Ohio, in the twentieth year of their settlement, was neither as pleasant, nor as graceful, nor as elegant, nor as clean, nor as convenient as it is in an English village; and this discovery she communicated to the world in two volumes, 12mo, with sixteen illustrations, very much to the satisfaction of many English readers. This worthy and gifted lady, mother of worthy and gifted children, was utterly baffled in her attempts to account for the rudeness of Western life. Provisions, she says, were abundant in Cincinnati, as many as four thousand pigs being advertised sometimes by one man. The very gutters of the town ran blood—the blood of cheap innumerable swine. But "the total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is so remarkable that I was constantly endeavoring to account for it." The people, she thought, had clear and active intellects; their conversation was often weighty and instructive, occasionally dull, but never silly. What an unaccountable thing, then, it was that these dealers in the pig and slayers of the bear, these subduers of the wilderness and conquerors of Tecumseh, should not bow with courtly grace, and converse with the elegance and ease of Holland House! "There is no charm, no grace, in their conversation," she laments. "I very seldom, during my whole stay in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American."

Such a thing it is to be brought up in an island! Her volumes, however, are to this day entertaining, and not devoid of historical value. There is here and there a passage which some of us could still read with profit, and her misinterpretations are not much more insular and perverse than those of Dickens. No one, indeed, yet knows much of this mystery of transplanting, in which lies hidden the explanation of America.

Her first caricature, entitled "Ancient and Modern Republics," is in two scenes. An Ancient Republic is represented as a noble Greek, crowned with flowers, reclining upon a lounge, one hand resting upon the strings of a lyre, and the other gracefully holding up a beautiful cup, into which a lovely maiden is squeezing the juice from a luxuriant bunch of grapes. A Modern Republic figures as a Western bar-room politician, with his hat over his eyes, his heels upon the table, a tumbler in his hand, a decanter within reach, and a plug of tobacco at its side. We have next a picture of a "Philosophical Millinery Store" at New Orleans, in which Mrs. Trollope delineated an astounding event—"My being introduced in form to a milliner!" She, a curate's daughter, introduced to a maker of bonnets, who actually proved to be a gifted and intelligent lady! A "Cincinnati Ball-room" reveals to us twenty-two ladies sitting close to the walls, the floor vacant, and all the men gormandizing at a table in the next room, leaving the ladies to a "sad and sulky repast" of trash in plates held on their laps. Then we are favored with a view of a young lady who is making a shirt, but is ashamed to pronounce the name of the garment in the presence of a man, and calls it pillow-case. Whereupon he says, "Now that passes, Miss Clarissa! 'Tis a pillow-case for a giant, then. Shall I guess, miss?" To which she sweetly replies, "Quit, Mr. Smith; behave yourself, or I'll certainly be affronted."

Another picture represents some ladies about to enter a gallery of art at Philadelphia, in which were exhibited several antique statues. The old woman in attendance says: "Now, ma'am, now! this is just the time for you. Nobody can see you. Make haste!" Mrs. Trollope stared at her with astonishment, and asked her what she meant. "Only, ma'am," was the reply, "that the ladies like to go into that room by themselves, when there be no gentlemen watching them." Another picture presents to us an American citizen of "the highest standing" returning from market at 6 A.M. with a huge basket of vegetables on one arm and a large ham carried in the other hand. A still more marvelous picture is given. Mr. Owen, father of Robert Dale Owen, challenged debate on his assertion that all the religions ever promulgated were equally false and pernicious. A clergyman having accepted the challenge, the debate was continued during fifteen sessions. But what amazed Mrs. Trollope was that Mr. Owen was listened to with respect! Nothing was thrown at him. The benches were not torn up. Another marvel was that neither of the disputants lost his temper, but they remained excellent friends, and dined together every day with the utmost gayety and cordiality. All this must have seemed strange indeed to the doting daughter of a State Church whose belief was regulated by act of Parliament.

A famous contemporary of John Doyle and Mrs. Trollope was Robert Seymour, who will be long remembered for his co-operation with Charles Dickens in the production of the first numbers of "Pickwick." Nothing can be more certain than that this unfortunate artist, who died by his own hand just before the second number of the work was issued, did actually suggest the idea which the genius of Dickens developed into the "Pickwick Papers." While Dickens was still in the reporters' gallery of the House of Commons, Seymour had attained a shop-window celebrity by a kind of picture of which the English people seem never to be able to get enough—caricatures of Londoners attempting country sports. It appears to be accepted as an axiom in England that a man capable of conducting business successfully becomes an absurd and ludicrous object the moment he gets upon a horse or fires at a bird. It seems to be taken for granted that horsemanship and hunting belong to the feudal system, and are strictly entailed in county families. But as a man is supposed to rank in fashionable circles according to his mastery of those arts, great numbers of young men, it seems, live but to attempt feats impossible except to inherited skill. Here is the field for such artists as Robert Seymour, "For whose use," as Mr. Dickens wrote, "I put in Mr. Winkle expressly," and who drew "that happy portrait of the founder of the Pickwick Club by which he is always recognized, and which may be said to have made him a reality." Perhaps as many as a third of the comic pictures published at that period were in the Winkle vein.

Upon looking over the sketches of Robert Seymour, which used to appear from time to time in the windows—price threepence—while Boz was getting his "Sketches" through the press, we perceive that Dickens really derived fruitful hints from this artist, besides the original suggestion of the work. Mr. Winkle is recognizable in several of them; Mr. Pickwick's figure occurs occasionally; the Fat Boy is distinctly suggested; the famous picnic scene is anticipated; and there is much in the spirit of the pictures to remind us that among the admiring crowd which they attracted, the author of "Pickwick" might often have been found. Seymour, however, gave him only hints. In every instance he has made the suggested character or incident absolutely his own. Seymour only supplied a piece of copper, which the alchemy of genius turned into gold. In Dickens's broadest and most boisterous humor there are ever a certain elegance and refinement of tone that are wanting in Seymour, Seymour's cockney hunters being persons of the Tittlebat Titmouse grade, who long ago ceased to amuse and began to offend.

Seymour's discovery, in the first numbers of "Pickwick," that it was the author, not the artist, who was to dominate a work which was his own conception and long-cherished dream, was probably among the causes of his fatal despair. When he first mentioned to Chapman & Hall his scheme of a Cockney Club ranging over England, he was a popular comic artist of several years' standing, and Charles Dickens was a name unknown. Nor was it supposed to be of so very much consequence who should write the descriptive matter. The firm closed the bargain with Mr. Seymour without having bestowed a thought upon the writer; and when they had suggested the unknown "Boz," and procured a copy of his "Sketches" by way of recommendation, Mrs. Seymour's remark was that, though she could not see any humor in his writings herself, yet he might do as well as another, and fifteen pounds a month to a poor and struggling author would be a little fortune. To a sensitive and ambitious man, made morbid by various hard usage such as the men who delight the world often undergo, it must have been a cutting disappointment to be asked, in the infancy of an enterprise which he deemed peculiarly his own, to put aside an illustration that he had prepared, and make another to suit the fancies of a subordinate. It was like requiring a star actor to omit his favorite and most special "business" in order to afford a member of the company an opportunity to shine.

The biographer of Mr. Dickens is naturally reluctant to admit the social insignificance in London, forty years ago, of a "struggling author," and he is grossly abusive of Mr. N. P. Willis for describing his hero as he appeared at this stage of his career. Mr. Willis visited him at a dismal building in Holborn, in company with one of Mr. Dickens's publishers, and he gave a brief account of what he saw, which doubtless was the exact truth. Willis was a faithful chronicler of the minutiæ of a scene. He was a stickler for having the small facts correct. "We pulled up," he wrote, "at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs, and a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens, for the contents. I was only struck at first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers)—the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit." He describes Dickens as dressed rather in the Swiveller style, though without Richard's swell look: hair close cropped, clothes jaunty and scant, "the very personification of a close sailer to the wind." There is nothing in this discreditable to the "poor author," and nothing which a person who knew London then would deem improbable. Is it not a principle imbedded in the constitution of Britons that the person who receives money in small amounts for work and labor done is the party obliged, and must stand hat in hand before him who pays it?

Whoever shall truly relate the history of the people of Great Britain in the nineteenth century will not pass by in silence the publication of "Pickwick." Cruikshank, Seymour, and Irving, as well as the humorists of other times, had nourished and molded the genius of Dickens; but, like all the masters in art, he so far transcended his immediate teachers that, even in what he most obviously derived from them, he was original. And it is he, not they, who is justly hailed as the founder of that benign school of comic art which gives us humor without coarseness, and satire without ill nature. It is "Pickwick" that marks the era, and the sole interest which Seymour's sketches now possess is in showing us from what Charles Dickens departed when he founded the Pickwick Club.

CHAPTER XXIV.
COMIC ART IN "PUNCH."

One happy consequence of the new taste was the publication of Punch, which has been ever since the chief vehicle of caricature in England. As long as caricature was a thing of the shop-windows only, its power was restricted within narrow limits. Since the founding of Punch, in 1841, about two years after the conclusion of the "Pickwick Papers," caricature has become an element in periodical literature, from which it will perhaps never again be separated. And it is the pictures in this celebrated paper which have prolonged its life to this day. It owes its success chiefly to artists. There was and is an error in the scheme of the work which would have been speedily fatal to it but for the ever-welcome pictures of Richard Doyle, John Leech, John Tenniel, Du Maurier, and their companions.

One of the rarest products of the human mind is a joke so good that it remains good when the occasion that gave rise to it is past. Probably the entire weekly harvest of wit and humor gathered from the whole earth would not fill a number of Punch with "good things;" and if it did, no one could enjoy so many all at once, and the surfeit would sicken and disgust. The mere sitting-down for the purpose of being funny in a certain number of lines or pages is death to the comic powers; and hence it is that a periodical to which nearly the whole humorous talent of England has contributed is sometimes dull in its reading, and we wonder if there can be in any quarter of the globe a person so bereft of the means of entertainment as to get quite through one number. Once or twice a year, however, Punch originates a joke which goes round the world, and remains part of the common stock of that countless host who are indebted to their memory for their jests.

But the pictures are almost always amusing, and often delightful. The artists have the whole scene of human life, public and private, to draw from, and they are able by their pencils to vividly reproduce the occasions that gave birth to their jokes.

Lord Brougham was supposed to be courting the conservatives when Leech began to caricature. The superserviceable zeal of the ex-chancellor was hit very happily in a circus scene, in which the Duke of Wellington figures as the ring-master, Brougham as the clown, and Sir Robert Peel as the rider. The clown says to the ring-master, "Now, Mr. Wellington, is there any thing I can run for to fetch—for to come—for to go—for to carry—for to bring—for to take?" etc. In another picture the same uneasy spirit, restive under his titled and pensioned nothingness, appears as "Henry asking for more." Again we have him dancing with the Wool-sack, which is explained by the words, "The Polka, a new Dance, introducing the old Double Shuffle." And again we see him in a tap-room, smoking a pipe, with a pot of beer on the table, looking on with complacency while Mr. Roebuck bullies an Irish member. Brougham says, "Go it, my little Roebuck! Bless his little heart! I taught him to bounce like that."

In these sixty-nine volumes of Punch there is much of the history of our time which words alone could not have preserved. We can trace in them the progress of ideas, of measures, and of men. The changes in public feeling are exhibited which enabled Cobden and Peel to strike from British industry the gilt fetters of protection, for Punch is only another name for Public Opinion. These pictures have a particular interest for us, since we are to travel the same road in due time, and thus, at length, give Great Britain a rival in the markets of the world. Nothing could be better than Mr. Leech's picture showing Sir Robert Peel as the "Deaf Postilion." In a debate on the Corn Laws he had said, "I shall still pursue steadily that course which my conscience tells me I should take; let you and those opposite pursue what course you think right." The picture shows us a post-chaise, the body of which has become detached from the fore-wheels—a mishap which the deaf postilion does not discover, but goes trotting along as though his horses were still drawing the load. The chaise, named Protection, is occupied by Tory lords, who shout in vain to the deaf postilion. Again, we have Disraeli as a viper biting the file, Sir Robert. Leech continued his effective support of the movement until the victory was won, when he designed a monument to the victor, consisting of a pyramid of large cheap loaves of bread crowned by the name of Peel.

The Puseyite imbecility was as effectively satirized by Leech in 1849 as the ritualistic imitation has recently been by Tenniel. American slavery came in for just rebuke. As a retort to "some bunkum" in the American press in 1848, Mr. Leech drew a picture of Liberty lashing a negro, while Jonathan, with rifle on his arm, cigar in his mouth, and bottle at his side, says, "Oh, ain't we a deal better than other folks! I guess we're a most a splendid example to them thunderin' old monarchies." The language is wrong, of course; no American ever said "a deal better." English attempts at American slang are always incorrect. But the satire was deserved. Leech was far from sparing his own country. Some readers must remember the pair of pictures by Leech, in 1849, entitled "Pin-money" and "Needle-money," one exhibiting a young lady's boudoir filled with luxurious and costly objects, and the other a poor needle-woman in her garret of desolation, sewing by the light of a solitary candle upon a shirt for which she is to receive three half-pence. In a similar spirit was conceived a picture presenting two objects often seen in agricultural fairs in England—a "Prize Peasant" and a "Prize Pig:" the first rewarded for sixty years of virtuous toil by a prize of two guineas, the owner of the fat pig being recompensed by an award of three guineas.

Toward Louis Napoleon Punch gradually relented. At first Mr. Leech gave just and strong expression to the world's contempt for that unparalleled charlatan; but as he became powerful, and seemed to be useful to Great Britain, Punch treated him with an approach to respect. A similar change toward Mr. Disraeli is observable. Seldom during the first fifteen years of his public life was he presented in a favorable light. Upon his retirement from office in 1853, Leech satirized his malevolent attacks upon the new ministry very happily by a picture in which he appears as a crossing-sweeper spattering mud upon Lord Russell and his colleagues. "Won't give me any thing, won't you?" says the sweeper: "then take that!" Nor did the admirable Leech fail to mark the public sense of Disraeli's silence during the long debates upon the bill giving to English Jews some of the rights of citizenship. In his whole public career there is nothing harder to forgive than that ignoble and unnecessary abstinence. During the last few years Mr. Disraeli has won by sheer persistence a certain solidity of position in English politics, and Punch pays him the respect due to a person who represents a powerful and patriotic party.

One quality of the Punch caricatures is worthy of particular regard: they are rarely severe, and never scurrilous. The men for whom Mr. Leech entertained an antipathy, such as O'Connell, O'Brien, Brougham, and others, were usually treated in a manner that could not have painfully wounded their self-love. We observe even in the more incisive works of Gillray a certain boisterous good-humor that often made their satire amusing to the men satirized. Mr. Rush, American minister in London in 1818, describes a dinner party at Mr. Canning's, at which the minister exhibited to his guests albums and scrap-books of caricature in which he was himself very freely handled. Fox and Burke, we are told, visited the shop where Gillray's caricatures were sold, and while buying the last hit at themselves would bandy jests with Mrs. Humphrey, the publisher. Burke winced a little under the lash, but the robuster and larger Fox was rarely disturbed, and behaved in the shop with such winning courtesy that Mrs. Humphrey pronounced him the peerless model of a gentleman. Punch, likewise, does not appear to irritate the men whom he caricatures. Lord Brougham used to laugh at the exceedingly ugly countenance given him by Leech, and to say that the artist, unable to hit his likeness, was obliged to designate him by his checked trousers. Lord Russell, as we see, does not object to Leech's delineations; and Palmerston, long a favorite with the Punch artists, may well have been content with their handsome treatment of him.

During the last fifteen years Mr. Tenniel has oftenest supplied the political cartoon of Punch. His range is not so wide as that of Leech, but within his range he is powerful indeed. He has produced some pictures which for breadth, strength, aptness, good feeling, and finish have rarely been equaled in their kind. He gives us sometimes such an impression of his power as we fancy Michael Angelo might have done if he had amused himself by drawings reflecting upon the politics of his time. If, as the Quarterly Review lately remarked, Tenniel's pictures are often something less than caricature, being wanting in the exuberant humor of his predecessors, we can also say that they are frequently much more than caricature. Mr. Tenniel was an artist of repute, and had furnished a cartoon for the Westminster Parliament-house before he became identified with Punch.

But from that time to the end of the war all was misapprehension and perversity. In July, 1861, "Naughty Jonathan," an ill-favored little boy carrying a toy flag, addresses the majesty of Britain thus: "You sha'n't interfere, mother—and you ought to be on my side—and it's a great shame—and I don't care—and you shall interfere—and I won't have it." During the Mason and Slidell imbroglio the Tenniel cartoons were not "soothing" to the American mind. "Do what's right, my son," says the burly sailor, Jack Bull, to little Admiral Jonathan, "or I'll blow you out of the water." Again, we have a family dinner scene. John Bull at the head of the table, and Lord Russell the boy in waiting. Enter "Captain Jonathan, F.N.," who says, "Jist looked in to see if thar's any rebels he-arr." Upon which Mr. Bull remarks, "Oh, indeed! John, look after the plate-basket, and then fetch a policeman." This was in allusion to a supposed claim on the part of Mr. Seward of a right to search ships for rebel passengers. Then we have Mr. Lincoln as a "coon" in a tree, and Colonel Bull aiming his blunderbuss at him. "Air you in earnest, colonel?" asks the coon. "I am," replies the mighty Bull. "Don't fire," says the coon; "I'll come down." And accordingly Mason and Slidell were speedily released. In a similar spirit most of the events of the war were treated; and when the war had ended, there was still shown in Punch, as in the English press generally, the same curious, inexplicable, and total ignorance of the feelings of the American people. What an inconceivable perversity it was to attribute Mr. Sumner's statement of the damage done to the United States by the alliance which existed for four years between the owners of England and the masters of the South to a Yankee grab for excessive damages! In all the long catalogue of national misunderstandings there is none more remarkable than this. Mr. Tenniel from the first derided the idea that any particular damage had been done by the Alabama and her consorts: certainly there was no damage, he thought, upon which a "claim" could be founded. "Claim for damages against me?" cries big Britannia, in one of his pictures of October, 1865. "Nonsense, Columbia; don't be mean over money matters."

All this has now become merely interesting as a curiosity of misinterpretation. The American people know something of England through her art, her literature, and press; but England has extremely imperfect means of knowing us. No American periodical, probably, circulates in Great Britain two hundred copies. We have no Dickens, no Thackeray, no George Eliot, no Punch, to make our best and our worst familiar in the homes of Christendom; and what little indigenous literature we have is more likely to mislead foreigners than enlighten them. Cooper's men, women, and Indians, if they ever existed, exist no more. Mr. Lowell's Yankee is extinct. Uncle Tom is now a freeman, raising his own bale of cotton. Mark Twain and Bret Harte would hardly recognize their own California. It is the literature, the art, and the science of a country which make it known to other lands; and we shall have neither of these in adequate development until much more of the work is done of smoothing off this rough continent, and educating the people that come to us, at the rate of a cityful a month, from the continent over the sea. At present it is nearly as much as we can do to find spelling-books for so many.

To most Americans the smaller pictures of Leech and others in Punch, which gently satirize the foibles and fashions of the time, are more interesting than the political cartoons. How different the life of the English people, as exhibited in these thousands of amusing scenes, from the life of America! We see, upon turning over a single volume, how much more the English play and laugh than we do. It is not merely that there is a large class in England who have nothing to do except to amuse themselves, but the whole people seem interested in sport, and very frequently to abandon themselves to innocent pleasures. Here is a young lady in the hunting field in full gallop, who cries gayly to her companion, "Come along, Mr. Green; I want a lead at the brook;" which makes "Mr. Green think that women have no business in hunting." England generally thinks otherwise, and Mr. Punch loves to exhibit his countrywomen "in mid-air" leaping a ditch, or bounding across a field with huntsmen and hounds about them. He does not object to a hunting parson. A churchwarden meets an "old sporting rector" on the road, and says, "Tell ye what 'tis, sir, the congregation do wish you wouldn't put that 'ere curate up in pulpit; nobody can't hear un." To which the old sporting parson on his pony replies, "Well, Blunt, the fact is, Tweedler's such a good fellow for parish work, I'm obliged to give him a mount sometimes." And in the distance we see poor Tweedler trudging briskly along, umbrella in hand, upon some parish errand. Another sporting picture shows us three gentlemen at dinner, one of whom is a clergyman whose mind is so peculiarly constituted that his thoughts run a little upon the duties of his office. Perhaps he is Tweedler himself. One of the laymen, a fox-hunter, says to the other, "That was a fine forty minutes yesterday." The other replies, "Yes; didn't seem so long either." Punch remarks that "the curate is puzzled, and wonders, do they refer to his lecture in the school-room?"