Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/197

 The Second Pretender's rebellion was fruitful in caricatures, of which the most famous is Hogarth's March of the Guards to Finchley, on their way to the north. The city trained bands were at this period made the subject of much disrespectful joking; indeed they had a hard time of it during the whole of the century, down to the days when Cowper had his fling at them in Johnny Gilpin. After the suppression of the formidable rising in Scotland, the caricaturists seem for a long while to have divided their attention between the politics of the hour, and the eccentricities of fashion, or other social topics: giving quite as much attention to the latter as to the former. This was the epoch of Hogarth's great productions, in which comic art was raised to the highest level. But, though Hogarth had no equal, he had contemporaries of considerable ability as fugitive caricaturists. We see much of their work in Mr. Wright's volume, and it gives us no mean idea of their readiness and skill. It is curious to observe how long the feeling of antagonism to the House of Hanover, as something foreign and degrading, lasted with a large proportion of the people. In several of these caricatures the British Lion is represented in various ignominious positions relatively to the Hanoverian White Horse. Politics, however, as in most times, frequently gave place to social matters. The rivalries of Garrick and other eminent actors; the quackery and insolence of Dr. Hill, a surgeon and journalist, who made some little name, about the middle of the century, by his scurrility and assurance; the egregious hoax of the Bottle Conjuror at the Haymarket Theatre; the earthquake of 1750, the apprehension of which threw all London into spasms of terror, but which, when it came, proved to be so gentle that, as Horace Walpole said, "you might have stroked it;" the Betty Canning Mystery; the Cock-lane Ghost; the rage for Handel and other foreign musicians; the extravagance of the rich, and the exaggerations of fashion; these were favourite subjects with the caricaturists of the time of George the Second and of the early years of George the Third. Towards the conclusion of the former reign, and for some time after, great complaints were made of the profligacy of manners, and of the evils introduced into the country by the importation of French modes and tastes. It cannot be questioned that the grievance was a serious one, and that our national morals were never more depraved, shameless, and impudently coarse, than at the period in question. Young men of fashion, having made the grand tour—often in company with tutors who were proficients in every species of debauchery—returned to England worse than they left it, and propagated at home the vices they had learnt abroad. Even though we may not accept as a true picture, in any general sense, the terrible account given by Churchill, in his poem called The Times, we must yet allow that society in the middle of the eighteenth century was deplorably corrupt. The Hell-fire Club, and other associations of a similar character, maintained a standard of villany which every young rake did his utmost to reach; the ladies were often as bad as the gentlemen; masked balls and open-air entertainments at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, contributed to the general laxity of morals; and the style of female dress reflected the spirit of the epoch. The hoops, which had been large enough in the days of George the First, became much more outrageous in the next reign; and a contemporary caricature represents a lady being let down with a crane and pulley into her sedan chair by three assistants, who carefully lower her through the open roof. The head-dresses were equally absurd. They were piled up to an enormous height by the aid of false hair, cushions, pins, pomatum, feathers, ribbons, and artificial flowers; and very singular are the pictures we here find of the fantastic forms they were made to assume. The men soon rivalled the women in eccentricity of dress. For a year or two subsequent to 1770, the Macaronis, as the young beaux for awhile delighted to call themselves, were the talk of the town, the rage of the moment, and the subjects of wits and caricaturists.

Going back a few years, we find Hogarth, towards the conclusion of his life, involved in a bitter quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill, the mortification resulting from which is thought to have hastened his death. The painter had received a pension from Lord Bute, who, on rising to power shortly after the accession of George the Third, made a great show of patronising literature and art, though doubtless with no other object than to procure support for his ministry, of which it stood greatly in need. In the fervour of his new-born political zeal, Hogarth attacked his old friend Wilkes in Number One of the prints called The Times. Wilkes retaliated in the North Briton; Churchill assisted on the same side, in his Epistle to William Hogarth; and a great many caricatures were published, representing the painter performing ignominious services for the minister, or receiving his pay. Lord Bute is frequently typified by the comic artists of the time in the form of a large jack-boot, by way of a pun upon his title. Smollett, as a paid advocate of the Scotch favourite, and himself a Scotchman, was severely ridiculed about this time; for all our Northern fellow-subjects were then regarded as Jacobites, or as a set of hungry adventurers who came to England to pick up what they could get. The unpopularity of Lord Bute has hardly ever been equalled; but it was shared by his fellow ministers, especially Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, whose name lent itself very readily to the caricaturists. On the other hand, Wilkes and Pitt were the idols of the populace, until Pitt accepted a place in the Upper House, under the title of Lord Chatham, when he was looked upon as a tool of the court party, which was still ruled in secret by Bute, though that nobleman had been compelled to retire from the ministry. In a caricature published about 1770, Wilkes is pictured as a patriot worried by two dogs, one