Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/199

Charles Dickens] in many forms. Although there is a little occasional satire at the expense of the volunteers, and an outbreak of grumbling now and then at the taxes, the sentiment, on the whole, is strongly on the side of loyalty. Buonaparte is depicted as a braggart, coward, and imbecile little manikin. The amount of national self-esteem which was thus encouraged, looks half-ludicrous, half-pitiable, at this distance of time. A debased and clap-trap spirit came over the comic art of the period, and it is impossible to glance back at it with any sentiment of satisfaction. In one of Gillray's sketches, George the Third appears as the King of Brobdingnag, holding in his hand the diminutive figure of Buonaparte, whom he is scanning through an opera-glass, and addressing in these words, slightly altered from Swift's text: "My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon yourself and country; but, from what I can gather from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wring'd (sic) and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude you to be one of the most pernicious little odious reptiles that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." The likeness of George in this print is very good; but the portrait of Napoleon presents quite the reverse of his real appearance. He is drawn with the lantern jaws and approximating nose and chin of a very old man—though he was then young—and his hair is carroty red! The personal appearance of the great general could not then have been much known in England; but some of the later sketches are better. It is remarkable, by the way, that the popular ideal of John Bull, continued, even to the early years of the present century, very different from that which is now accepted, as if it had come down to us from time immemorial. The costume, wig included, is that of the eighteenth century; shoes and buckles occupy the place of the now familiar top-boots; and the type of face is rather German or Dutch, than English. The modern John Bull must have come up after the peace of 1815.

Mr. Wright's volume concludes with the death of George the Third, in January, 1820, and its final pages are occupied with some of the fashionable oddities, in the way of male and female dress, of the concluding years of that long reign. The dandies and dandizettes of 1819-20 must have been a strange race. "Dandizette" was a term applied to the feminine devotees to dress, and their absurdities were fully equal to those of the dandies. We are now, however, touching upon our own day. The rising race of caricaturists were men whose works and lives bring us down to the present moment; for the most remarkable of them is still alive. George Cruikshank connects the age of Gillray, Rowlandson, and Sayer, with that of the elder Doyle, Leech, the younger Doyle, and Tenniel. The Georgian and the Victorian eras are linked together by the genius of this admirable humourist, who was a pictorial reformer in the evil days of the Regency, and who still survives to employ his pencil on social topics in the better times which have ensued. 

  .—At the same time looking over what I have written, I should not perhaps, in strict justice, whelm all in indiscriminate censure—I mean the subordinates downwards—since seeing this croupier in the church, and who was saying his prayers. He may have come to think it a mere mechanical function—a simple clerkship in a bank; and certainly association and habit blunt the soul. But are there not clergy here, good men, as I know, to tell him, that all who touch pitch must be defiled, to thunder in his ears that evil got moneys must not be handled on any pretext, to ring out the awful words of Scripture against gamesters and others—to tell him he must give up all rather than be connected with such sin? I felt an interest in the man and would almost be tempted myself——but this is mere folly and quixotism, and I am so carried away by pity for the victims, that I begin to talk nonsense and impossibilities. What could poor I do? I must say, I admire Grainger for his selfdenial, I never see him in the rooms. Sometimes, indeed, he comes, drawn in by the irresistible temptation; but when he sees my warning finger his head droops, and he slips away quietly.

Such an adventure this evening. Surely this is the place for disciplining the mind. I had strolled into the rooms about ten o'clock, the most delightful hour of the night, to have what I call "my quiet game at humanity." I had my card—the menials are beginning to know me and ply me with large corking pins, of which I have a supply for my pet—when I saw D'Eyncourt's face opposite. He was with a lady—a young girl, French or English, decent or otherwise, for no one can tell here. I have done some charming country English girls cruel injustice by mistaking them for what they were not; and en revanche, I have done other creatures too much honour by taking them for what they were certainly not. But everything seems inverted here. I see a scrubby, dowdy, schoolmaster-looking man, with a shambling walk, and wonder what business he has dining in the grand Kursaal, when he is revealed as Lord ——, who has the palace at the corner