Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/462

 if we mistake not, the work of Kenny Meadows. The Christian Bayadere Worshipping the Idol Siva, has reference to the tolerance which " John Company " wisely conceded to Hindoo religious ceremony, so long as its traditions were found consistent with the ordinary dictates of humanity. "The Story of a Feather" in this volume has five illustrations, two of which are very clever. Among the other cartoons we find The Modern Macheath (the Captain being Sir Robert Peel). The fifth volume contains eight of his illustrations, six being cartoons; among them, The Irish Frankenstein (badly imagined and atrociously drawn), The Water Drop and the Gin Drop are characterized by much poverty of invention, but the former is the best of the two. The Battle of the Alphabet (cartoon) is a better specimen of his work, although the legs and arms look as usual, as if drawn with a ruler. The sixth volume contains three of his cartoons, while the almanack of the year (1844) has several of his illustrations. To the seventh volume he contributed no less than thirty-one illustrations, some very good, one of the best being that of the two legal dogs quarrelling over a bone of litigation. Punch at the outset of his career had considerable difficulty in the selection of a graphic satirist, and one of his "right hand men" in those early days was a Mr. Henning, by whose side Kenny Meadows figures as an absolute genius. After his seventh volume, however, he met with artists better fitted to interpret his political and social views, and no trace of Meadows' useful hand appears in succeeding volumes.

In stating that the merits of Kenny Meadows as an illustrator of books are unequal, and in denying to him the possession of genius, we must not be held to imply that he was deficient of talent. An excellent example of the inequality of which we speak will be found it. his Shakespeare (Robert Tyas, 1843), a work selected by us for the reason that it was considered by himself and his two favourable friends as his masterpiece. Although we cannot stay to notice all the strange conceptions with which he has enriched this book, we may be permitted to wonder whence he derived his preposterous ideas of Caliban, of Malvolio, of Shylock, of Juliet's nurse, of