Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/198

 of which has the features of Dr. Johnson, while the other is distinguished by the head of some court writer whose identity cannot now be traced. Johnson was frequently caricatured. A print issued in 1782 shows him as an owl, standing on two of his own volumes, and leering at the heads of Milton, Pope, and others, which are surrounded with starry rays. This was in allusion to the depreciatory remarks contained in his recently published Lives of the Poets. The face is powerfully drawn, and is probably a good likeness of the doctor, from the exaggerated and unsympathetic point of view.

It would be impossible, in the compass of a single essay, to follow the complicated politics of the reign of George the Third, as exemplified in the comic art of that long era; for the caricaturists were very busy during the whole of those sixty years. The love of caricature seems to have increased as the eighteenth century wore on towards its close, and a vast number of pictorial squibs were issued during the days of the second Pitt and Fox, of Burke and Sheridan, of Shelburne, North, Warren Hastings, Grattan, Home Tooke, and the other eminent politicians of the time. The faces of all these men have been rendered familiar to us by the burlesque artists of the period, who did not spare royalty itself. Indeed, George and his consort were frequently made the subjects of ludicrous pictures, which could hardly have been flattering to their self-esteem. They were represented as "Farmer George and his wife," a very common-place couple, equally plain in looks and in costume; as misers hugging their bags of gold; as frugal, homely people, frying sprats or toasting muffins; as sordid economisers, trying to save a few pence in any shabby way; as perambulators about Windsor and Weymouth, scraping acquaintance with the peasantry, and staggering them with rapid and irrelevant questions; and in other ludicrous or ignoble relations. Of course, the celebrated story of the apple dumplings, told by Peter Pindar in a well-known poem, was illustrated by the draughtsmen of the time. A caricature on this subject, depicting his majesty "learning to make apple dumplings," was published in November, 1797. The king's passion for hunting, his coarse features and ungainly figure, his over-familiarity of manner, and his devotion to trivial pursuits, were repeatedly satirised by the artists of the latter part of the last century. It used to be said—whether justly or not—that his majesty gave so much tune to agriculture that he neglected the duties of State; and he was also accused of wasting a good deal of petty ingenuity in making buttons. But the avarice of the august pair was what the caricaturists were most fond of holding up to popular aversion and ridicule. "A very clever caricature was published by Gillray, entitled 'Anti-saccharites,' in which the king and queen are teaching their daughters to take their tea without sugar, as 'a noble example of economy.' The princesses have a look of great discontent, but their royal mother exhorts them to persevere: 'Above all, remember how much expense it will save your poor papa.' The king, delighted with the experiment, exclaims, 'O delicious! delicious!'" Another caricature by the same artist, published in the same year (1792), after the arrival of news of the defeat of Tippoo Saib, shows us Dundas, as the minister who took charge of Indian affairs, communicating the intelligence to the monarch and his consort. The secretary of state announces that "Seringapatam is taken—Tippoo is wounded—and millions of pagodas secured." George, who is dressed in the costume of a huntsman, exclaims, "Tally ho! ho! ho! ho!" while Charlotte sighs forth, "O the dear, sweet pagodas!" Gillray, it appears, had a personal cause for disliking the king, the latter having once spoken of the artist's sketches with contempt. Yet in December, 1790, Gillray had published a very loyal caricature, representing Dr. Price, the Unitarian clergyman, as a disseminator of treason, anarchy, and atheism, and Burke as the illustrious upholder of the crown and religion. Exactly a year later, we find him satirising William Pitt as a toadstool springing out of the royal crown, which is described as "a dunghill." Price could hardly have been more revolutionary than that.

The most eminent caricaturists of the later years of the eighteenth and earlier years of the nineteenth centuries were Gillray, Rowlandson, and Sayer. Gillray may be said to have refashioned and reanimated the art. His best works are marked by real genius—by great inventiveness, lively characterisation, considerable humour, and no mean executive skill. His later works are not so good as his earlier; some of them, indeed, he only engraved, without designing. Rowlandson was coarser, but not devoid of talent; and Sayer, though less known at the present day than either of the others, was ingenious and prolific. The comic art of the reign of the third George was more varied and elaborate than that of the two preceding reigns; but it was also more vulgar in spirit and design. The astounding ugliness of costume which set in about 1780, and continued in several forms for many years, was equalled by the heavy, debauched, bloated, and mean faces of the people; and both these facts were made the most of by the caricaturists.

The profligacy and spendthrift habits of the Prince of Wales were severely lashed in many of the caricatures of that period; but in a little while personal matters gave place to the more important considerations arising out of the revolutionary condition of France, the spread of agitation in our own country, and the great war which speedily burst out between ourselves and the newly established republic. The anti-revolutionary and anti-Gallican feeling of the upper and middle classes of England is sufficiently proved by the caricatures reproduced or described by Mr. Wright, which are almost all on the national and conservative side. The French are held up to ridicule in every conceivable way, and John Bull is made to think the most of himself. The brilliant achievements of our army and navy were