Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 27

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Threatened Invasion of England, 1804. (Gillray.)

(The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver. _Scene_--Gulliver manoeuvring with his little boat in the cistern.--_Vide_ Swift's "Gulliver.")

"I often used to row for my own diversion, as well as that of the queen and her ladies, who thought themselves well entertained with my skill and agility. Sometimes I would put up my sail and show my art by steering starboard and larboard. However, my attempts produced nothing else besides a loud laughter, which all the respect due to his majesty from those about him could not make them contain. This made me reflect how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Bibliomaniac. (George Cruikshank, 1871.)]

There is perhaps no gift so likely to be transmitted from father to son as a talent for drawing. Certainly it runs in the Cruikshank family, for there are already five of the name known to collectors, much to their confusion. As a guide to Mr. Reid in the preparation of his catalogue, the old gentleman made a brief statement, which is one of the curiosities of art gossip, and it may serve a useful purpose to collectors in the United States. His father, Isaac Cruikshank, was a designer and etcher and engraver, as well as a water-color draughtsman.

His brother, Isaac Robert, a miniature and portrait painter, was also a designer and etcher, and "your humble servant likewise a designer and etcher. When I was a mere boy," he adds, "my dear father kindly allowed me to play at etching on some of his copper-plates, little bits of shadows or little figures in the background, and to a.s.sist him a little as I grew older, and he used to a.s.sist _me_ in putting in hands and faces. And when my dear brother Robert (who in his latter days omitted the Isaac) left off portrait-painting, and took almost entirely to designing and etching, I a.s.sisted him, at first to a great extent, in some of his drawings." The result was that, in looking over the pictures of sixty years ago, he could not always tell his own work; and, to make matters worse, his brother left a son, Percy Cruikshank, also a draughtsman and engraver, and he, too, has an artist son, named George.

The family has provided work for the coming connoisseur.

The glory of the living veteran, however, will remain unique, because he, first of the comic artists of his country, caught the new spirit, avoided the grossness and thoughtless one-sidedness of his predecessors, and used his art in such a manner that now, in his eighty-fourth year, looking back through the long gallery of his works gathered by the affectionate persistence of his admirers, he can not point to one picture which for any moral reason he could wish to turn to the wall.

England owes much to her humorists of the new humane school. She owes, perhaps, more than she yet perceives, because the changes which they promote in manners and morals come about slowly and unmarked. It is the American revisiting the country after many years of absence who perceives the ameliorations which the satiric pencil and pen have conjointly produced; nor are those ameliorations hidden from the American who treads for the first time the fast-anch.o.r.ed isle. It is with a peculiar rapturous recognition that we hail every indication of that England with which English art and literature have made us acquainted--a very different country indeed from the England of politics and the newspaper. A student who found himself one fine Sunday morning in June gliding past the lovely Hampshire coast, covered with farms, lawns, and villas, gazed in silence for a long time, and could only relieve his mind at last by gasping, "Thomson's 'Seasons?'" His first glance revealed to him, what he had never before suspected, that the rural poetry of England applied in a particular manner to the land that inspired it, could have been written only there, and only there could be quite appreciated. From Chaucer to Tennyson there is not a sterling line in it which could have been what it is if it had been composed in any part of the Western continent. We have a flower which we call a daisy, a weed coa.r.s.ened by our fierce sun, betraying barrenness of soil, and suggestive of careless culture. There is also to be seen in our windows and greenhouses a flower named the primrose, which, though it has its merit, has not been celebrated by poets, nor is likely to be.

But the instant we see an English road-side bright with primroses and daisies, we find ourselves saying, "Yes, of course; _these_ are what the poets mean; _this_ is the daisy of Shakspeare and Burns; _here_ is Wordsworth's yellow primrose!" And we go on holding similar discourse with ourselves as often as we descry the objects, at once familiar and unknown, which in every age the poets of Great Britain have loved to sing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hope--A Phrenological Ill.u.s.tration. (George Cruikshank, 1826.)]

But when, in these recent days, the same traveler observes the human life of English streets and homes and public places, he does not perceive so exact a resemblance to the life portrayed in books and pictures. English life seems gentler and better than it was represented forty years ago; manners are freer and more cordial; people are less intemperate; the physical life is much less obstreperous; the topics discussed have a more frequent relation to the higher interests of human nature. The glory of the last generation was held to be Waterloo; the distinction of the present one is a peaceful arbitration. The six-bottle men of Sheridan's time--where are they? Gone, quite gone. _One_ bottle is now almost as unusual as it is excessive. Gone is the coach, with its long train of barbarisms--its bloated Wellers, its coachmen who swallowed "an imperial pint of vinegar" with their oysters without winking, its mountainous landlord skillful in charging, its general horseyness and c.u.mbersome inconvenience. The hideous prize-fight seems finally suppressed. If there are still estates upon which there are family cottages of one room, they are held in horror, and it is an axiom accepted that the owner who permits them to remain is a truer savage than the most degraded peasants who inhabit them.

Art, humanizing art, has reached a development which a dreamer of Hogarth's day could not have antic.i.p.ated for any period much short of the millennium; and not a development only, but a wide diffusion.

Chadband--where is he? If he exists, he has a.s.sumed a less offensive form than when he ate m.u.f.fins and sniveled inanity in Mrs. Snagsby's back room. Where are Thackeray's sn.o.bs? They, too, have not ceased to be, for the foible which he satirized is an integral part of human nature, which can be enn.o.bled, not eradicated. Strangers, however, do not often observe those violent and crude manifestations of it which Thackeray describes; and there seems a likelihood of the "Book of Sn.o.bs"

meeting the fate of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," which made itself obsolete by accomplishing its purposes. Beer still flows redundant in every part of the British Empire. Nevertheless, there is here and there a person who has discovered how much more can be got out of life by avoiding stimulation. A decided advance must have been made toward tolerance of opinion when men can be borne to honorable burial in Westminster Abbey whose opinions were at variance with those which built and sustain the edifice. Chadbandom feebly protests, but no man regards it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Term Time. (George Cruikshank, 1827.)]

There are men still alive who remember the six-bottle period and all its strenuous vulgarities, the period when the whole strength of the empire was put forth in the Bonaparte wars. William Chambers, who was born when George Cruikshank was a boy of eight, speaks of those years as a time of universal violence. Children, ruled by violence at home and by cruelty at school, pummeled and bullied one another in turn, besides practicing habitual cruelty toward birds and beasts, hunting cats, pelting dogs, plundering birds' nests. He tells us of a carter who used to turn out his horses to die on the common of his native town, where the boys, in the sight of the people, and without being admonished by them, would daily amuse themselves by stoning the helpless creatures till they had battered the life out of them. The news that roused the people was all of bloodshed on land and sea. The only pleasures that were held to be entirely worthy of men were hard riding and deep drinking. Those diaries of persons who flourished in the first half of George Cruikshank's life, of which so many volumes have been published lately--those, for example, of Moore, Greville, Jerdan, and Young--what are they but a monotonous record of dinner anecdotes? Marryat's novels preserve a popular exhibition of that fighting age, and we perceive from his memoirs that he did not exaggerate its more savage characteristics. Several of his most brutal incidents were transcripts from his own experience.

Comic art, which the amelioration of manners has purified, has done much in its turn to strengthen and diffuse that amelioration. Isaac Cruikshank was among the last of the old school. He seems to have kept his pencil on hire, for we have caricatures of his on all sides of the politics of his time, from conservative to radical. In 1795 he represented William Pitt as the royal extinguisher putting out the flame of sedition; but in 1797 he exhibited the same minister in the character of a showman deceiving the people with regard to the condition of the country. "Observe," says "Billy," "what a busy scene presents itself.

The ports are filled with shipping, riches are flowing in from every quarter." But the countrymen standing around declare that they can see nothing but "a woide plain with some mountains and mole-hills upon't,"

and conjecture that the fine things which Billy sees must be behind one of the mole-hills. During the same year we find him caricaturing Fox, the leader of the Opposition, as having laid a train for the purpose of blowing up the Const.i.tution, and then leaving to others the risk of touching it off. On both sides of the Irish questions of his day he employed his pencil, ridiculing in some pictures the Irish discontents, and in others the measures proposed by ministers for quieting them. When the old king was losing his reason, he drew him as a "farthing rush-light," around which were the Prince of Wales, Fox, Sheridan, and their friends, all trying to blow out the flickering flame. At length, in 1810, he caricatured the Burdett riots in a manner to please the most "advanced" radical. This picture, however, may have been a tribute to the mere audacity of the member for Westminster, who barricaded his house for four days against the officers of the House of Commons ordered to arrest him.

It was while Isaac Cruikshank was occasionally drawing such caricatures as these that he "kindly allowed" his son George, "a mere boy," to "play at etching on some of his copper-plates." The first real work done by the lad was of a very modest character, but he speaks of them in a way to make us regret that even they should have been lost. "Many of my first productions, such as half-penny lottery books and books for little children, can never be known or seen, having been destroyed long, long ago by the dear little ones who had them to play with."

Men who write so of little children that tore up their picture-books seventy years before are not formed for the strife of politics. George Cruikshank early in life withdrew from political caricature, but not before he had executed a few pictures of which he might reasonably boast in his old age, after time had justified their severity. This aged artist, who has lived to see the laws repealed which restricted the importation of grain into England, was just coming of age when those laws were pa.s.sed, and he expressed his opinion of them in a caricature called "The Blessings of Peace; or, The Curse of the Corn Bill." It was in 1815--the year that consigned Bonaparte to St. Helena, and gave peace to Europe. A vessel laden with grain has arrived from a foreign port, and the supercargo, holding out a handful, says, "Here is the best for fifty shillings." But on the sh.o.r.e stands a store-house filled with home-grown grain, tight shut, in front of which is a group of British land-owners, one of whom waves the foreign trader away, saying: "We won't have it at any price. We are determined to keep up our own to eighty shillings, and if the poor can't buy it at that price, why, they must starve." The foreign grain is thrown overboard, while a starving family looks on, and the father says, "No, no, masters, I'll not starve, but quit my native country, where the poor are crushed by those they labor to support, and retire to one more hospitable, and where the arts of the rich do not interpose to defeat the providence of G.o.d."

Such is the Protective System: an interested few, having the ear of the Government, thriving at the expense of the many who have not the ear of the Government! This young man saw the point in 1815 as clearly as Cobden, Peel, or Mill in 1846.

In the same year he aimed a caricature at the ministry who took off the income tax, and lessened the taxes upon property without diminishing those which bore more directly upon the poor. Many pictures in a similar spirit followed; but while he was still a young man he followed the bent of his disposition, and has ever since employed his pencil in what his great master Hogarth once styled "moral comedies," wherein humor appears as the ally and teacher of morals.

John Doyle, who reigned next in the shop-windows of Great Britain, and continued to bear sway for twenty years--1829 to 1849--was not known by name to the generation which he amused. It chanced one day that two I's, in a printing-office where he was, stood close to two D's, and he observed that the conjunction formed a figure resembling HB. He adopted this as the mark or signature of his caricatures, and consequently he was always spoken of as H. B. down to the time of his death, which occurred about the year 1869. He, too, shared the spirit of the better time. Collectors number his published caricatures at nine hundred and seventeen, which have been re-issued in eleven volumes; but in none of his works is there any thing of the savage vulgarity of the caricatures produced during the Bonaparte wars. It was a custom with English print-sellers to keep port-folios of his innocent and amusing pictures to let out by the evening to families about to engage in the arduous work of entertaining their friends at dinner. He excelled greatly in his portraits, many of which, it is said by contemporaries, are the best ever taken of the noted men of that day, and may be safely accepted as historical. Brougham, Peel, O'Connell, Hume, Russell, Palmerston, and others appear in his works as they were in their prime, with little distortion or exaggeration, the humor of the pictures being in the situation portrayed. Thus, after a debate in which allusion was made to an ancient egg anecdote, HB produced a caricature in which the leaders of parties were drawn as hens sitting upon eggs. The whole interest of the picture lies in the speaking likenesses of the men. An air of refinement pervades his designs. His humor is not aggressive. It was remarked at the time in the _Westminster Review_ that the great hits of Gillray, on being put up for the first time in Mrs. Humphrey's window, were received by the crowd with shouts of approval, but that the kindlier humor of HB only elicited silent smiles.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Box in a New York Theatre in 1830.

"I observed in the front row of a dress box a lady performing the most maternal office possible, several gentlemen without their coats, and a general air of contempt for the decencies of life, certainly more than usually revolting."--MRS. TROLLOPE, _Domestic Manners of the Americans_, vol. ii., p. 194.]

Doubtless the war pa.s.sion that raged throughout Christendom in Gillray's day had much to do with the warmth of applause which his works called forth. But, in truth, the vulgar portion of mankind appear to have a certain relish of an effective thrust, no matter who may writhe. HB was seldom severer than in his picture called "Handwriting on the Wall," in which "Silly Billy" (as William IV. was familiarly styled) is seen reading a placard headed "Reform Bill," and muttering, "Reform _Bill_?

Can that mean me?" Most of his pieces turn upon incidents or phases of politics which would require many words to recall, and then scarcely interest a reader of to-day. A caricature, as before remarked, is made to be seen; it is a thing of the moment, and for the moment, and when that moment is pa.s.sed, it must be of exceptional quality to bear revival in words.

Seeing caricatures from childhood has induced a habit in many persons of surveying life in the spirit of caricature, and has developed some tolerable private wielders of the satiric pencil. Mrs. Trollope was, perhaps, a case in point. Her volumes upon the "Domestic Manners of the Americans," the literary sensation of 1832, were ill.u.s.trated by a dozen or more of very amusing caricatures, some of which were fair hits, and were of actual service in improving popular manners. There are persons still alive who remember hearing the cry of "Trollope! Trollope!" raised in our theatres when a man ventured to take off his coat on a hot night, or sat with his feet too high in the air.[39] Her whole work, pictures and all, was a purposed political caricature, as she frankly confesses in her preface, where she says that her chief object was to warn her countrymen of "the jarring tumult and universal degradation which invariably follow the wild scheme of placing all the power of the State in the hands of the populace." She was, besides, exceedingly uncomfortable during her three years' residence in the United States, except when she was so happy as to be served by slaves. "On entering a slave State," she remarks, "I was immediately comfortable and at my ease, and felt that the intercourse between me and those who served me was profitable to both parties and painful to neither."

[Footnote 39: "In the pit [of the Chatham Theatre, New York] persons pulled off their coats in order to be cool.... Gentlemen keep their hats on in the boxes, and in the pit they make themselves in every respect comfortable."--_Travels through North America during the Years 1825 and 1826_, p. 145, by his Highness Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.]

Besides the specimen of her caricaturing powers given in this chapter, there are several others which have, at least, some interest as curiosities of insular judgment. Mrs. Trollope, the daughter of a clergyman of the English Church, and the wife of an English lawyer of aristocratic family, entered the United States, in 1827, by the Mississippi, and spent a year or two in its newly settled valley. She saw the Western people engaged in a life-and-death struggle with untamed nature--the forest, wild men and beasts, the swamp, the flood, the fever, a trying climate, and interminable distances. A partial conquest had been won. Some fair towns had risen. A few counties were subdued.

The log school-house was a familiar object. To a mind of continental compa.s.s, although Western life was still rough, rude, and haggard, the prospect was hopeful; it was evident that civilization was winning the day, and was destined, in the course of a century or two, to make the victory complete. The worst that a person of liberal mind could say, or can now say, of such a scene, would be this: "See what it costs to transplant human families from the parish to the wilderness!"

Even cabbage plants wither when only transferred from the hot-bed to the garden; but the transplanting of families from the organized society of an old country to a wild new land is a process under which all sicken, many degenerate, and many die.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Seymour's Conception of Mr. Winkle before that Hunter appeared in "Pickwick." (Seymour's Sketches, 1834.)

"Vot, eighteen shillings for that ere little pig? Vy, I could buy it in town for seven any day!"]

Our curate's daughter, on the contrary, after a long and close survey of this interesting scene, could only discover that life on the banks of the Ohio, in the twentieth year of their settlement, was neither as pleasant, nor as graceful, nor as elegant, nor as clean, nor as convenient as it is in an English village; and this discovery she communicated to the world in two volumes, 12mo, with sixteen ill.u.s.trations, very much to the satisfaction of many English readers.

This worthy and gifted lady, mother of worthy and gifted children, was utterly baffled in her attempts to account for the rudeness of Western life. Provisions, she says, were abundant in Cincinnati, as many as four thousand pigs being advertised sometimes by one man. The very gutters of the town ran blood--the blood of cheap innumerable swine. But "the total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is so remarkable that I was constantly endeavoring to account for it." The people, she thought, had clear and active intellects; their conversation was often weighty and instructive, occasionally dull, but never silly.

What an unaccountable thing, then, it was that these dealers in the pig and slayers of the bear, these subduers of the wilderness and conquerors of Tec.u.mseh, should not bow with courtly grace, and converse with the elegance and ease of Holland House! "There is no charm, no grace, in their conversation," she laments. "I very seldom, during my whole stay in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly p.r.o.nounced from the lips of an American."

Such a thing it is to be brought up in an island! Her volumes, however, are to this day entertaining, and not devoid of historical value. There is here and there a pa.s.sage which some of us could still read with profit, and her misinterpretations are not much more insular and perverse than those of d.i.c.kens. No one, indeed, yet knows much of this mystery of transplanting, in which lies hidden the explanation of America.

Her first caricature, ent.i.tled "Ancient and Modern Republics," is in two scenes. An Ancient Republic is represented as a n.o.ble Greek, crowned with flowers, reclining upon a lounge, one hand resting upon the strings of a lyre, and the other gracefully holding up a beautiful cup, into which a lovely maiden is squeezing the juice from a luxuriant bunch of grapes. A Modern Republic figures as a Western bar-room politician, with his hat over his eyes, his heels upon the table, a tumbler in his hand, a decanter within reach, and a plug of tobacco at its side. We have next a picture of a "Philosophical Millinery Store" at New Orleans, in which Mrs. Trollope delineated an astounding event--"My being introduced _in form_ to a milliner!" She, a curate's daughter, introduced to a maker of bonnets, who actually proved to be a gifted and intelligent lady! A "Cincinnati Ball-room" reveals to us twenty-two ladies sitting close to the walls, the floor vacant, and all the men gormandizing at a table in the next room, leaving the ladies to a "sad and sulky repast" of trash in plates held on their laps. Then we are favored with a view of a young lady who is making a shirt, but is ashamed to p.r.o.nounce the name of the garment in the presence of a man, and calls it pillow-case. Whereupon he says, "Now that pa.s.ses, Miss Clarissa! 'Tis a pillow-case for a giant, then. Shall I guess, miss?" To which she sweetly replies, "Quit, Mr.

Smith; behave yourself, or I'll certainly be affronted."

Another picture represents some ladies about to enter a gallery of art at Philadelphia, in which were exhibited several antique statues. The old woman in attendance says: "Now, ma'am, _now_! this is just the time for you. n.o.body can see you. Make haste!" Mrs. Trollope stared at her with astonishment, and asked her what she meant. "Only, ma'am," was the reply, "that the ladies like to go into _that_ room by themselves, when there be no gentlemen watching them." Another picture presents to us an American citizen of "the highest standing" returning from market at 6 A.M. with a huge basket of vegetables on one arm and a large ham carried in the other hand. A still more marvelous picture is given. Mr. Owen, father of Robert Dale Owen, challenged debate on his a.s.sertion that all the religions ever promulgated were equally false and pernicious. A clergyman having accepted the challenge, the debate was continued during fifteen sessions. But what amazed Mrs. Trollope was that Mr. Owen was listened to with respect! Nothing was thrown at him. The benches were not torn up. Another marvel was that neither of the disputants lost his temper, but they remained excellent friends, and dined together every day with the utmost gayety and cordiality. All this must have seemed strange indeed to the doting daughter of a State Church whose belief was regulated by act of Parliament.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Probable Suggestion of the Fat Boy of the "Pickwick Papers." (Seymour's Sketches, 1834.)

"Walked twenty miles overnight; up before peep o' day again; got a capital place; fell fast asleep; tide rose up to my knees; my hat was changed, my pockets pick't, and a fish run away with my hook; dreamt of being on a polar expedition and having my toes frozen."]

A famous contemporary of John Doyle and Mrs. Trollope was Robert Seymour, who will be long remembered for his co-operation with Charles d.i.c.kens in the production of the first numbers of "Pickwick." Nothing can be more certain than that this unfortunate artist, who died by his own hand just before the second number of the work was issued, did actually suggest the idea which the genius of d.i.c.kens developed into the "Pickwick Papers." While d.i.c.kens was still in the reporters' gallery of the House of Commons, Seymour had attained a shop-window celebrity by a kind of picture of which the English people seem never to be able to get enough--caricatures of Londoners attempting country sports. It appears to be accepted as an axiom in England that a man capable of conducting business successfully becomes an absurd and ludicrous object the moment he gets upon a horse or fires at a bird. It seems to be taken for granted that horsemanship and hunting belong to the feudal system, and are strictly entailed in county families. But as a man is supposed to rank in fashionable circles according to his mastery of those arts, great numbers of young men, it seems, live but to attempt feats impossible except to inherited skill. Here is the field for such artists as Robert Seymour, "For whose use," as Mr. d.i.c.kens wrote, "I put in Mr.

Winkle expressly," and who drew "that happy portrait of the founder of the Pickwick Club by which he is always recognized, and which may be said to have made him a reality." Perhaps as many as a third of the comic pictures published at that period were in the Winkle vein.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MANNERS and CVSTOMS of ye ENGLYSHE in 1849

A Weddynge BREAKFASTE.

(Richard Doyle, 1849.)]

Upon looking over the sketches of Robert Seymour, which used to appear from time to time in the windows--price threepence--while Boz was getting _his_ "Sketches" through the press, we perceive that d.i.c.kens really derived fruitful hints from this artist, besides the original suggestion of the work. Mr. Winkle is recognizable in several of them; Mr. Pickwick's figure occurs occasionally; the Fat Boy is distinctly suggested; the famous picnic scene is antic.i.p.ated; and there is much in the spirit of the pictures to remind us that among the admiring crowd which they attracted, the author of "Pickwick" might often have been found. Seymour, however, gave him only hints. In every instance he has made the suggested character or incident absolutely his own. Seymour only supplied a piece of copper, which the alchemy of genius turned into gold. In d.i.c.kens's broadest and most boisterous humor there are ever a certain elegance and refinement of tone that are wanting in Seymour, Seymour's c.o.c.kney hunters being persons of the t.i.ttlebat t.i.tmouse grade, who long ago ceased to amuse and began to offend.

Seymour's discovery, in the first numbers of "Pickwick," that it was the author, not the artist, who was to dominate a work which was his own conception and long-cherished dream, was probably among the causes of his fatal despair. When he first mentioned to Chapman & Hall his scheme of a c.o.c.kney Club ranging over England, he was a popular comic artist of several years' standing, and Charles d.i.c.kens was a name unknown. Nor was it supposed to be of so very much consequence who should write the descriptive matter. The firm closed the bargain with Mr. Seymour without having bestowed a thought upon the writer; and when they had suggested the unknown "Boz," and procured a copy of his "Sketches" by way of recommendation, Mrs. Seymour's remark was that, though she could not see any humor in his writings herself, yet he might do as well as another, and fifteen pounds a month to a poor and struggling author would be a little fortune. To a sensitive and ambitious man, made morbid by various hard usage such as the men who delight the world often undergo, it must have been a cutting disappointment to be asked, in the infancy of an enterprise which he deemed peculiarly his own, to put aside an ill.u.s.tration that he had prepared, and make another to suit the fancies of a subordinate. It was like requiring a star actor to omit his favorite and most special "business" in order to afford a member of the company an opportunity to shine.

The biographer of Mr. d.i.c.kens is naturally reluctant to admit the social insignificance in London, forty years ago, of a "struggling author," and he is grossly abusive of Mr. N. P. Willis for describing his hero as he appeared at this stage of his career. Mr. Willis visited him at a dismal building in Holborn, in company with one of Mr. d.i.c.kens's publishers, and he gave a brief account of what he saw, which doubtless was the exact truth. Willis was a faithful chronicler of the minutiae of a scene.

He was a stickler for having the small facts correct. "We pulled up," he wrote, "at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers' chambers.

I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs, and a few books, a small boy and Mr. d.i.c.kens, for the contents. I was only struck at first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers)--the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit." He describes d.i.c.kens as dressed rather in the Swiveller style, though without Richard's swell look: hair close cropped, clothes jaunty and scant, "the very personification of a close sailer to the wind." There is nothing in this discreditable to the "poor author," and nothing which a person who knew London then would deem improbable. Is it not a principle imbedded in the const.i.tution of Britons that the person who receives money in small amounts for work and labor done is the party obliged, and must stand hat in hand before him who pays it?

Whoever shall truly relate the history of the people of Great Britain in the nineteenth century will not pa.s.s by in silence the publication of "Pickwick." Cruikshank, Seymour, and Irving, as well as the humorists of other times, had nourished and molded the genius of d.i.c.kens; but, like all the masters in art, he so far transcended his immediate teachers that, even in what he most obviously derived from them, he was original.

And it is he, not they, who is justly hailed as the founder of that benign school of comic art which gives us humor without coa.r.s.eness, and satire without ill nature. It is "Pickwick" that marks the era, and the sole interest which Seymour's sketches now possess is in showing us from what Charles d.i.c.kens departed when he founded the Pickwick Club.