Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/327

 the artist to publish these specimens, and their success was so genuine and unmistakable that both publisher and artist decided to continue them. Thus commenced a series of political pictures which ultimately numbered almost a thousand, and ran an uninterrupted course of prosperity for a period of upwards of two and twenty years.

The enormous success and reputation which the "sketches," as they were called, achieved, was due not only to the cleverness and originality of the artist himself, but also in a great measure to the mystery which attended their publication and appearance. Both parties concerned in their production preserved an inviolable secrecy on the subject of the identity of the artist and the place whence the "sketches" originated. Mr. Buss tells us, "the drawings were called for in a mysterious hackney coach, mysteriously deposited in a mysterious lithographic printing office, and as mysteriously printed and mysteriously stored until the right day of publication." The B mystery was most religiously preserved for a great number of years, both by the artist and the publisher. The initials afforded no clue to those not immediately concerned in preserving the secret; and yet in this very original monogram lay the key to the whole of the mystery. The origin of this signature was simply the junction of two I's and two D's (one above the other), thus converting the double initials into B. The single initials were those of John Doyle, father of the late Richard Doyle, who afterwards made his own mark as a comic artist in the pages of Punch and elsewhere.

The "sketches" of B were a complete innovation upon pictorial satire. The idea of satirizing political subjects and public men without the exaggeration or vulgarity which the caricaturists had more or less inherited from Gillray, was entirely new to the public, and took with them immensely; and herein lies their peculiarity, that whilst the subjects are treated with a distinctly sarcastic humour, there is an absence of anything approaching to