HISTORICAL SKETCH OF BRITISH
CARICATURE.

CARICATURE is a branch of art of great importance and influence, although its history is but imperfectly known. In no other country has this art been so extensively used for social and political purposes, nor been carried to such great perfection, as in Great Britain. No other country has given it the same amount of encouragement-and chiefly for this reason, that in no other part of the globe has the same measure of freedom been enjoyed by all classes of the people.

Pictorial satire is no new invention; it can be traced among every people of whom we have any historical acquaintance. In the centre of the pyramids, upon Egyptian tombs, on Assyrian remains, and in the catacombs of Rome, caricatures have been met with; and in ancient manuscripts, missals, sculptured pieces of wood, and in architectural decorations of the middle ages, we find the memorials of pictorial humour and satirical invective.

Among our Saxon forefathers caricature was employed, and they seem to have made very free with their rulers, and men in political authority and station. We see this in some of the churches, and the delineations are by no means very flattering. In the church of Bredon, in Leicestershire, there are ranges of figures,

placed in the walls, near the heads of princes and queens, connected with a set of animals grinning over each other's backs, with faces redolent of the most genuine caricature. A pillar at the west end of Ledbury Church, Herefordshire, has a neatly-executed caricatural head placed upon it. There are likewise many curious satirical representations connected with the Anglo-Saxon "gleemen." These practised dancing, tumbling, sleightof-hand-threw balls and knives alternately into the air, and caught them again, one by one. These performers taught animals to dance, tumble, and play many strange tricks and antics. On the friezes of Alderbury, Kilpeck, and other Anglo-Saxon churches, there are pictorial representations of them on the stone walls, and on the wooden parts of the stalls. In one of these old churches, now unhappily in ruins, there are still to be seen several grotesque faces, placed there, according to tradition, by the monks, in derision of the townspeople. There are also two or three Anglo-Saxon coins, found about the middle of the last century in Devonshire, on which there are unmistakeable grotesque figures, ridiculing some of the public authorities of the day.

On the arched corbel table over the doorway of Romsey Abbey, we have various grotesque figures. Mr. Digby Wyatt says, "This is an example of the latter Norman style. The grotesque figures are characteristic of that sculpture, whether Lombard, Rhenish, or Norman, in which, with figures more or less symbolic of divine matters, are mixed up the fancies, and often the coarse jokes of the rude artist.”

As we proceed down the stream of time, we find

caricature in the fourteenth century. There is a prayerbook used by our Richard II., on the back of which there are figured very grotesque representations of choirs of priests, monks, and nuns, employed in the actual service of the church. About the same period, science itself fell under the ban of graphic ridicule. In one of the Cotton manuscripts in the British Museum, there is a caricatural drawing of astronomy, in which there is a figure of a triangle, including three others, on one of the lines of which our Saviour is extended. Two fiends are shooting with bows and arrows at the crucifix; and they are likewise drawn with forky stings in their mouths. There is also still extant a striking caricatural representation of one of our kings, in this century, crossing over the Channel to France. This is, perhaps, one of the earliest specimens of pictorial satire between the two neighbouring nations.

In the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. there were several notable caricatures, which are still extant in some of the private cabinets of the curious. These were mostly of a political and religious character. The first monarch was ridiculed for depressing the influence of the aristocracy of the day, and for his parsimonious habits of life. These sketches are rough, and executed in pen-and-ink. Henry VIII. laid himself very open to the caricaturists of the age; and they often put him in an ill humour-a thing not difficult to do at any time-by their wit and drollery. His contentions with the Pope, and his amorous habits, were the most prolific sources of these graphic squibs.

A William Wraghton was one of the active pictorial

satirists of the day. Little or nothing is known of his private history, further than that he lived principally at Winchester, and that, on the government threatening him with punishment for some of his sketches, he went over to Holland, where he remained for some time, and where, it is conjectured, he got engraved several of those caricatural pieces which connoisseurs have ascribed to his pencil. He came back to England before the death of Henry VIII., for we find Wraghton's name as publisher of a book printed at Winchester in 1545, which contains the first grotesque and satirical illustrations executed in England of that notable romance, "Reynard the Fox," In one of the woodcuts in this rare and curious book we have the fox holding a bishop's crook, and underneath the following lines:

"My son, Steven Gardiner, with wepying teares,

Hath cut away the toppes of myn eaeres ;

But the rest of my body abydeth hole still,

With alle my ceremonies even at my will.
I trust myn eaeres shal grow agayn,

When all the gospellers ar ones slayn.

Whiche Steven, my son, both sterck and stout,
Doth now right ernestly go aboute.

If he can bryng thys mater to pass,

He shal be cardinal, as Fissher was."

Dr. William Turner, a native of Northumberland, following the medical profession at Oxford, and the first writer on botany in the English language, was a sketcher of caricatures against the papal hierarchy. He wrote several satirical works ridiculing the papacy, some of which were illustrated with humorous and witty representations. He was often under the necessity, like

Wraghton, of paying visits to Holland, to escape punishment; and he is conjectured to have been the designer of many of those comic Dutch engravings which were numerously circulated in England in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen Mary. We are told by Warton, in his "Life of Pope," that in the reign of this queen, when England was groaning under the Spanish yoke, her person and government were held up to perpetual ridicule by prints and pictures, "representing her naked, meagre, withered, and wrinkled, with every aggravated circumstance of deformity that could disgrace the female figure; seated in a regal chair, a crown on her head, surrounded by M, R, and A, in capitals, accompanied by small letters-Maria Regina Anglica. A number of Spaniards were sucking her to skin and bone; and a specification was added of the money, rings, jewels, and other presents with which she had secretly gratified her husband Philip."

After the doctrines of the Reformation were pretty fully established in England on the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, caricatures still continued very rife. A great proportion of them came from Holland, but supposed to be the work of English designers. There is a large English print called "Popish Plots and Treasons," representing, in thirty-four separate engravings, the various plots which the Catholic Church has been engaged in for a considerable time back. The satirical emblems are each accompanied with a set of appropriate verses. Appended to the piece we have "A Thankful Remembrance of God's Mercies," by G. S. Printed and sold at John Garret's, Exchange Stairs, Cornhill.