Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/503

 milk and honey. On the opposite bank sit in dreary solitude a starving cottier and his family. This was Richard Doyle's dream in 1849. He did not live to wake to the reality of 1884: half a dozen "Gladstone" bags filled with American dynamite, the property of subjects of a republic who allows her mongrel murderers to plot the deaths of thousands of the people of a friendly nation without lifting a hand or a finger to restrain them. A home government too weak to pass a law which would stop these outrages by hanging these foreign miscreants as high as Haman. These formed no part of course of the young artist's dream. He delighted in sunshine. The year 1850 was memorable for the repeal of the window tax, one of the most extraordinary impositions which ever crossed the inventive mind of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Hollo! old fellow," says a workman to his family, hailing the unwonted appearance of the sunbeams in their dark and dreary apartment, "Hollo! old fellow; we're glad to see you here."

Among the numerous illustrations which Doyle designed for Punch, probably the most original were the series entitled "Manners and Customs of ye Englishe," which, under the title of "Bird's-eye Views of English Society," he afterwards continued in the Cornhill Magazine in a more elaborate form. The "Manners and Customs" form a curious record of the doings of the period, and remind us of "Sam Cowell" and the cider cellars, the Jenny Lind mania, Julien and his famous band, Astleys, the Derby day, and many of the forgotten scenes and follies in which some of us may have mingled in days gone by. They are very clever so far as they go; but none of them, as the writer in "The Month" would have us believe, are at all "worthy of" or in any way remind us of "Hogarth" (why are all the writers on comic art immediately reminded of Hogarth?). "Each face in one of these pictures—A Prospecte of Exeter Hall, showynge a Christian Gentleman denouncynge ye Pope," says the same writer—"deserves a careful study, and tells the tale of bigotry, prejudice, and gaping credulity which has made Exeter Hall a bye-word among men." Although we agree with the writer on this subject, we would at the same time take leave to remind him that the Catholics are singularly