Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/480

 were McConnell and Watts Phillips, the latter of whom contributed largely also to the literary matter. We find a clever design of his (in Leech's style) in the second volume: "Now, gentlemen of the jury," says a brazen-faced barrister, "I throw myself upon your impartial judgment as husbands and fathers, and I confidently ask, Does the prisoner [the most murderous-looking ruffian un-hung] look like a man who would knock down and trample upon the wife of his bosom? Gentlemen, I have done!"

There was considerable originality in the designs of Bennett, which is more particularly manifested in the well-known series of humorous sketches in which the effect intended to be produced is effected by means of the shadows of the figures represented, which are supposed to indicate their distinguishing failings and characteristics. Among them may be mentioned a tipsy woman amused at the shadow cast by her own figure of a gin bottle; an undertaker, in his garb of woe wrung from the pockets of widows and orphans, casts the appropriate shadow of a crocodile; a red-nosed old hospital nurse of a tea-pot; a worn-out seamstress of a skeleton; a mischievous street boy of a monkey; an angry wife sitting up for a truant husband of an extinguisher; a tall, conceited-looking parson, with a long coat, of a pump; while a sweep, with his "machine," to his mortal terror beholds his own shadow preceding him in the guise of Beelzebub himself. The series is continued in a work published by W. Kent & Co. in 1860, under the title of "Shadow and Substance," the letterpress of which is contributed to Bennett's pictures by Robert B. Brough. Literary work of this description, like William Combe's "Doctor Syntax," is necessarily unsatisfactory; but the pictures themselves are distinctly inferior to the series which preceded them, the best being Old Enough to Know Better,—a bald-headed, superannuated old sinner behind the scenes, presenting a bouquet to a ballet girl, his figure casting a shadow on the back of the scene of a bearded, long- eared, horned old goat.

We are in no position to give a detailed list of Charles Bennett's work, which was of a very miscellaneous kind, comprising among others a series of slight outline portraits of members of