Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/308

 victorious prize-fighter recruiting his exhausted frame by imbibing many quarts of strong ale; He was much Feared by his Physician (Act 4, Sc. 1), an irascible gouty patient flinging medicine bottles and nostrums at one of his doctors, and stamping a prostrate one under foot; You are too great to be by me gainsaid (King Henry IV., Part 2, Act 1, Sc. 1), a huge woman administering chastisement to a small and probably (in more senses than one) frail husband; My Lord, I over rode him on the way (Act 1, Sc. 1), a miserable huntsman who has ridden over and killed one of the master's fox-hounds; He came, saw, and overcame (Act 4, Sc. 2), a wretched Frenchman, who, overbalancing himself, falls over the rails of a bear-pit amongst the hungry animals below; Never was such a sudden scholar made, (King Henry V., Act 1, Sc. 1), in allusion to the installation of the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor of Oxford University; A Mid-summer Night's Dream, a fat sleeper suffering under the agonies of nightmare, under the influence of whose delusion he fancies himself roasting before a vast fire, with a huge hook stuck through his stomach; and, I beg the ancient privilege of Athens: as she is mine, I may dispose of her (Act 1, Sc. 1), an Englishman attempting to dispose of his ugly, wooden-legged old harridan of a wife by auction. The lithographic stones on which the drawings to these "New Readings" were made, and which comprised no less than three hundred drawings, were effaced before the artist's death, and impressions from them are now, of course, more than difficult to procure. The Shakespeare series were collected and republished in four volumes, in 1841-2, by Tilt & Bogue, of Fleet Street, and even these last are very seldom met with. On the l0th of December, 1831, there started into life a periodical of decidedly pronounced political bias and opinions, entitled "Figaro in London." Politics ran high in those days; it was the time of the great agitation for "reform," which in those days, as we shall presently see, was both loudly called for and imperatively necessary. A mob of boys and degraded women had taken complete possession of Bristol,—had driven its deformed little mayor over a stonewall in ignominious flight,—had burnt down the gaol and the