catura_, our burlesque picture of life, stands on the same basis
as comedy or satire, is, in fact, but comedy or satire finding its
outlet in another form of expression. And this is so true that wherever
we find brilliant or trenchant satire of life there we may be sure, too,
that caricature is not far absent. Pauson's grotesques are the
correlative of the Comedies of Aristophanes; and when the development of
both is not correlative, not simultaneous, it is surely because one or
other has been checked by political or social conditions, which have
been inherently antagonistic to its growth.

Those conditions--favourable or antagonistic--it becomes part of our
inquiry at this point to examine. We have this to ask, even granting
that our "burlesque picture" is a natural, almost a necessary,
accompaniment of human life,--was found, we may quite safely assume, in
the cave-dwelling of primitive man, who probably satirised with a flint
upon its walls those troublesome neighbours of his, the mammoth and the
megatherium,--peers out upon us from the complex culture of the Roman
world in the clumsy _graffito_ of the Crucifixion,--emerges in the
Middle Ages in a turbulent growth of grotesque, wherein those grim
figures of Death or Devil move through a maze of imagery often quaint
and fantastic, sometimes obscene or terrible--takes a fresh start in the
_Passionals_ of Lucas Cranach, and can be traced in England through her
Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth
century. Why, we have to ask, even granting that William Hogarth's
"monster Caricatura" is thus omnivorous and omnipresent, does he tower
aloft in some countries and under some conditions to the majesty of a
new art, and in others dwindle down to puny ridicule?

Taking the special subject of this little volume, the eighteenth century
itself, we find little to interest us in French pictorial satire until
that monstrous growth of political caricature created by the Revolution.
Italy in the same period has but little to offer us, Germany as little
or less; and it is to England that we must turn for the pictorial
humour, whether social or political, of that interesting epoch. And this
because the England of that time is a self-conscious creature, emergent
from a successful struggle for freedom, and strong enough to enjoy a
hearty laugh--even at her own expense. While the Bastille still frowns
over France, the Inquisition and the Jesuits are an incubus