or take his part in
the improvised theatricals; but whose prints have real humour, charm,
and the sweet, wholesome breath of English country life. Then we watched
Gillray tower aloft in political satire, and Rowlandson's pencil touch
every side of life.

If we noticed at the same time a certain coarseness of fibre come to the
surface in much of their work, finding expression often both in subject,
and still more in treatment and in type, we must remember that this
quality belongs not to the men alone, but to the age. The more sensitive
modern may feel himself at first repelled rather than attracted, and
many a print of Rowlandson or Gillray find a place in his _Index
Expurgatorius_; but the brutality of these men is the brutality of
Nature in some of her moods, and their work, like Nature, fertile,
fresh, and vigorous, attracts us (as all strong work will and must) the
more we study it by its masterly drawing, its free, open humour, and
often its high imaginative grasp.

Behind these men, these Masters of English Caricature, appears, never
entirely absent from our thought, the history of the century, with its
magnificent record of English achievement. Behind them, too, a
corrective and a stimulant to their best effort, is that wonderful
revelation of English eighteenth-century pictorial art. For just as
when, in years to come, men think on that stirring epoch, the two words
_England_ and _Liberty_ will leap unbidden to their thought; so, too,
in the record of the greatest epoch of our country's art, a place must
be found for the English Caricaturists of the Eighteenth Century.

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
London & Edinburgh

Footnotes:

[1] A fine collection of lithographs of Honore Daumier (1808-1879) has
this year been exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

[2] "The Works of William Hogarth, elucidated by Descriptions." By T.
Clerk. London, 1810.

[3] "William Hogarth," by Austin Dobson; with a valuable technical
introduction by Sir W. Armstrong. London, 1902.

[4] "Bartolozzi and his Pupils in England" (Langham Series). By Selwyn
Brinton. London, 1903.

[5] "History of Caricature and of Grotesque in Art." By Thomas Wright,
M.A., F.S.A. London, 1863.

[6] His "Englishman at Paris" even predates this by four years (1767).
The British Museum etchings, to which I allude later, are early work,
one even dating from his schooldays at Westminster!

[7] _Op. cit._ p. 63.

[8] I give