limits of space is a sketch, where my
matter tempts me sorely to a comprehensive study. Yet even the sketch
may claim for itself a place beside the finished work of art, if--while
omitting the detail which it was unable to include--it has yet secured
for us the main outlines, the swing of the figure, the balance of light
and shadow, the sweep and spacing of the horizon; just as the massed
clouds in a Constable study can give us as keen artistic pleasure as the
"Valley Farm," or his "Salisbury Cathedral." And thus I have attempted
here not so much the history of the men, the catalogue of their achieved
work--interesting or valuable though such a history or catalogue might
be--as to show the spirit of the age itself reflected most faithfully,
even when it seems most caricatured or burlesqued, by their brush or
graver or pencil; to watch the grotesque visage and ignoble form of Vice
traced by Hogarth's genius from the homes of London's luxury to her dens
of hidden crime; to study the more refined, if somewhat weaker, social
satire of Henry William Bunbury; to admire those magnificent political
cartoons of James Gillray--colossal and overwhelming, even in their
brutality or obscenity; and finally, to lose ourselves in the luxuriant
and living growth of Thomas Rowlandson's pencil, recreating for us the
features of an age that was, like himself, vigorous, buoyant, and
expansive,--that true Age of Caricature, which is also known as the
Eighteenth Century.

=(Illustration without caption) Shrimpers.=

II

THE COMEDY OF VICE

The eighteenth century, which was to witness the magnificent and, in its
own way, unequalled achievement of English art in the paintings of
Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, Hoppner; in the engravings of
Bartolozzi, Dalton, John Raphael Smith, and William Henry Ryland; in the
caricatures, which we have just noted, of Bunbury, Rowlandson, and
Gillray, was to open, not inappropriately, with the appearance and
speedy recognition of a very individual and very characteristic
genius--with the pictured comedies of William Hogarth.

A first survey of my subject led me for a moment to doubt how far my
title would cover the creations of that incomparable humourist. He is,
indeed, more than caricaturist in the sense in which we shall use this
term of his artistic successors. His pictured moralities teem with
portraits drawn from the very life. He is a satirist, as mordant and
merciless as Juvenal, or