Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/404

 their loyalty at a cheap cost, presented an address to his Majesty, which contained the following intemperate passage:—"Let the miserable assassins—the subaltern agents of such crimes—receive the chastisement due to their abominable attempts; but also, let the infamous haunt where machinations so infernal are planned be destroyed for ever. &hellip; Give us the order, sire, and we shall pursue them even to their places of security." French military composition, even in the time of the first Napoleon, was never of the highest order of merit, and the third Napoleon, whose policy it was to distract the attention of his people from reflecting on the questionable means by which he had attained his position, never lost an opportunity of earning popularity with any class of his subjects, particularly with the army. He suffered this quintessence of bombastic absurdity to appear in the pages of the official Moniteur, whence it was duly copied by the English newspapers, and afforded us the most intense amusement. Punch answered this valorous appeal with Leech's celebrated cartoon (in vol. xxxiv.) of Cock-a-doodle-do! wherein the French cock, habited in the uniform of a French colonel, crows most lustily on his own dunghill. This remarkable caricature possesses a singular historical interest, as it exactly expresses the feeling which pervaded England for some time after the close of the Crimean war. The hostile spirit towards Frenchmen which formed a part of John Leech's nature, once aroused was not easily allayed, and in the same volume he gives us specimens of Some Foreign Produce that Mr. Bull can very well Spare, in which he angrily includes French conspirators, vile French women, organ grinders (the artist's peculiar abomination), and other foreign refuse of an objectionable character. Further on, he follows up the subject in A Discussion Forum (!) as Imagined by our Volatile Friends, which represents a party of English conspirators from a French point of view. They wear the peaked hats, long cravats, long hair, boots, and inexpressibles peculiar to the Reign of Terror, and carry knives, revolvers, axes, and other weapons of destruction; a speaker occupies the rostrum, and below him sits the registrar with a bowl of blood, in which sanguinary fluid the proceedings are supposed to