Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/328

, and the likenesses of the persons represented are most faithfully preserved. Whilst claiming for himself the character of a pictorial satirist, the artist is all throughout anxious to impress upon you the fact that he repudiates the notion of being considered a caricaturist in the Johnsonian meaning of the word. This idea seems also to have struck Thackeray, who, writing at the time when the sketches were appearing, says of him, "You never hear any laughing at 'H.B.'; his pictures are a great deal too genteel for that, polite points of wit, which strike one as exceedingly clever and pretty, and cause one to smile in a quiet, gentlemanlike kind of way." Throughout the series of sketches we know but of one instance where the artist surfers any comparison to be established between, himself and the political caricaturists who had preceded him, and that is the one entitled Bombardment Extraordinary (having reference to the indictment for libel against the Morning Journal, which was shortly followed by the collapse of that paper), which is treated to the full as coarsely as Gillray himself might desire. The fact of this being among the earliest sketches would seem to show that the artist had not then quite made up his mind whether to follow in the footsteps of his great predecessor or not. We think the result must have convinced him that, whilst having distinct merits of his own as a satirist, and indeed as an artist, he was very far behind Gillray; and the rest of the sketches seem to show that their designer had made up his mind that no middle course was possible;—in other words, that he must be B or nothing.

The faithfulness of the likenesses of the persons who appear in these "sketches" is simply marvellous. Not only has the artist preserved the features of the subjects of his satires, but he has caught their attitude—their manner, almost their tricks and habits,—and the drawings being, as we have said, wholly free from exaggeration, the very men stand before you, often, it is true, in absurd and ridiculous positions. The persons who figure in these lithographs comprise among names of note many whose reputations