Hogarth was as much a humorist in his life as he was in his works. The invitation to Mr. King to eta beta py, given on the next page, was one of many similar sportive efforts of his pencil. He once boasted that he could draw a sergeant carrying his pike, entering an ale-house, followed by his dog, all in three strokes. He produced the following, also given on next page:

He explained the drawing thus: A is the perspective line of the door; B, the end of the sergeant's pike, who has gone in; C, the end of the dog's tail.

The "Five Days' Peregrination" of Hogarth and his friends, of which Thackeray discoursed to us so agreeably in one of his lectures, occurred when the artist was thirty-four years of age. But it shows us the same jovial Londoner, whose manners and pleasures, as Mr. Thackeray remarked, though honest and innocent, were "not very refined." Five friends set out on foot early in the morning from their tavern haunt in Covent Garden, gayly singing the old song, "Why should we quarrel for riches?" Billingsgate was their first halting-place, where, as the appointed historian of the jaunt records, "Hogarth made the caricature of a porter, who called himself the Duke of Puddle Dock," which "drawing was by his grace pasted on the cellar door." At Rochester, "Hogarth and Scott stopped and played at hop-scotch in the colonnade under the Town-hall." The Nag's Head at the village of Stock sheltered them one night, when, after supper, "we adjourned to the door, drank punch, stood and sat for our pictures drawn by Hogarth." In another village the merry blades "got a wooden chair, and placed Hogarth in it in the street, where he made the drawing, and gathered a great many men, women, and children about him to see his performance." The same evening, over their flip, they were entertaining the tap-room with their best songs, when some Harwich lobster-men came in and sung several sea-songs so agreeably that the Londoners were "quite put out of countenance." "Our St. John," records the scribe of the adventure, "would not come in competition, nor could Pishoken save us from disgrace." Here, too, is a Hogarthian incident: "Hogarth called me up and told me the good-woman insisted on being paid for her bed, or having Scott before the mayor, which last we did all in our power to promote." And so they merrily tramped the country round, singing, drawing, copying comic epitaphs, and pelting one another with dirt, returning to London at the end of the five days, having expended just six guineas—five shillings a day each man.

In his long warfare with the picture-dealers, who starved living art in England by the manufacture of "old masters," he employed ridicule and caricature with powerful effect. His masterly caricature of "Time smoking a Picture" was well seconded by humorous letters to the press, and by many a passing hit in his more elaborate writings. He maintained that a painting is never so good as at the moment it leaves the artist's hands, time having no possible effect upon it except to impair its beauty and diminish its truth. There was penned at this period a burlesque "Bill of Monsieur Varnish to Benjamin Bister," which is certainly Hogarthian, if it is not Hogarth's, and might well serve as a companion piece to the engraving. Among the items are these:

The idea of a wet sheet imparting the effect of dryness was taken from a treatise on painting, which stated that "some of the ancient masters acquired a dry manner of painting from studying after wet drapery."

This robust and downright Briton, strong in the consciousness of original and native genius, did not object merely to the manufacture of old masters, but also to the excessive value placed upon the genuine productions of the great men of old. He could not feel it to be just or favorable to the progress of art that works representing a state of feeling long ago outgrown in England should take precedence of paintings instinct with the life of the present hour. In other words, he did not enjoy seeing one of his own paintings sell at auction for fourteen guineas, and an Old Master bring a thousand. He grew warm when he denounced "the picture-jobbers from abroad," who imported continually "ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal, dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental, on which they scrawl the terrible cramp names of some Italian masters, and fix upon us Englishmen the name of universal dupes." He imagines a scene between one of those old-master mongers and his customer. The victim says:

"'Mr. Bubbleman, that grand Venus, as you are pleased to call it, has not beauty enough for the character of an English cook-maid.' Upon which the quack answers, with a confident air: 'Sir, I find that you are no connoisseur; the picture, I assure you, is in Alesso Baldminetto's second and best manner, boldly painted, and truly sublime: the contour gracious; the air of the head in high Greek taste; and a most divine idea it is.' Then spitting in an obscure place, and rubbing it with a dirty handkerchief, takes a skip to t'other end of the room, and screams out in raptures, 'There's an amazing touch! A man should have this picture a twelvemonth in his collection before he can discover half its beauties!' The gentleman (though naturally a judge of what is beautiful, yet ashamed to be out of the fashion by judging for himself) with this cant is struck dumb, gives a vast sum for the picture, very modestly confesses he is indeed quite ignorant of painting, and bestows a frame worth fifty pounds on a frightful thing, which, without the hard name, is not worth so many farthings."

He gives picture-buyers a piece of advice which many of them have since taken, to the sore distress of their guests: Use your own eyes, and buy the pictures which they dwell upon with delight.

In the heat of controversy, Hogarth, as usual, went too far; but he stood manfully by his order, and defended resolutely their rights and his own. Artists owe him undying gratitude for two great services: he showed them a way to independence by setting up in business on his own account, becoming his own engraver and publisher, and retaining always the ownership of his own plates, which, indeed, constituted his estate, and supported creditably his family as long as any of them lived. He served all artists, too, by defending himself against the pirates who flooded the market with meanly executed copies of his own engravings. It was William Hogarth who obtained from Parliament the first act which secured to artists the sole right to multiply and sell copies of their works; and this right is the very corner-stone of a great national painter's independence. That act made genuine art a possible profession in England.

Such was Hogarth, the original artist of his country, an honest, valiant citizen, who stood his ground, paid his way, cheered and admonished his generation. He had the faults which belong to a positive character, trod on many toes, was often misunderstood, and had his ample share of trouble and contention. All that is now forgotten; and he was never so much valued, so frequently reproduced, so generally possessed, or so carefully studied as at the present time.

The generation that forms great satirists shines in the history of literature, but not in that of morals; for to supply with objects of satire such masters of the satiric arts as Hogarth, Swift, Pope, Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Foote, there must be deep corruption in the State and radical folly in conspicuous persons. The process which has since been named "secularization" had then fairly set in. The brilliant men of the time had learned to deride the faith which had been a restraining force upon the propensities of man for fifteen centuries, but were very far from having learned to be continent, temperate, and just without its aid. "Four treatises against the miracles" Voltaire boasted of having seen during his residence in England in 1727 and 1728; but these treatises did not moderate the warmth of human passions, nor change any other element in the difficult problem of existence. Walpole bribed, Swift maligned, Bolingbroke intrigued, Charteris seduced, and Marlborough peculated just as if the New Light had not dawned and the miracles had remained intact. Do we not, even in our own time, see inquiring youth, bred in strait-laced homes, assuming that since there are now two opinions as to the origin of things, it is no longer necessary to comply with the moral laws? The splendid personages of that period seem to have been in a moral condition similar to that of such a youth. It was the fashion to be dissolute; it was "provincial" to obey those laws of our being from compliance with which all human welfare and all honest joy have come.

There was also a burlesque "Bill of Costs for a late Tory Election in the West," in which we find such items as "bespeaking and collecting a mob," "a set of No-Roundhead roarers," "a set of coffee-house praters," "Dissenter damners," "demolishing two houses," "committing two riots," "breaking windows," "roarers of the word Church," "several gallons of Tory punch on church tombstones." It is questionable, however, if in all the burlesques of the period there was one more ridiculous than the narrative of an actual occurrence in April, 1715, when the footmen of members of the House of Commons met outside of the House, according to established custom, to elect a Speaker. The Tory footmen cast their votes for "Sir Thomas Morgan's servant," and the Whigs for "Mr. Strickland's man." A dispute arising, a fight ensued between the two parties, in the midst of which the House broke up, and the footmen were obliged to attend their masters. The next day, as soon as the House was in session, the fight was renewed, and, after a desperate struggle, the victorious Whigs carried their man three times in triumph round Westminster Hall, and then adjourned to a Whig ale-house, the landlord of which gave them a dinner, the footmen paying only for their drink.

The caricatures of the Walpole period preserve the record of the first attempt to lessen by law the intemperate drinking of gin—the most pernicious of the spirituous liquors. A law was passed imposing upon this article a very heavy excise, and prohibiting its sale in small quantities. But in 1736 England had not reached, by a century and a half, the development of civilization which admits of the adequate consideration of such a measure; nor can the poor man's gin ever be limited by law while the rich man's wine flows free. This gin law appears to have been killed by ridicule. Ballads lamenting the near decease of "Mother Gin" were sung in the streets; the gin-shop signs were hung with black, and there were mock ceremonies of "Madame Geneva's Lying in State," "Mother Gin's Wake," and "Madame Gin's Funeral." Paragraphs notified the public that the funeral of Madame Gin was celebrated with great merriment, many of both sexes "getting soundly drunk," and a mob following her remains with torches. The night before the measure went into operation was one of universal revel among the gin-drinkers, and every one, we are assured, carried off as much of the popular liquor, for future consumption, as he could pay for. The law was evaded by the expedients long afterward employed in Maine, when first a serious attempt was made to enforce the "Maine Law." Apothecaries and others colored their gin, put it into phials, and labeled it "Colic Water," "Make-shift," "The Ladies' Delight," with printed "Directions" to take two or three spoonfuls three or four times a day, "or as often as the fit takes you." Informers sprung into an importance never before known, and many of them invented snares to decoy men into violations of the law. So odious did they become that if one of them fell into the hands of the mob, he was lucky to escape with only a ducking in the Thames or a horse-trough. In short, the attempt was ill-considered and premature, and after an experiment of two or three years it was given up, having contributed something toward the growing unpopularity of the ministry.

The downfall of Sir Robert Walpole, after holding office for twenty years, was preceded by an animated fire of caricature, in which the adherents of Walpole held their own. The specimen given above, entitled "The Motion," was reduced from one of the most famous caricatures of the reign of George II., and one of the most finely wrought of the century.[21] Horace Walpole, son of the great minister, wrote from Florence that the picture had "diverted him extremely," and that the likenesses were "admirable." To us the picture says nothing until it is explained; but every London apprentice of the period recognized Whitehall and the Treasury, toward which the Opposition was driving with such furious haste, and could distinguish most of the personages exhibited. A few days before this caricature appeared, Sandys, who was styled the motion-maker, from the frequency of his attempts to array the House of Commons against the Walpole ministry, moved once more an address to the king, that he would be pleased to remove Sir Robert Walpole from his presence and councils forever. The debate upon this motion was long and most vehement, and though the ministry triumphed, it was one of those bloody victories which presage overthrow. On the same day a similar "motion" was made in the House of Lords by Lord Carteret, where an equally violent discussion was followed by a vote sustaining the ministry. The exultation of the Walpole party inspired this famous caricature, in which we see the Opposition peers trying to reach office in a lordly coach and six, and the Commons trudging toward the same goal on foot, their leader, Pulteney, wheeling a load of Opposition newspapers, and leading his followers by the nose. Every politician of note on the side of the Opposition is in the picture: Lord Chesterfield is the postilion; the Duke of Argyll the coachman; Lord Carteret the gentleman inside the coach, who, becoming conscious of the breakdown, cries, "Let me get out!" Bubb Dodington is the spaniel between the coachman's legs; the footman behind the coach is Lord Cobham, and the outrider Lord Lyttelton. On the side of the Commons there is Sandys, dropping in despair his favorite, often-defeated "Place Bill," and exclaiming, "I thought what would come of putting him on the box?" Much of the humor and point of the picture is lost to us, because the peculiar relations of the persons portrayed to the public, to their party, and to one another can not now be perfectly recalled.

Edition after edition of "The Motion" appeared, one of which was so arranged that it could be fitted to the frame of a lady's fan, a common device at the time. The Opposition retorted with a parody of the picture, which they styled "The Reason," in which Walpole figures as the coachman, driving the coach of state to destruction. Another parody was called "The Motive," in which the king was the passenger and Walpole the driver. Then followed "A Consequence of the Motion," "Motion upon Motion," "The Grounds," and others. The Walpole party surpassed their opponents in caricature; but caricature is powerless to turn back a genuine tide of public feeling, and a year later Sir Robert was honorably shelved in the House of Lords.

From this time forward the history of Europe is recorded or burlesqued in the comic pictures of the shop-window; not merely the conspicuous part played in it by ministers and kings, but the foibles, the fashions, the passions, the vices, the credulities, the whims, of each generation. The British rage for the Italian opera, the enormous sums paid to the singers, the bearish manners of Handel, the mania for gaming, the audacity of highwaymen, and the impositions upon popular credulity no more escape the satirist's pencil than Braddock's defeat, the Queen of Hungary's loss of Silesia, or William Pitt's timely, and also his ill-timed, fits of the gout. Nor were the abuses of the Church overlooked. One picture, entitled "The Fat Pluralist and his Lean Curates," published in 1733, exhibited a corpulent dignitary of the Church in a chariot drawn by six meagre and wretched curates. The portly priest carries under one arm a large church, and a cathedral under the other, while at his feet are two sucking pigs, a hen, and a goose, which he has taken as tithe from a farmyard in the distance. "The Church," says the pluralist, "was made for me, not I for the Church;" and under the wheels of the coach is a book marked "The Thirty-nine Articles." One starving curate cries, piteously, "Lord, be merciful to us poor curates!" to which another responds, "And send us more comfortable livings!" It required a century of satire and remonstrance to get that one monstrous abuse of the Church Ring reduced to proportions approaching decency. Corruption in the city of New York in the darkest days of Tweed was less universal, less systematic, less remote from remedy, than that of the Government of Great Britain under the least incapable of its four Georges. It was merely more decorous.

CHAPTER XIII.
ENGLISH CARICATURE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

It is part of the office of caricature to assist in destroying illusions that have served their turn and become obstructive. As in Luther's time it gave important aid to the reformers in breaking the spell of the papacy, so now, when kingship broke down in Europe, the satiric pencil had much to do with tearing away the veil of fiction which had so long concealed the impotence of kings for nearly every thing but mischief.

The fatal objection to the hereditary principle in the government of nations is the importance which, to use Mr. Jefferson's words, it "heaps upon idiots." Idiot is a harsh word to apply to a person so well disposed as George III., King of England, to whom the violence of the Revolutionary period was chiefly due; but when we think of the evil and suffering from which Europe could have been saved if he had known a little more or been a little less, we can not be surprised that contemporaries should have summed him up with disrespectful brevity. But for him, so far as short-sighted mortals can discern, the period of bloody revolution could have been a period of peaceful reform. After exasperating his subjects nearly to the point of rebellion, he precipitated the independence of the American colonies, which, in turn, brought on the French Revolution, and that issued in Napoleon Bonaparte, whose sins France only finished expiating at Sedan.

It is true, there must have been in Great Britain myriads upon myriads of such heads as that of King George to make his policy possible. But suppose that, instead of placing himself at the head of the dull minds in his empire, he had given the prestige of the crown to the bright and independent souls! Suppose he had taken as kindly to Chatham, Burke, Fox, Franklin, Price, Priestley, and Barré as he did to Bute, Dr. Johnson, Addington, and Eldon!

And see how this heir to the first throne in Christendom was educated. That period has been so laid bare by diaries and correspondence that we can visit the orphan boy in his home at Carlton House, and listen to his mother, the widowed Princess of Wales, as she describes his traits and laments the defects of his training. Go back to the year 1752, and imagine a drawing-room in a royal residence. The dinner hour then had only got as far toward "to-morrow" as three in the afternoon, and therefore by early candle-light of an October evening the drawing-room may be supposed to be inhabited. The Princess of Wales, born a princess of a petty German sovereignty, still a young mother, is dressed in mourning, her husband being but a few months dead. Of the duties belonging to royalty she had no ideas except those which had prevailed from time immemorial at the court of absolute German sovereigns. Her chief care was to preserve the morals of her children, and to have her eldest son a king in reality as well as in name. "Be king" (Sois roi) were favorite words with her, often repeated in the hearing of the heir to the throne. She thought it infamy in a king to allow himself to be ruled by ministers. There is no reason to doubt that she was an honorable lady and affectionate mother. Horace Walpole's insinuation that she instilled virtuous principles into the mind of her son because she "feared a mistress," and that her intimacy with Lord Bute was a criminal intrigue, dishonors Horace Walpole and human nature, but not the mother of George III.

She has company this evening—Bubb Dodington, a gentleman of great wealth and agreeable manners, who controlled six votes in the House of Commons, and passed his life in scheming to buy a peerage with them, in which, a year before his death, he succeeded, but left no heir to inherit it. He was much in the confidence of the princess, and she had sent for him to "spend the day" with her. Dinner is over, the two ladies-in-waiting are present, and now the "children" enter to play a few games of cards with their mother before going to bed. The children are seven in number, of whom the eldest was George, Prince of Wales—a boy of fourteen, of fresh complexion, sturdy and stout in form, and a countenance open and agreeable, and wearing an expression of honesty. Human nature rarely assumes a more pleasing form than that of a healthy, innocent English boy of fourteen. He was such a boy as you may still see in the play-grounds of Eton, only he was heavier, slower, and ruddier than the average, and much more shy in company. He loved his horse, and was exceedingly fond of rural sports; but when lesson-time came—but let his mother speak on that point.

The old game of "comet" was the one which the lad usually preferred. The company play at comet for small stakes, until the clock strikes nine, when "the royal children" go to bed. Then the mother leaves her ladies, and withdraws with her guest to the other end of the room, where she indulges in a long, gossipy, confidential chat upon the subject nearest her heart—her son, the presumptive heir to the throne. To show the reader how she used to talk to confidants on such occasions, I will glean a few sentences from her conversations:

"I like that the prince should amuse himself now and then at small play; but princes should never play deep, both for the example, and because it does not become them to win great sums. George's real disposition, do you ask? You know him almost as well as I do. He is very honest, but I wish he was a little more forward and less childish at his age. I hope his preceptors will improve him. I really do not know what they are teaching him, but, to speak freely, I am afraid not much. They are in the country, and follow their diversions, and not much else that I can discover."

Dodington remarked upon this that, for his part, he did not much regard books; what he most wished was that the prince should begin to acquire knowledge of the world, and be informed of the general frame and nature of the British Government and Constitution, and, without going into minutiæ, get some insight into the manner of doing public business.

"I am of your opinion," said the princess; "and his tutor, Stone, tells me that when he talks with him on those subjects, he seems to give proper attention, and makes pertinent remarks. I stick to the learning as the chief point. You know how backward the children were, and I am sure you do not think them much improved since. It may be that it is not too late to acquire a competence. I am highly sensible how necessary it is that the prince should keep company with men. I know that women can not inform him; but if his education was in my power absolutely, to whom could I address him? What company can I wish him to keep? What friendships can I desire him to contract? Such is the universal profligacy, such is the character and conduct of the young people of distinction, that I am really afraid to have them near my children. I shall even be in more pain for my daughters than I am for my sons, for the behavior of the women is indecent, low, and much against their own interest by making themselves so very cheap."

Three years passed. The prince was seventeen. Still the anxious mother deplored the neglect of his education.

"His book-learning," said she to the same friend, "I am no judge of, though I suppose it is small or useless; but I did hope he might have been instructed in the general understanding of things. I once desired Mr. Stone to inform the prince about the Constitution; but he declined it to avoid giving jealousy to the Bishop of Norwich (official educator). I mentioned it again, but he still declined it as not being his province."

"Pray, madam," asked Dodington, "what is his province?"

"I don't know, unless it is to go before the prince up-stairs, to walk with him sometimes, seldomer to ride with him, and now and then to dine with him. But when they do walk together, the prince generally takes that time to think of his own affairs and say nothing."

The youth was, indeed, extremely indolent and stupid. At school he would have been simply called a dunce, for at eleven he could not read English with any fluency, and he could never have been induced to apply his mind to study except by violence. He never had the slightest notion of what Chatham, Burke, or Fox meant when they spoke of the Constitution. If Mr. Stone had not been in dread of invading the Bishop of Norwich's province, and if the bishop had not been a verbose and wearisome formalist, their united powers could not have shown this young man the unique and prodigious happiness of a constitutional king in governing through responsible ministers. His "governor" during the last few years of his minority was Lord Waldegrave, whose too brief memoirs confirm the excellent report which contemporaries give of his mind and character. Lord Waldegrave could make nothing of him. Speaking of the prince at nineteen, he says he was "uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs." He found the heavy youth an insufferable bore, and he was soon, as his relation, Horace Walpole, relates, "thoroughly fatigued with the insipidity of his pupil." The prince derived from his education only two ideas, one very good and the other very bad. The first was that he must be a Good Boy and not keep a mistress; the second was that he must be a king indeed.

An indolent and ignorant monarch who will not govern by ministers must govern by favorites. He has no other alternative but abdication. A favorite was at hand in the person of a poor Scotch lord who had married one of the richest heiresses in Europe, the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her miserly husband. He had also, if we may believe Lord Waldegrave, "a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the greatest importance." He was likewise fond of medals, engravings, and flowers; he pensioned Dr. Johnson and the dramatist Home; he really enjoyed some products of art, and was far from being either the execrable or the ridiculous personage which he was esteemed by men whom he kept from place. "Bute," said Prince Frederick, father of George III., "you would make an excellent embassador in a small, proud little court where there is nothing to do." He would have arranged the ceremonials, superintended the plays, been gracious to artists and musicians, smiled benignantly upon the court poet, bored the reigning prince, enchanted the reigning princess, amused her children, and ripened into a courtly and garrulous old Polonius, "full of wise saws and modern instances." Above all, he would have upheld the prerogative of the prince with stanch sincerity. Sois roi!

There is something in the Scotch character that causes it to relish royal prerogative. To this hour there are in Scotland families that cherish a kind of sentimental attachment to the memory of the Stuarts; and we find Scotchmen as eminent as Hume, Carlyle, Lockhart, Scott, Wilson—men of distinguished liberality in some provinces of thought—unable to widen out into liberal politics. Bute was a lord as well as a Scotchman, not as ignorant nor as vulgar as lords in that generation usually were, but still subject to the lowering influences that always beset a privileged order; predisposed, too, by temperament to the worship of the picturesque, and now the cherished sharer of the shy, proud, gloomy seclusion of the family upon which the hopes of an empire were fixed. He showed them medals and pictures, he discoursed of music and architecture—two of his most pronounced tastes—and he nourished every princely prejudice which a wise tutor would have striven to eradicate.

This unfortunate youth, dull offspring of the stimulated lust of ages, was an apt pupil in the Jacobin theory of kingly authority. He was caught one day reading the book written at the instance of the dethroned James II. to justify his arbitrary policy; and there were so many other signs of the heir to a constitutional throne being educated in unconstitutional principles that Horace Walpole drew up a formal remonstrance against it in the name of the Whig families. This document, which was privately circulated, produced no effect. Sois roi! That remained the ruling thought in the mind of this ignorant, proud, moral young man, about to fill a place which conferred more obstructive power than any other in the world. If he had only been dissolute in that most dissolute age, he could have been ruled through his vices; but being strictly moral and temperate, he was, alas! always himself; and he had at his back the great voiceless multitude, who know by instinct that morality is the first interest of civilized human nature, and who honor it supremely even in this crude, rudimentary form. "Your dad is safe on his throne," said some boon companion of George IV., "as long as he is faithful to that ugly old woman, your mother." And wise old Franklin said, "If George III. had had a bad private character and John Wilkes a good one, he might have turned the king out of his dominions." Such is the mighty power of the mere indispensable rudiments of virtue, its mere preliminary corporeal conditions. A chaste and temperate fool will carry the day nine times in ten over profligate genius.

Riding in the park on an October day in 1760, a messenger delivered to the prince a note from the valet de chambre of his grandfather, George II. The prince had coolly arranged with this valet, while yet the king seemed firm in health, that at the moment of the old man's death he should send him a note bearing a certain mark on the outside. The king, a vigorous old man of seventy-seven, fell dead in his closet at seven in the morning, and this note bore the preconcerted announcement of the fact. The moral and steady young man, quietly remarking to his groom that his horse was lame, turned about and gently rode back to Kew. Upon dismounting he said to the man, "I have said this horse is lame; I forbid you to say the contrary." At twenty-two years of age he was king. Except that he married, a few months after, a pliant, adoring German princess, his accession did not much change his mode of life. He still lived in strict seclusion, shut in against expanding influences, accessible at all times only to one man—him of the good legs and Jacobin mind, Bute, progenitor of the Pope's recent conquest, and Mr. Disraeli's hero, Lothair.

In the caricatures of the next fifty years we see the ghastly results. His first important act was to repel from his counsels humiliating superiority in the person of William Pitt, the darling of the nation, the first minister of the world, and one of the three great orators of all time. In his stead ruled a long monotony of servile incompetents, beginning with Bute himself, continuing with Grenville, and coming at last to Addington and Eldon, the king keeping far from his confidence every man in England who had a gleam of public sense, or a touch of independent spirit, or even a sound traditionary attachment to Whig principles. An immovable obstructive to the true interest of his country at every crisis, honoring the men whom the better sense of the nation did not honor, and repressing the men whom wise contemporaries loved, and whom posterity with unanimous voice pronounces the glory of England in that age, he kept the country in bad humor during most of his reign, put her wrong on every question of universal interest, lost the most valuable and affectionate colonies a country ever had, kept Europe in a broil for twenty-five years, and developed Napoleon Bonaparte into a destructive lunatic by creating for him a succession of opportunities for the display of his talent for beating armies which had no generals.

Charles James Fox was the bête noire of Gillray. He delighted in depicting him and his friends in as odious a light as possible, giving him huge beetle-brows, heavy jaws, and a swarthy complexion. The famous Westminster election, at which the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire won a vote for Fox by giving a kiss to a butcher, supplied him with a rich source of caricature. Fox is drawn riding on the back of the lady; and again, sitting in a tap-room with the duchess on his knee; and in another picture, hobnobbing with a coster-monger, while the duchess has her shoes mended by a cobbler, and pays the cobbler's wife with a purse of gold. Fox chops off the head of the king; he is a traitor, a republican, a Jacobin, a confederate with the French, a forestaller, a buyer-up of corn with which to feed the enemy, a sot, a gambler—every thing that is bad. His very death-bed forms the subject of a brutal caricature. The noblest traits of his political character are the points satirized. His great crimes apparently are that he loved freedom abroad as well as at home, that he strove for peace with France, and endeavored to do justice to Ireland. For this he is depicted as the secret ally of Bonaparte and as the instigator of Irish rebellion. The ghosts of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, the Sheares brothers, Emmett, and other Irish martyrs are made to pass before Fox's bed, and point to him as the cause of their rebellion and their fate. When Burke went over to the Tories he then became the favorite of Gillray, who before had generally represented him as a Jesuit, because he demanded justice for the Catholics. Now he is the savior of his country, and the terror of Fox, Sheridan, and Priestley. Sheridan is depicted as a blazing meteor with an extremely rubicund nose. There is a picture of the Titans attempting to scale heaven, in which George III. figures as a comical Jupiter launching his thunder-bolts at the Whig Opposition. Queen Charlotte is shown as a miracle of ugliness. The prodigality of the Prince of Wales, who first appears as a handsome young man with long powdered hair, totally unlike the high-shouldered, curly-wigged, royal Turveydrop of later days, is contrasted in companion pictures with the alleged parsimony of his parents. He is represented reveling with inordinately fat but handsome women, who get drunk, hang round his neck, and indulge in familiarities. The popular hope that marriage would reform him suggested a large drawing, in which the slumbering prince is visited by a descending angel in the likeness of the unhappy Caroline, at whose approach a crowd of reprobates, male and female, hurry away into darkness. Thomas Paine did not escape. In a picture entitled "The Rights of Man; or, Tommy Paine, the Little American Taylor, taking the Measure of the Crown for a New Pair of Revolution Breeches," he is represented as the traditional starveling tailor, ragged and slippered, and armed with an immense pair of shears. He crouches to take the measure of an enormous crown, while uttering much irrelevant nonsense. This precious work is "humbly dedicated to the Jacobin clubs of France and England."

Bound with such pictures as these are a vast number by inferior hands, most of which are indescribable, the standard subjects being gluttony, drunkenness, incontinence, and fashion, and these in their most outrageous manifestations. They serve to show that a stupid king in that age, besides corrupting Parliament and debauching the Press, could demoralize the popular branch of art. The visitor, turning from this collection of atrocities and ferocities, finds himself relenting toward the unfortunate old king, and inclined to say that he was, after all, only the head noodle of his kingdom. Every improvement was mercilessly burlesqued—steam, gas, the purchase of the Elgin marbles; popular prejudices were nearly always flattered, seldom rebuked; so that if the caricatures were of any use at all in the promulgation of truth, they served only as part of the ordeal that tested its vitality.

We do not find in this or in any other collection many satirical pictures relating to the revolution which ended in the independence of the American colonies. There was, however, one gentleman in London during the earlier phases of the dispute who employed caricature and burlesque on behalf of America with matchless skill. He is described in the London Directory for 1770 in these words, "Franklin, Benjamin, Esq., agent for Philadelphia, Craven Street, Strand." The effective caricature placed at the beginning of this chapter was one of the best of a long series of efforts to avert the impending conflict. He loved his country with the peculiar warmth that usually animates citizens who live in a distant outlying province. His country, when he designed that caricature and wrote the well-known burlesques in a similar taste, was not Pennsylvania, nor America, nor England, but the great British Empire, to which William Pitt, within Franklin's own life-time, seemed to have given an ascendency over the nations of the earth similar to that which Rome had once enjoyed. It was, however, only on the coast of North America that Britain possessed colonies loyal and free, not won by conquest nor by diplomacy, and therefore entitled to every right secured by the British Constitution. Franklin loved and gloried in this great country of which he was born a citizen. He deplored the measures that threatened the severance of those colonies from the mother country, and would have prevented the severance if the king's folly had been any thing short of incurable. The most wonderful thing in the whole controversy was that the argument, fact, and fun which Franklin wrote and inspired, from 1765 to 1774, had only momentary influence on the course of events. "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."