Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/194

 prefixes your correspondent in England has foolishly added the complimentary Esquire. Under those circumstances the best thing you could do was to look for yourself under the head of "Esquire." Failing in unearthing yourself, then you might try Optimus and Terminus, and so up to Penn. When you found yourself a number was affixed to you. At one extremity of the apartment was a grating, and behind that grating sat an old gentleman in a striped dressing-gown and a black velvet skull cap. If you can imagine a very tame and sleepy tiger at the Zoological Gardens, smoking a cigarito, and with bundles of letters and newspapers, in lieu of shin bones of beef, to eat, you may realise the idea of that old gentleman in his cage at the Poste Restante behind the Puerta del Sol. You spake him kindly, and called him "Caballero." He bowed profoundly and returned your compliment. Then you told him your number, and handed your passport through the bars. He looked at the number and he looked at the passport. Then he kindled another cigarito; then, in a preoccupied manner he began the perusal of a leading article in the Epoca of that morning. Then after a season, remembering you, he arose, offered you a thousand apologies, and went away out of the cage altogether, retiring into some back den—whether to look for your letters, or to drink his chocolate, or to offer his orisons to San Jago de Compostella, is uncertain. By this time there were generally two or three free and independent Britons clamouring at the bars; the Briton who threatened to write to the Times; the Briton who declared that he should place the whole matter in the hands of the British ambassador; and the persistent Briton who simply clung to the grate, or battered at the doortrap with an umbrella, crying, "Hi! Mossoo! Donnez-moi mon letter. Larrup, Milk-street, Cheapside, à Londres. Donnez-moi. Look alive, will you!" At last the old gentleman returned, lighted another cigarito, and began to look for your letters. For whose letters is he looking now, I wonder, and where?

Poste Restante! Poste Restante! It has rested for me close to the Roman Pantheon, and under the shadow of that blood-stained sacrificial stone by the great Cathedral of Mexico. Poste Restante! How many time have I journeyed towards it with fluttering pulse and a sinking in my throat—how many times have I come from it with my pocket full of dollars, or my eyes full of tears; tears that were sometimes of joy, and sometimes—but not often—of sorrow. The Poste Restante has been to me, these many years, a smooth and a kind post, on the whole.

CARICATURE HISTORY.

the last century, no one had thought of issuing a weekly caricature with accompanying letterpress; yet the number of pictorial burlesques of politics and politicians, of fashions and fashionable leaders, then published, is large; and we know all the great men, and many of the little men of the age, by the pencils of political satirists, such as Hogarth at one end of the chain, and Gillray at the other. Mr. Thomas Wright has done the student of history and manners some service by collecting as many of these fugitive productions as he could lay his hands on, and giving us an account of them in a very interesting volume, which he entitles, Caricature History of the Georges; or, Annals of the House of Hanover, compiled from the Squibs, Broadsides, Window Pictures, Lampoons, and Pictorial Caricatures of the Time. This volume is illustrated with engravings copied from the old prints of bygone generations, and in looking through it we seem to live over again the lives of our ancestors, and to share with them in the passions, personalities, jealousies, intrigues, and follies of the hour. Lord Macaulay made a collection of Whitechapel ballads to illustrate some period of English history. Mr. Wright has turned to the same purpose our caricatures from the accession of George the First to the peace of 1815.

To the proverb that "there is nothing new under the sun," caricatures are no exception. They have been found in Egyptian tombs; and the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages are sometimes adorned with extravagantly humorous pictures, in which the object evidently was to satirise particular persons or classes. Caricatures became very popular in England in the days of the Commonwealth. They used to be engraved on playing-cards, and one of them is extant at the present day. It is entitled, Shuffling, Cutting, and Dealing in a Game at Picquet. Being acted from the year 1653 to 1658. By O. P. [Oliver, Protector] and others, with great applause. Underneath the title is the motto, "Tempera mutantur, et nos" This squib was published in 1659, the year after Oliver's death, while Richard was feebly endeavouring to carry on the Protectorate. The several persons represented—Cromwell and his son, Lambert, Fleetwood, Vane, Lenthal, Claypole, Harrison, Monk, and others, express themselves in various pithy and suggestive ways; and a Papist looks on with the remark, "If you all complain, I hope I shall win at last." Our early caricatures were mostly manufactured in Holland, and this continued to be the case even down to the time of the South Sea Bubble; but after that date a vigorous race of native satirical artists sprang up, and has continued to the present day.