HOGARTH AND HIS TIME.
These Dutch-English pictures William Hogarth, we may be sure, often
inspected as they successively courted public notice in the shops of
London, as we see in his early works a character evidently derived from
them. During the bubble period of 1720, he was an ambitious young
engraver and sign-painter (at least willing to paint signs if a job
offered),[19] much given to penciling likenesses and strange attitudes
upon his thumb-nail, to be transferred, on reaching home, to paper, and
stored away for future use. He was one of those quick draughtsmen who
will sketch you upon the spot a rough caricature of any odd person,
group, or event that may have excited the mirth of the company; a young
fellow somewhat undersized, with an alert, vigorous frame, a bright,
speaking eye, a too quick tongue and temper, self-confident, but honest,
sturdy, and downright in all his words and ways. "But I was a good
paymaster even _then_" he once said, with just pride, after speaking of
the days when he sometimes walked London streets without a shilling in
his pocket.
[Footnote 19: "Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum,"
Division I., vol. ii., p. 566.]
_Hogherd_ was the original name of the family, which was first humanized
into Hogert and Hogart, and then softened into its present form. In
Westmoreland, where Hogarth's grandfather cultivated a farm--small, but
his own--the first syllable of the name was pronounced like that of the
domestic animals which his remote ancestors may have herded. There was a
vein of talent in the family, an uncle of Hogarth's having been the
song-writer and satirist of his village, and his own father emerging
from remote and most rustic Westmoreland to settle in London as a poor
school-master and laborious, ill-requited compiler of school-books and
proof-reader. A Latin dictionary of his making existed in manuscript
after the death of the artist, and a Latin letter written by him is one
of the curiosities in the British Museum. But he remained always a poor
man, and could apprentice his boy only to an engraver of the lowest
grade known to the art. But this sufficed for a lad who could scarcely
touch paper with a pencil without betraying his gift, who drew capital
burlesques upon his nail when he was fifteen, and entertained Addison's
coffee-house with a caricature of its landlord when he was twenty-two.
[Illustration: The Sleeping Congregation. (Hogarth.)]
The earliest work by this greatest English artist of his century, which
has been preserved in the British Museum (1720), shows the bent of his
genius as plainly as the first sketch by Boz betrays the quality of
Dickens. It is called "Design for a Shop-bill," and was probably
Hogarth's own shop-bill, his advertisement to the public that he was
able and willing to paint signs. In those days, the school-master not
having yet gone "abroad," signs were usually pictorial, and sometimes
consisted of the popular representation of the saint having special
charge of the business to be recommended. In Hogarth's shop-bill we see
a tall man holding up a newly painted sign of St. Luke with his ox and
book, at which a group of persons are looking, while Hogarth himself
appears to be showing the sign to them as possible customers. Along the
bottom of the sign is engraved W. HOGARTH, PAINTER. In the background is
seen an artist painting at an easel and a boy grinding colors. He could
not even in this first homely essay avoid giving his work something of
a narrative character. He must exhibit a story with humorous details. So
in his caricature of Daniel Button, drawn to ridicule the Tory
frequenters of Button's coffee-house, he relates an incident as well as
burlesques individuals. There stands Master Button in his professional
apron, with powdered wig and frilled shirt; and opposite to him a tall,
seedy, stooping scholar or poet is storming at the landlord with
clinched fists, because he will not let him have a cup of coffee without
the money. There is also the truly Hogarthian incident of a dog smelling
suspiciously the poet's coat tail. Standing about the room are persons
whom tradition reports to have been intended as portraits of Pope,
Steele, Addison, Arbuthnot, and others of Button's famous customers.
This drawing, executed with a brush, is also preserved in the British
Museum. Daniel Button, as Dr. Johnson reports, had once been a servant
in the family of the Countess of Warwick, and was placed in the
coffee-house by Addison. A writer in the _Spectator_ alludes to this
haunt of the Tories: "I was a Tory at Button's and a Whig at Child's."
The South Sea delusion drew from Hogarth his first engraved caricature.
Among the Dutch engravings of 1720, called forth by the schemes of John
Law, there was one in which the victims were represented in a
merry-go-round, riding in revolving cars or upon wooden horses, the
whole kept in motion by a horse ridden by the devil. The picture
presents also the usual multitude of confusing details, such as the
Dutch mad-house in the distance, with a long train of vehicles going
toward it. In availing himself of this device the young Londoner showed
much of that skill in the arrangement of groups, and that fertility in
the invention of details, which marked his later works. His whirligig
revolves higher in the air than in the Dutch picture, enabling him to
show his figures clear of the crowd below, and instead of the devil on
horseback giving the motion, he assigns that work more justly to the
directors of the South Sea Company. Thus he has room and opportunity to
impart a distinct character to most of his figures. We see perched aloft
on the wooden horses about to be whirled around, a nobleman with his
broad ribbon, a shoe-black, an old woman, a wigged clergyman, and a
woman of the town. With his usual uncompromising humor, Hogarth places
these last two characters next to one another, and while the clergyman
ogles the woman, she chucks him under the chin. There is a world of
accessories: a devil exhaling fire, standing behind a counter and
cutting pieces of flesh from the body of Fortune and casting them to a
hustling crowd of Catholic, Puritan, and Jew; Self-Interest breaking
Honesty upon a wheel; a crowd of women rushing pell-mell into an edifice
gabled with horns, and bearing the words, "Raffling for Husbands with
Lottery Fortunes in here;" Honor in the pillory flogged by Villainy; an
ape wearing a sword and cap. The scene chosen by the artist for these
remarkable events is the open space in which the monument stands, then
fresh and new, which commemorates the Great Fire; but he slyly changes
the inscription thus: "This Monument was erected in Memory of the
Destruction of this City by the South Sea in 1720."
Hogarth, engraver and sign-painter though he may have been, was all
himself in this amusing and effective piece. If the Dutch picture and
Hogarth's could be placed here side by side, the reader would have
before him an interesting example of the honest plagiarism of genius,
which does not borrow gold and merely alter the stamp, but converts a
piece of crude ore into a Toledo blade. Unfortunately, both pictures are
too large and crowded to admit of effective reduction.
In this, his first published work, the audacious artist availed himself
of an expedient which heightened the effect of most of his later
pictures. He introduced portraits of living persons. Conspicuous in the
foreground of the South Sea caricature, among other personages now
unknown, is the diminutive figure of Alexander Pope, who was one of the
few lucky speculators of the year 1720. At least, he withdrew in time to
save half the sum which he once thought he had made. The gloating rake
in the first picture of the "Harlot's Progress" is that typical
reprobate of eighteenth-century romances, Colonel Francis Charteris,
upon whom Arbuthnot wrote the celebrated epitaph, which, it is to be
hoped, is itself a caricature:
"Here continueth to rot
the body of FRANCIS CHARTERIS,
who, with an INFLEXIBLE CONSTANCY and
INIMITABLE UNIFORMITY of life,
PERSISTED,
in spite of AGE and INFIRMITIES,
in the practice of EVERY HUMAN VICE,
excepting PRODIGALITY and HYPOCRISY.
His insatiable AVARICE exempted him from the first;
his matchless IMPUDENCE from the second.
Oh, indignant reader!
think not his life useless to mankind;
Providence connived at his execrable designs
to give to after-ages a conspicuous
proof and example
of how small estimation is EXORBITANT WEALTH
in the sight of GOD, by His bestowing it on
the most UNWORTHY OF ALL MORTALS."
Hogarth was as much a humorist in his life as he was in his works. The
invitation to Mr. King to _eta beta py_, given on the next page, was one
of many similar sportive efforts of his pencil. He once boasted that he
could draw a sergeant carrying his pike, entering an ale-house, followed
by his dog, all in three strokes. He produced the following, also given
on next page:
He explained the drawing thus: A is the perspective line of the door; B,
the end of the sergeant's pike, who has gone in; C, the end of the dog's
tail.
[Illustration: Hogarth's Invitation Card.]
[Illustration: Diagram.]
Nor was he too nice in his choice of subjects for way-side treatment.
One of his fellow-apprentices used to relate an anecdote of the time
when they were accustomed to make the usual Sunday excursion into the
country, Hogarth being fifteen years of age. In a tap-room row a man
received a severe cut upon the forehead with a quart beer-pot, which
brought blood, and caused him to "distort his features into a most
hideous grin." Hogarth produced his pencil and instantly drew a
caricature of the scene, including a most ludicrous and striking
likeness of the wounded man. There was of necessity a good deal of
_tap-room_ in all humorous art and literature of that century, and he
was perfectly at home in scenes of a beery cast.
The "Five Days' Peregrination" of Hogarth and his friends, of which
Thackeray discoursed to us so agreeably in one of his lectures, occurred
when the artist was thirty-four years of age. But it shows us the same
jovial Londoner, whose manners and pleasures, as Mr. Thackeray remarked,
though honest and innocent, were "not very refined." Five friends set
out on foot early in the morning from their tavern haunt in Covent
Garden, gayly singing the old song, "Why should we quarrel for riches?"
Billingsgate was their first halting-place, where, as the appointed
historian of the jaunt records, "Hogarth made the caricature of a
porter, who called himself the Duke of Puddle Dock," which "drawing was
by his grace pasted on the cellar door." At Rochester, "Hogarth and
Scott stopped and played at hop-scotch in the colonnade under the
Town-hall." The Nag's Head at the village of Stock sheltered them one
night, when, after supper, "we adjourned to the door, drank punch, stood
and sat for our pictures drawn by Hogarth." In another village the merry
blades "got a wooden chair, and placed Hogarth in it in the street,
where he made the drawing, and gathered a great many men, women, and
children about him to see his performance." The same evening, over their
flip, they were entertaining the tap-room with their best songs, when
some Harwich lobster-men came in and sung several sea-songs so agreeably
that the Londoners were "quite put out of countenance." "Our _St.
John_," records the scribe of the adventure, "would not come in
competition, nor could _Pishoken_ save us from disgrace." Here, too, is
a Hogarthian incident: "Hogarth called me up and told me the good-woman
insisted on being paid for her bed, or having Scott before the mayor,
_which last we did all in our power to promote_." And so they merrily
tramped the country round, singing, drawing, copying comic epitaphs, and
pelting one another with dirt, returning to London at the end of the
five days, having expended just six guineas--five shillings a day each
man.
[Illustration: Time Smoking a Picture.]
His sense of humor appears in his serious writings. One illustration
which he gives in his "Analysis of Beauty," to show the essential and
exhaustless charm of the waving line, is in the highest degree comic: "I
once heard an eminent dancing-master say that the minuet had been the
study of his whole life, and that he had been indefatigable in the
pursuit of its beauties, yet at last could only say, with Socrates, _he
knew nothing_, adding that I was happy in my profession as a painter, in
that some bounds might be set to the study of it."
In his long warfare with the picture-dealers, who starved living art in
England by the manufacture of "old masters," he employed ridicule and
caricature with powerful effect. His masterly caricature of "Time
smoking a Picture" was well seconded by humorous letters to the press,
and by many a passing hit in his more elaborate writings. He maintained
that a painting is never so good as at the moment it leaves the artist's
hands, time having no possible effect upon it except to impair its
beauty and diminish its truth. There was penned at this period a
burlesque "Bill of Monsieur Varnish to Benjamin Bister," which is
certainly Hogarthian, if it is not Hogarth's, and might well serve as a
companion piece to the engraving. Among the items are these:
_L s. d._
To painting and canvas for a naked Mary Magdalen, in the
undoubted style of Paul Veronese 2 2 0
To brimstone, for smoking ditto 0 2 0
Paid Mrs. W---- for a live model to sit for Diana bathing,
by Tintoretto 0 16 0
Paid for the hire of a layman, to copy the robes of a
Cardinal, for a Vandyck 0 5 0
Paid the female figure for sitting thirty minutes in a wet
sheet, that I might give the dry manner of that master 0 10 6
The Tribute-money Rendered, with all the exactness of Quintin
Metsius, the famed blacksmith of Antwerp 2 12 6
The Martyrdom of St. Winifred, with a view of Holywell Bath,
by old Frank 1 11 6
To a large allegorical altarpiece, consisting of men and
angels, horses and river gods; 'tis thought most happily
hit off for a Rubens 5 5 0
Paid for admission into the House of Peers, to take a sketch
of a great character, for a picture of Moses breaking the
Tables of the Law, in the darkest manner of Rembrandt, not
yet finished 0 2 6
The idea of a wet sheet imparting the effect of dryness was taken from a
treatise on painting, which stated that "some of the ancient masters
acquired a dry manner of painting from studying after wet drapery."
This robust and downright Briton, strong in the consciousness of
original and native genius, did not object merely to the manufacture of
old masters, but also to the excessive value placed upon the genuine
productions of the great men of old. He could not feel it to be just or
favorable to the progress of art that works representing a state of
feeling long ago outgrown in England should take precedence of paintings
instinct with the life of the present hour. In other words, he did not
enjoy seeing one of his own paintings sell at auction for fourteen
guineas, and an Old Master bring a thousand. He grew warm when he
denounced "the picture-jobbers from abroad," who imported continually
"ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal,
dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental, on which they scrawl
the terrible cramp names of some Italian masters, and fix upon us
Englishmen the name of universal dupes." He imagines a scene between one
of those old-master mongers and his customer. The victim says:
"'Mr. Bubbleman, that grand Venus, as you are pleased to call it, has
not beauty enough for the character of an English cook-maid.' Upon which
the quack answers, with a confident air: 'Sir, I find that you are no
_connoisseur_; the picture, I assure you, is in Alesso Baldminetto's
second and best manner, boldly painted, and truly sublime: the contour
gracious; the air of the head in high Greek taste; and a most divine
idea it is.' Then spitting in an obscure place, and rubbing it with a
dirty handkerchief, takes a skip to t'other end of the room, and screams
out in raptures, 'There's an amazing touch! A man should have this
picture a twelvemonth in his collection before he can discover half its
beauties!' The gentleman (though naturally a judge of what is beautiful,
yet ashamed to be out of the fashion by judging for himself) with this
cant is struck dumb, gives a vast sum for the picture, very modestly
confesses he is indeed quite ignorant of painting, and bestows a frame
worth fifty pounds on a frightful thing, which, without the hard name,
is not worth so many farthings."
[Illustration:
The no Dedication
Not Dedicated to any Prince in Christendom
for fear it might be thought an
Idle piece of Arrogance.
Nor Dedicated to any man of quality
for fear it might be thought too assuming.
Nor Dedicated to any learned body
of Men, as either of the universities or the
Royal Society, for fear it might be thought
an uncommon piece of Vanity.
Nor Dedicated to any one particular Friend
for fear of offending another.
Therefore Dedicated to nobody.
But if for once we may suppose
Nobody to be every body, as Every body
is often said to be nobody, then is this work
Dedicated to every body.
by their most humble
and devoted W. Hogarth
Dedication of a Proposed History of the Arts. (From Hogarth's
Manuscript.[20])]
[Footnote 20: "Hogarth's Works," frontispiece to vol. iii., by Ireland
and Nichols.]
He gives picture-buyers a piece of advice which many of them have since
taken, to the sore distress of their guests: Use your own eyes, and buy
the pictures which _they_ dwell upon with delight.
In the heat of controversy, Hogarth, as usual, went too far; but he
stood manfully by his order, and defended resolutely their rights and
his own. Artists owe him undying gratitude for two great services: he
showed them a way to independence by setting up in business on his own
account, becoming his own engraver and publisher, and retaining always
the ownership of his own plates, which, indeed, constituted his estate,
and supported creditably his family as long as any of them lived. He
served all artists, too, by defending himself against the pirates who
flooded the market with meanly executed copies of his own engravings. It
was William Hogarth who obtained from Parliament the first act which
secured to artists the sole right to multiply and sell copies of their
works; and this right is the very corner-stone of a great national
painter's independence. That act made genuine art a possible profession
in England.
Such was Hogarth, the original artist of his country, an honest, valiant
citizen, who stood his ground, paid his way, cheered and admonished his
generation. He had the faults which belong to a positive character, trod
on many toes, was often misunderstood, and had his ample share of
trouble and contention. All that is now forgotten; and he was never so
much valued, so frequently reproduced, so generally possessed, or so
carefully studied as at the present time.
The generation that forms great satirists shines in the history of
literature, but not in that of morals; for to supply with objects of
satire such masters of the satiric arts as Hogarth, Swift, Pope, Gay,
Steele, Arbuthnot, and Foote, there must be deep corruption in the State
and radical folly in conspicuous persons. The process which has since
been named "secularization" had then fairly set in. The brilliant men of
the time had learned to deride the faith which had been a restraining
force upon the propensities of man for fifteen centuries, but were very
far from having learned to be continent, temperate, and just without its
aid. "Four treatises against the miracles" Voltaire boasted of having
seen during his residence in England in 1727 and 1728; but these
treatises did not moderate the warmth of human passions, nor change any
other element in the difficult problem of existence. Walpole bribed,
Swift maligned, Bolingbroke intrigued, Charteris seduced, and
Marlborough peculated just as if the New Light had not dawned and the
miracles had remained intact. Do we not, even in our own time, see
inquiring youth, bred in strait-laced homes, assuming that since there
are now two opinions as to the origin of things, it is no longer
necessary to comply with the moral laws? The splendid personages of that
period seem to have been in a moral condition similar to that of such a
youth. It was the fashion to be dissolute; it was "provincial" to obey
those laws of our being from compliance with which all human welfare and
all honest joy have come.
[Illustration: Sir Robert Walpole paring the Nails of the British Lion.]
Politics were still most rudimentary. The English people were fully
resolved on keeping out the dull and deadly Stuarts; but the price they
had to pay for this was to submit to the rule of the dull and difficult
Georges, whose bodies were in England and their hearts in Hanover.
Between the king and the people stood Sir Robert Walpole--as good a man
as could have held the place--who went directly to the point with
members and writers, ascertained their price, and paid it. According to
one of Pope's bitter notes on the "Dunciad," where he quotes a
Parliamentary report, this minister in ten years paid to writers and
publishers of newspapers "fifty thousand pounds eighteen shillings!" How
much he paid to members of Parliament was a secret known only to himself
and the king. The venality of the press was frequently burlesqued, as
well as the fulsome pomp of its purchased eulogies. A very good specimen
is that which appeared in 1735, during a ministerial crisis, when the
opposition had high hopes of ousting the tenacious Walpoles. An
"Advertisement" was published, in which was offered for sale a "neat and
curious collection of well-chosen similes, allusions, metaphors, and
allegories from the best plays and romances, modern and ancient, proper
to adorn a panegyric on the glorious patriots designed to succeed the
present ministry." The author gave notice that "all sublunary metaphors
of a new minister, being a Rock, a Pillar, a Bulwark, a Strong Tower, or
a Spire Steeple, will be allowed very cheap;" but celestial ones, being
brought from the other world at a great expense, must be held at a
higher rate. The author announced that he had prepared a collection of
State satires, which would serve, with little variation, to libel a
judge, a bishop, or a prime minister. "N.B.--The same satirist has
collections of reasons ready by him against the ensuing peace, though he
has not yet read the preliminaries or seen one article of the
pacification."
[Illustration: Dutch Neutrality, 1745.]
There was also a burlesque "Bill of Costs for a late Tory Election in
the West," in which we find such items as "bespeaking and collecting a
mob," "a set of No-Roundhead roarers," "a set of coffee-house praters,"
"Dissenter damners," "demolishing two houses," "committing two riots,"
"breaking windows," "roarers of the word CHURCH," "several gallons of
Tory punch on church tombstones." It is questionable, however, if in all
the burlesques of the period there was one more ridiculous than the
narrative of an actual occurrence in April, 1715, when the footmen of
members of the House of Commons met outside of the House, according to
established custom, to elect a Speaker. The Tory footmen cast their
votes for "Sir Thomas Morgan's servant," and the Whigs for "Mr.
Strickland's man." A dispute arising, a fight ensued between the two
parties, in the midst of which the House broke up, and the footmen were
obliged to attend their masters. The next day, as soon as the House was
in session, the fight was renewed, and, after a desperate struggle, the
victorious Whigs carried their man three times in triumph round
Westminster Hall, and then adjourned to a Whig ale-house, the landlord
of which gave them a dinner, the footmen paying only for their drink.
[Illustration: British Idolatry of the Opera-Singer Mingotti, 1756.
"Ra, ra, ra, rot ye,
My name is Mingotti.
If you worship me notti,
You shall all go to potti."]
The caricatures of the Walpole period preserve the record of the first
attempt to lessen by law the intemperate drinking of gin--the most
pernicious of the spirituous liquors. A law was passed imposing upon
this article a very heavy excise, and prohibiting its sale in small
quantities. But in 1736 England had not reached, by a century and a
half, the development of civilization which admits of the adequate
consideration of such a measure; nor can the poor man's gin _ever_ be
limited by law while the rich man's wine flows free. This gin law
appears to have been killed by ridicule. Ballads lamenting the near
decease of "Mother Gin" were sung in the streets; the gin-shop signs
were hung with black, and there were mock ceremonies of "Madame Geneva's
Lying in State," "Mother Gin's Wake," and "Madame Gin's Funeral."
Paragraphs notified the public that the funeral of Madame Gin was
celebrated with great merriment, many of both sexes "getting soundly
drunk," and a mob following her remains with torches. The night before
the measure went into operation was one of universal revel among the
gin-drinkers, and every one, we are assured, carried off as much of the
popular liquor, for future consumption, as he could pay for. The law was
evaded by the expedients long afterward employed in Maine, when first a
serious attempt was made to enforce the "Maine Law." Apothecaries and
others colored their gin, put it into phials, and labeled it "Colic
Water," "Make-shift," "The Ladies' Delight," with printed "Directions"
to take two or three spoonfuls three or four times a day, "or as often
as the fit takes you." Informers sprung into an importance never before
known, and many of them invented snares to decoy men into violations of
the law. So odious did they become that if one of them fell into the
hands of the mob, he was lucky to escape with only a ducking in the
Thames or a horse-trough. In short, the attempt was ill-considered and
premature, and after an experiment of two or three years it was given
up, having contributed something toward the growing unpopularity of the
ministry.
[Illustration: The Motion (for the Removal of Sir Robert Walpole).]
The downfall of Sir Robert Walpole, after holding office for twenty
years, was preceded by an animated fire of caricature, in which the
adherents of Walpole held their own. The specimen given above, entitled
"The Motion," was reduced from one of the most famous caricatures of the
reign of George II., and one of the most finely wrought of the
century.[21] Horace Walpole, son of the great minister, wrote from
Florence that the picture had "diverted him extremely," and that the
likenesses were "admirable." To us the picture says nothing until it is
explained; but every London apprentice of the period recognized
Whitehall and the Treasury, toward which the Opposition was driving with
such furious haste, and could distinguish most of the personages
exhibited. A few days before this caricature appeared, Sandys, who was
styled the motion-maker, from the frequency of his attempts to array the
House of Commons against the Walpole ministry, moved once more an
address to the king, that he would be pleased to remove Sir Robert
Walpole from his presence and councils forever. The debate upon this
motion was long and most vehement, and though the ministry triumphed, it
was one of those bloody victories which presage overthrow. On the same
day a similar "motion" was made in the House of Lords by Lord Carteret,
where an equally violent discussion was followed by a vote sustaining
the ministry. The exultation of the Walpole party inspired this famous
caricature, in which we see the Opposition peers trying to reach office
in a lordly coach and six, and the Commons trudging toward the same goal
on foot, their leader, Pulteney, wheeling a load of Opposition
newspapers, and leading his followers by the nose. Every politician of
note on the side of the Opposition is in the picture: Lord Chesterfield
is the postilion; the Duke of Argyll the coachman; Lord Carteret the
gentleman inside the coach, who, becoming conscious of the breakdown,
cries, "Let me get out!" Bubb Dodington is the spaniel between the
coachman's legs; the footman behind the coach is Lord Cobham, and the
outrider Lord Lyttelton. On the side of the Commons there is Sandys,
dropping in despair his favorite, often-defeated "Place Bill," and
exclaiming, "I thought what would come of putting _him_ on the box?"
Much of the humor and point of the picture is lost to us, because the
peculiar relations of the persons portrayed to the public, to their
party, and to one another can not now be perfectly recalled.
[Footnote 21: Thomas Wright, "Caricature History of the Georges," p.
128.]
Edition after edition of "The Motion" appeared, one of which was so
arranged that it could be fitted to the frame of a lady's fan, a common
device at the time. The Opposition retorted with a parody of the
picture, which they styled "The Reason," in which Walpole figures as the
coachman, driving the coach of state to destruction. Another parody was
called "The Motive," in which the king was the passenger and Walpole the
driver. Then followed "A Consequence of the Motion," "Motion upon
Motion," "The Grounds," and others. The Walpole party surpassed their
opponents in caricature; but caricature is powerless to turn back a
genuine tide of public feeling, and a year later Sir Robert was
honorably shelved in the House of Lords.
From this time forward the history of Europe is recorded or burlesqued
in the comic pictures of the shop-window; not merely the conspicuous
part played in it by ministers and kings, but the foibles, the fashions,
the passions, the vices, the credulities, the whims, of each generation.
The British rage for the Italian opera, the enormous sums paid to the
singers, the bearish manners of Handel, the mania for gaming, the
audacity of highwaymen, and the impositions upon popular credulity no
more escape the satirist's pencil than Braddock's defeat, the Queen of
Hungary's loss of Silesia, or William Pitt's timely, and also his
ill-timed, fits of the gout. Nor were the abuses of the Church
overlooked. One picture, entitled "The Fat Pluralist and his Lean
Curates," published in 1733, exhibited a corpulent dignitary of the
Church in a chariot drawn by six meagre and wretched curates. The portly
priest carries under one arm a large church, and a cathedral under the
other, while at his feet are two sucking pigs, a hen, and a goose, which
he has taken as tithe from a farmyard in the distance. "The Church,"
says the pluralist, "was made for me, not I for the Church;" and under
the wheels of the coach is a book marked "The Thirty-nine Articles." One
starving curate cries, piteously, "Lord, be merciful to us poor
curates!" to which another responds, "And send us more comfortable
livings!" It required a century of satire and remonstrance to get that
one monstrous abuse of the Church Ring reduced to proportions
approaching decency. Corruption in the city of New York in the darkest
days of Tweed was less universal, less systematic, less remote from
remedy, than that of the Government of Great Britain under the least
incapable of its four Georges. It was merely more decorous.
[Illustration: Antiquaries Puzzled. (London, 1756.)]
A specimen of the harmless, good-humored satire aimed at the zealous
antiquaries of the last century is given above. This picture may have
suggested to Mr. Dickens the familiar scene in "Pickwick" where the
roving members of the Pickwick Club discover the stone commemorative of
Bill Stumps. The mysterious inscription in the picture is, "Beneath this
stone reposeth Claud Coster, tripe-seller of Impington, as doth his
consort Jane."