Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/516

 Away goes the lion, with his tail as stiff as a poker and every hair of his mane erect, dragging after him the frightened premier, who exclaims, in the extremity of his terror, that he can hold him no longer and is bound "to let him go." The Russian war showed our singular unreadiness for warfare. Just at its close we had provided ourselves with a fleet of vessels of light draught capable of floating in the shallows which surrounded the Russian fortifications, which, had they been ready at the time they were wanted, might have proved of incalculable service. Britannia disconsolately eyes these gun-boats from the summit of her cliffs. "Ah!" she sighs, "if you'd been only hatched a year ago, what might have come out of your shells!"

Close upon the heels of the Russian war followed the mutiny of our Indian levies. So closely did one event follow the other, that those who have watched and learnt with reason to distrust the odious and insidious policy of Russia towards this country, considered the coincidence a more than singular one. The Franco-Austrian war came next; and the war wave passed onwards to America, where the Northern and Southern states were speedily engaged in fratricidal and deadly strife. Peace, driven from land to land, found no resting place for the sole of her foot, and the artist shows her to us, seated disconsolately pondering over these untoward matters and her own unhappy condition on the breech of a garrison gun.

Punch's low estimate of the character and abilities of the Emperor Louis is patent throughout those of Tenniel's satires in which he puts in an appearance. In 1853 he takes us to an International Poultry Show (in obvious reference to the Boulogne catastrophe) where, amid a variety of eagles—the American eagle, the Prussian eagle—the double-headed Austrian and Russian eagles—we find a wretched nondescript, half eagle half barn door fowl, labelled the "French eagle." Victoria (a royal visitor) remarks to her astonished companion, "We have nothing of that sort, Mr. Punch; but should there be a lion show, we can send a specimen!!" The approaching marriage of the French Emperor is alluded to in the