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IF you put the caricature of a man into his own hands, and, as it stares up at him, let him have time to follow his thoughts, they will probably lead him into the thick of a very abstruse calculation. If he is a sensible man, and has any of the natural curiosity which Burns's couplet expresses, his first consideration will be the consoling one, that in the midst of all that false absurdity there is yet the germ of truth, that exaggeration is but a later form of what was in the first place perfectly symmetrical, or simply, that the most extravagant burlesque implies the existence of real, undeniable fact, without which there could be no burlesque. You may ornament the simple notes of Yankee Doodle with every kind of variation, but unless the ear readily detects the sturdy old tune, the variations are worse than useless, and should be dropped. There must be truth in a caricature, or there is no burlesque ; it must be a story whose foundation is fact, whatever exaggerations the author adds above. If, then, you want to get deep enough into a caricature to pick out the truth concealed, you must make as many allowances as the astronomer calculating positions in the heavens, an allowance for the false, perverting atmosphere around it, allowances now for this and now for

that, till you are tolerably well convinced you have reduced it pretty VOL. VIII. NO. 69.

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nearly to a "life size," which you can trust. But there have been few among the victims of caricatures who have thought the latent truth worth so much study, or who have had the philosophy so to disregard the exaggerations. They may be able to bear the sight of their magnified weaknesses in the cheerful, self-satisfying retirement of their own rooms; but if the thoughts wander out into the street, they cannot but feel for the reputations which have become such common property among the group at the print-shop window. Pitt and Fox could sit through the Parliamentary sessions, and each receive with the utmost composure the bitter attacks of his opponents; but the Coffee-House epigram, the partisan lampoon, and the sketches of the caricaturist were, by their own confession, far more penetrating and dreaded weapons. A dignified rebuke could by a sweep of the arm knock up all the points of the former, but it was Pitt's frequent complaint that the chorus from the Club-House which he passed on his way home at night was the most intolerable attack that he received, because of his entire inability to resist it.

The power of ridicule which the hands of the satirist and caricaturist wield is a curious one. The caricature, one hundred years old, which at its circulation seemed to almost everybody so full of extravagance and absurdity, comes down to us as one of the most trusty of historical commentators. The sketch or the verse, which at its first appearance was only valued for its burlesque ludicrousness, now rates high as a faithful representative of the age of which it is a relict. Age has sweetened the wine, has mellowed the sharpness of the colors, and we are ready to examine the caricature and its satirical associates with pleasure, and with a wish that some of their worried victims could again see their old torment thus without its sting, their lash without its thong. Of course the change is a natural one. An individual's or a nation's laughter, for the most part, is the most unaffected thing it does. It selects as food for its ridicule what is most prominent, what catches its eye soonest, as it looks around for something worth laughing at; and therefore through these sketches we have our worthy ancestors transmitted to us upon the broad grin ; through them we have the subjects which were capital for the old fireside puns and jests, which constituted the stock of our fathers' small-talk, the after-dinner chat, and the club-room gossip, faithfully given to us without any of the ill-feeling which originally attended them.

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Now, as one looks behind him on a comedy night, and sees tier

after tier of laughing faces, stretching up through the whole house, let us take a quick backward glance, and listen to the merriment with which the exhibition of human weaknesses have been received, when exhibited by the caricaturists of olden times; and it will be amusing to notice how the most momentous historical crises have produced the loudest laughter, only needing the tickling touch of the pen or pencil of satire to relax the mouth which had been solemnly drawn down to keep up appearances. I will only premise that a caricature may not only be pencil, but word drawing, a burlesque poem or paragraph, as well as a sketch or engraving.

Is there a fitter man to head the line of caricaturists than the Thersites of the Iliad? Not that it is a prepossessing picture which the poet gives, when he describes him as

"Awed by no shame, by no respect controlled,

In scandal busy, in reproaches bold,

With witty malice studious to defame,
Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim;
His figure such as would his soul proclaim,
One eye was blinking and one leg was lame,
His mountain-shoulders half his breast o'erspread,
Thin hairs bestrewed his long, misshapen head";

but Homer was meddling with Thersites's own art, as he often did. He had himself a power of caricature which could not but be called out by the fearless attack of Thersites on his pet hero. I would have you then consider that prejudice had some little influence in the drawing of the above portrait. Think of the "blinking eye" merely as one which had so often tipped a comical wink to a laughing crowd that the cock of the eye had become chronic, of the "lame leg" as one which, from constant action in assuming the attitudes of caricature, was a little "the worse for wear": the " mountain shoulders" you will at once recognize as purely a prejudiced way of stating, that he used to delight in a good-humored, comic shrug.

I have introduced caricature with the mortal Thersites, because I had not the courage to attempt any discussion of the keen Olympian sense of the ludicrous, which alone preceded that worthy. The assembly that became so convulsed with laughter at Vulcan's awkward way of passing his mother the nectar, did not let its merriment die out with that laugh. For instance, why were the Centaurs created, but merely that they should be considered caricatures on the

weak mortals whose clumsy equestrianship must have excited many a peal of divine laughter in the heavenly halls? The giants and the elves, too, with all their humanity and divinity so strangely mingled, are as complete and as humorous burlesques on the weak mortality which lay beneath, as Swift's Lilliputs and Brobdignags of a later day. The whole intercourse between heaven and earth was a course of good-humored condescension on the part of the former, in which Mercury or some other court wit would continually start a myth, which, if interpreted, would prove only a smothered laugh at our petty lives and pursuits. It is too wide and involved a subject. Let us leave it till at some future time we are at leisure to translate Lucian, and enjoy his impious caricatures.

After many transmissions, Thersites's mantle fell at last upon Æsop, who is described as of about the same figure as his Homeric predecessor, and could probably assume the latter's garments with ease. I call him a caricaturist, because, under the actions and words attributed to animals, the burlesque on human weaknesses is as visible as if the men and women were represented, like Bottom in the play, with the ass's head actually on their shoulders. After him, you find more downright caricature in Simonides's iambics on the "Women of the Age," the discussion of which was eminently calculated to fill up the hour after the ladies left the dining-room and the "black wine" began to circulate. A century or two more, and we come to the period when Socrates and Diogenes were luxuriating, respectively, in basket and tub. While an invasion was threatening the country, while the death of Pericles was still a recent affliction, and while the news of the fatal end of the Sicilian expedition was disturbing Athens, Aristophanes could yet drown all other sounds throughout the city by the shouts of laughter and applause which his popular caricatures of the times produced in the theatre. There is no need of instancing any particular specimen here. Fortunately, our course of study is one which has familiarized us with the best of them, and we have had the commonplaces of Athens, and the most popular jests of the lively Athenians, retailed at our recitations, with the old attendant acrimony taken from them, and, as we must confess, with the point often sadly blunted by frequent and worrying repetition.

In him we have the central figure in the history of ancient caricature, and, although he had able Roman successors, we must leave with hardly a notice those efforts which the liveliness and vicissitudes

of Roman history could not but encourage. We may be sure that Virgil was not the only man who "compared large and small together"; and that the people, who so appreciated personal peculiarities as to cause some of their most prominent public men to adopt the suggestive epithets of Rufus, Cicero, and Naso, would not be discountenancers of caricature. In the nasal epithet of Ovid there is a curious resemblance to Pope's nickname of "Poet pug," seventeen hundred years later.

We have a long journey to accomplish before we reach Aristophanes's modern counterpart; but the laugh never entirely subsides along the route, though it may at times sink to a low, quiet chuckle. Even if caricature gained no other advantage from the dark ages, still it was then that its christening took place, and an old Italian furnished it with its modern name. But, though a fit of laughter may often be a far more jovial thing in the dark than under any other circumstance, and though we find so many strong, well-known names in the list of caricaturists on the Continent before the sixteenth century, it is over England during the last two hundred years that the historians of caricature linger with the most fondness. Let us then, in the remaining space, throwing chronology aside as cumbersome, consider some of the products of these two centuries, rather in the order of the different styles into which they are naturally divided.

A good example of the grossly personal caricaturist was Samuel Foote, whom we may take as the master probably of dramatic mimicry. Unable to obtain a theatre license, he issued tickets for " teaparties," reading as follows: "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 play-house prices." A crowded house having assembled, he would come forward and remark, that, as he had some young actors under training, he would go on with his instruction while the tea was preparing. The tea never made its appearance, in fact was a failure, but the principle remained the same."

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This period was rich in subjects for political caricature, including the Jacobite, French, and American wars, interspersed with such incidents as the Mississippi Scheme and the South-Sea Bubble, while Georges Third and Fourth were inexhaustible subjects when all else failed. If you make selections from the numerous political prints of the day, the best will probably be those of Gillray, who took a rank

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