Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/195

 A great number of caricatures arose out of the Sacheverell business in the reign of Queen Anne. The reverend doctor, who was a renegade from Whiggism, had become a vehement Tory and assertor of High Church principles, and in that capacity he preached a sermon at St. Paul's, before the Lord Mayor and Corporation, on the 5th of November, 1709, of so violent a character towards the Dissenters and their friends, the principles of the revolution, and the Whig Lord Treasurer, Godolphin, that it was determined to impeach the author. In the meanwhile, the Tories caused the sermon to be printed and extensively circulated; and when the trial of Sacheverell ended in his inhibition for three years, the condemnation of his discourse, and the burning of a copy of it by the common hangman, an immense excitement seized on the nation, and a series of riots ensued of a very alarming character. High church clergymen preached incendiary sermons; money is said to nave been distributed among the mob; several encounters took place in the streets; dissenting places of worship were sacked and burnt; in short, ferocious intolerance was exhibited. The commotion was fruitful in ballads and caricatures, and not merely on the side of Sacheverell. The Whigs were not idle, and Mr. Wright gives a specimen of the kind of satirical prints they sent forth against their opponents. We here see Sacheverell in the act of writing his sermon. He is prompted on one side by the Pope, and on the other by the Devil; and the title of the engraving is "The Three False Brethren." In retaliation for this, the High Church party caricatured Bishop Hoadly, a Low Church friend of the Dissenters, in a print in which Satan is represented as closeted with the prelate, whose infirmities are coarsely ridiculed. They also parodied the Sacheverell caricature, putting a mitred bishop in the place of the Pope, and making the Devil fly away in terror from the doctor's pen. The oddest thing done at that period, however, was the issue of a medal with a head of Sacheverell on one side, and on the other a device and inscription which varied in different copies, so as to suit the predilections of both parties. The caricatures of the Sacheverell days are to be found in the collection of Mr. Hawkins. "In general," says Mr. Wright, "they are equally poor in design and execution." The figure or head of the clerical hero was introduced into all kinds of articles of ornament or use. Tobacco-stoppers, seals for letters, coat-buttons, &c., were made to take sides, and the general excitement was stimulated by every art that could possibly be pressed into the service.

On the accession of George the First, and the return of the Whigs to power after the brief ascendancy of Harley and Bolingbroke, the former of those Ministers was made the subject of a caricature which seems now not to be in existence. The object was to represent the Earl as the tool of the French King and the Pretender—an imputation which he had drawn on himself by the precipitate and disadvantageous peace he had concluded after Marlborough's brilliant victories, and by his intrigues against the House of Hanover.

The famous South Sea Bubble furnished abundant matter for literary and pictorial satirists to turn to account. The earliest English caricature on this disastrous speculation is entitled "The Bubblers bubbled; or, the Devil take the Hindmost." It contained a great many figures: a circumstance which seems to have been regarded as a recommendation, for another caricature of the same period was advertised as presenting "nigh eighty figures." This was in 1720, and in the same year a large number of "Bubble" caricatures were issued in France and Holland. In the latter country, several of these, together with satirical plays and songs on the same subject, were collected and published in a folio volume, entitled "The Great Picture of Folly." So great was the demand for such productions, and so easily were people satisfied with anything in the shape of a pictorial satire on the madness of the hour, that old engravings were re-issued with a verbal application to the various bubble companies, though the figures could hardly be twisted by the utmost ingenuity to any interpretation of current events. In England, packs of "bubble cards" were largely sold—an idea apparently derived from the caricature playing-cards of the time of the Commonwealth. In the sets belonging to the latter age, each card was embellished with an engraving representing some preposterous scheme, accompanied by four lines of verse. In many cases both pictures and verses were pointed and epigrammatic. The English caricatures of that time, however, are said to be very inferior to the Dutch.

But an Englishman of signal genius in the department of comic and tragi-comic art was on the eve of making himself famous. Hogarth's first caricature was published in 1721, and its subject was the company-forming mania of the previous year.

The general election of 1722, under the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, led to the production of many caricatures by the Tory party, who were then very much in the shade. The Tories complained, and not without reason, that the Whigs resorted to a most extensive system of bribery, and, being in opposition, they were of course severely virtuous. In Applebee's Original Weekly Journal, of January 6th, 1722—a Tory publication—the following editorial note occurs: "Altho' we think the appointing general meetings of the gentlemen of counties, for making agreements for votes for the election of a new Parliament before the old Parliament is expir'd, is a most scandalous method and an evident token of corruption, yet we find it daily practic'd, and, which is worse, publickly own'd, particularly in the county of Surrey, where the very names of the candidates are publish'd, and the votes of the freeholders openly sollicited in the publick prints. The like is now doing, or preparing to be done, for Buckinghamshire; and we are told, likewise, that it is doing for other counties also." There cannot be a doubt that Walpole