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king-his prominent eyes, light eyebrows, protruding lips, his shambling walk, his gaze of eager yet vacant curiosity-are even now better known to us through Gillray's caricatures than through anything which the Muses of painting and sculpture, in their serious moods, could effect for him or against him. Gillray's etchings, and Peter Pindar's verses, were for years among the minor plagues of royalty. Not, indeed, in the estimation of the stout-hearted monarch himself, as impervious to ridicule as to argument whenever he thought himself in the right; no man in his dominions laughed more regularly at each new caricature of Gillray than he; and a whole set, inscribed for the king,' forwarded to him as they came out, is said to be preserved at Windsor. But they were more keenly felt by his little knot of attached courtiers, and also by sober-minded people in general, seriously apprehensive, in those inflammable times, of anything which might throw ridicule on the Crown. One of the coarsest and most powerful, and which is said to have given especial offence at head-quarters, is that which represents Queen Charlotte as Milton's Sin, between Pitt as Death and Thurlow as the Devil. Others, of less virulence, such as 'Affability,' or the King and the Ploughman; the 'Lesson in Apple Dumplings;' the conjugal breakfast scene, where George is toasting muffins, and Charlotte frying sprats; the 'Anti-Saccharites,' where the Royal pair are endeavouring to coax the reluctant princesses (charming figures) to take their tea without sugar, these, and numbers more, held up the Royal peculiarities, especially the alleged stinginess of the Court, in a manner in which the usual coarseness of the execution rather tended to heighten the exceeding force and humour of the satire.

But when this country became seriously involved in hostilities. with France, republican, and afterwards imperial, a change came over the spirit of Gillray's satire. Thenceforth he gradually ceased his attacks, not only on the Royal family, but on domestic objects of raillery in general, and applied himself almost exclusively to sharpening the national spirit of hostility against the foreign enemy. His caricatures against the French are those by which he is best known, especially abroad, and occupy the greatest space in his works. This was no doubt the popular line to take, and Gillray worked for money; but it would be doing great injustice to the poor caricaturist's memory to suppose that money was his main object. The son of the old pensioner was full of the popular instincts of his class. It was not the French revolution or conquests that he opposed; it was the French themselves, whom he hated with all the vehemence of a Nelson or a Windham. These later compositions of his are, indeed,

indeed, marvellous performances. But they are so rather from the intensity of imaginative fury with which they are animated, than from the ordinary qualities of the caricaturist. They are comparatively destitute of his old humour and fun. Not that he had outgrown these. His few domestic caricatures are still full of them; such are those on 'All the Talents' (1806), one of which, the Funeral of Baron Broad bottom,' is among the most comic of all his productions. The last survivor of its procession of mourners, the late Marquis of Lansdowne, has now been dead for some years; the features of the remainder are quite unfamiliar to this generation; and yet it is scarcely possible to look at it even now without a smile, such as we bestow on the efforts of our cotemporaries Leech or Doyle. But when Gillray tried his vein on a French subject, he passed at once from the humorous to the grotesque, and thence to the hideous and terrible. One of his eccentric powers, amounting certainly to genius, comes out strongly in these later caricatures; that of bringing together an enormous number of faces, distorted into every variety of grimace, and yet preserving a wonderfully human expression. We would signalise particularly two, one almost tragical, the Apotheosis of Hoche;' one farcical, the Westminster Election' (1804). The tendency to the wild and extravagant now grew on him. Doubtless it was sharpened by the effect on his brain of constant potations, which gradually brought on delirium tremens. His latest art-debauches-if such we may term them -have often a touch of phantasmagoric-pictorial nightmare, like those of Callot, Teniers, and Höllenbreughel. His last drawing is preserved in the British Museum, executed when he was quite out of his mind-a madman's attempt at a portrait, said to be that of Mr. Humphreys, the printseller. He died in 1815; and the inscription Here lies James Gillray, the caricaturist,' marks, or lately marked, the spot of his interment in the Broadway, Westminster. His works, once so popular, had fallen so much in fashion a few years ago that the plates were about to be sold for old copper, when they were rescued by Mr. J. H. Bohn, the publisher, who gave to the public those now wellknown re-impressions which have procured for the artist a new lease of fame.

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Gillray was the Rubens of caricature, and the comparison is really one which does no injustice to the inspired Fleming. The lifelike realism of the Englishman's boldly-rounded, muscular figures, and the strong expression communicated to them by a few strokes of the pencil, are such as Antwerp in all her pride might not disdain. Any one who has studied some of Rubens's crowds of nude figures which approach nearest to the order of

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caricature-his sketches of the Last Judgment,' for instance, in the Munich Gallery-will appreciate the justice of the parallel. Gillray was undoubtedly coarse to excess, both in conception and execution; so much so, as to render his works mere objects of disgust to many educated in the gentler modern school. But there are also numbers of a taste more refined than catholic, who disclaim all admiration for Rubens on the very same grounds. And one quality Gillray possessed which was apparently discordant from his ordinary character. Many of his delineations of female beauty are singularly successful, and he seems to have dwelt on them with special pleasure, for the sake of the contrast with his usual disfigurements of humanity. His heroines are certainly not sylphs, but they often are, like the celestials of Rubens, uncommonly fine women. Let us refer to a few well-known instances only; such as his representations of Mrs. Fitzherbert at her best time, notwithstanding the prominence of the aquiline feature, which it was his business to enhance; of George III.'s daughters in the Anti-Saccharites,' and other prints; the Duchess of Richmond as the Height of Fashion;' the charming seated figure entitled 'Modern Elegance,' 1795 (said to be Lady Charlotte Campbell, but is it not an older person?), in which, though the costume is playfully exaggerated, the features are finely drawn; the beauty (evidently a portrait also) who is reading Monk Lewis's Tales of Wonder' to a bevy of very homely gossips (1802); and even the common ball-room figures in A Broad Hint of not meaning to Dance' (1804), in which, however, the design is Brownlow North's.

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Still, we fear that Gillray must be generally comprehended in the somewhat audacious assertion of M. Champfleury, that'satirists, from Molière down to Prudhon, only recognise two conditions for women-those of courtezan and housewife.' It will be seen that several of our instances are taken from what may be termed social, in contradistinction to political, caricatures, many of which are quite equally worthy of the master, although not those on which his popularity mainly rests. They are often of a libellous boldness, inconceivable now-a-days, and equally so in earlier times; for the generation to which Gillray belonged stood out in bad pre-eminence among all others in English domestic history in respect of this particular kind of coarseness-a generation which could see exposed in the shop-windows such shameless pictorial satires as those directed against Lady Archer, and other dames of gambling celebrity; or the representation of the dashing daughters of a countess as the Three Graces in a High Wind;' or of a titled beauty nursing her infant in a balldress, as the 'Fashionable Mamma;' or of Lady Cecilia Johnston,

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an inoffensive lady, of unobtrusive style as well as character, against whom it is said the artist had conceived some grudge, which induced him spitefully to represent her in all manner of ludicrous situations, Others of this class, it may be added, related to darker scandals behind the scenes, and may not now be met with in the ordinary collections of Gillray's works, though they excited little comment, and no disgust, in his day. To pass again, for one moment only, from Gillray's merit as an artist, to his specialty as a caricaturist; his strong power of seizing likenesses, and giving them a ludicrous expression, was, no doubt, the chief element of his popularity. In this he surpassed all his predecessors, though he has been equalled by one or two of his successors. But in one bye-quality we are inclined to think him unrivalled: the faculty of giving by a few touches a kind of double expression to a countenance; cowardice underlying bravado; impudence, affected modesty. See, as a specimen, the exceedingly comic representation of Addington and Napoleon, sword in hand, daring each other to cross the Channel which flows between them. A single figure of Burke as an Uniform Whig' (1791), admirably drawn in other respects, conveys much of this mingled meaning, though not quite so easily decipherable. The sage is leaning against a statue of George III.; he holds in one hand Burke's Thoughts on the Revolution,' in the other a cap of liberty; the motto, I preserve my consistency, by varying my means to secure the unity of my end.' The caricaturist's experience had attained for once to something like prophetic strain.' His facility of execution was wonderful. It must, no doubt, be added, as a natural qualification of such praise, that his drawing is often incorrect and careless in the extreme, even after all allowance for what we have never seen fully explained, the vast difference, in point of excellence, between various copies of what is apparently the same print. He is said 'to have etched his ideas at once upon the copper, without making a previous drawing, his only guides being sketches of the distinguished characters he intended to produce, made on small pieces of card, which he always carried about with him.'

Of Rowlandson (born 1756, died 1827), Mr. Wright speaks in high terms of praise, saying that he 'doubtlessly stands second to Gillray, and may, in some respects, be considered as his equal. .. He was distinguished by a remarkable versatility of talent, by a great fecundity of imagination, and by a skill in grouping quite equal to that of Gillray, and with a singular ease in forming his groups of a great variety of figures. It has been remarked, too, that no artist ever possessed the power of Rowlandson of expressing so much with so little effort. We are sorry

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that we cannot, for our own parts, subscribe to these eulogies. As a political caricaturist-to which line he resorted as a matter of trade, espousing the Whig side as others did the Tory-he seems to us dull enough. In general subjects he succeeded better, yet appears to us endowed with all Gillray's coarseness, but with little of his satirical power and none of his artistic genius.

James Sayer, cotemporary with these two as an artist, deserves mention as possessed of a certain amount of original talent, though not of a very high order. He was a bad draughtsman," says Mr. Wright-surely too sweeping a criticism-' and his pictures are produced more by labour than by skill in drawing, but they possess a considerable amount of humour.' His likenesses, generally produced by a small number of hard and carefully-executed lines, seem to us of great merit as such, though wanting in life and energy. He was almost exclusively a political caricaturist, and, unlike the reckless but independent Gillray, he turned his talents to good account, devoting himself to the cause of Pitt, who bestowed on him in return the 'not unlucrative offices of Marshal of the Court of Exchequer, Receiver of the Sixpenny Dues, and Cursitor.' His most famous production was the well-known Carlo Khan's Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall-street' (on the occasion of Fox's India Bill, 1783), still common in collections. But this succeeded chiefly because it fell in with the humour of the time; though the idea is good, the execution is cold, and it is encumbered with symbolical accessories, after the older fashion which we have described. Among his minor works, an unfinished proof of Boswell, Mrs. Piozzi, and others of the Johnsonian clique, with the ghost of the Doctor himself scowling at them from above, exhibits a good deal of his peculiar laborious talent.

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Our catalogue of cotemporaries would hardly be complete without including in it the clever and goodhumoured amateur Henry Bunbury, though no dabbler in State affairs, like Gillray and Sayer. Bunbury had (as Mr. Wright says) 'little taste for political caricature, and seldom meddled with it. He preferred scenes of social life and humorous incidents of cotemporary manners, fashionable or popular.' It may be added that he does not seem to have often inserted portraits in his pieces. He was rather the forerunner of the modern French school of grotesque artists 'de genre,' of whom we shall have a word to say presently. His drawing, says Mr. Wright, 'was often bold and good, but he had little skill in etching.' After some early essays in that line, his designs were engraved by various persons, and his own style was sometimes modified in this pro

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