pted by Johnson
in his dictionary (1757), but does not appear in Bailey's dictionary,
for example, as late as 1773; and it only assumed its modern guise
towards the end of the 18th century, when its use and comprehension
became general.

Little that is not conjectural can be written concerning caricature
among the ancients. Few traces of the comic are discoverable in Egyptian
art--such papyri of a satirical tendency as are known to exist appearing
to belong rather to the class of ithyphallic drolleries than to that of
the ironical grotesque. Among the Greeks, though but few and dubious
data are extant, it seems possible that caricature may not have been
altogether unknown. Their taste for pictorial parody, indeed, has been
sufficiently proved by plentiful discoveries of pottery painted with
burlesque subjects. Aristotle, moreover, who disapproved of grotesque
art, condemns in strong terms the pictures of a certain Pauson, who,
alluded to by Aristophanes, and the subject of one of Lucian's
anecdotes, is hailed by Champfleury as the _doyen_ of caricaturists.
That the grotesque in graphic art conceived in the true spirit of
intentional caricature was practised by the Romans is evident from the
curious frescoes uncovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum; from the mention
in Pliny of certain painters celebrated for burlesque pictures; from the
curious fantasies graven in gems and called Grylli; and from the number
of ithyphallic caprices that have descended to modern times. But in
spite of these evidences of Greek and Roman humour, in spite of the
famous comic statuette of Caracalla, and of the more famous _graffito_
of the Crucifixion, the caricaturists of the old world must be sought
for, not among its painters and sculptors, but among its poets and
dramatists. The comedies of Aristophanes and the epigrams of Martial
were, to the Athens of Pericles and the Rome of Domitian, what the
etchings of Gillray and the lithographs of Daumier were to the London of
George III. and the Paris of the Citizen King.

During the middle ages a vast mass of grotesque material was
accumulated, but selection becomes even more difficult than with the
scarce relics of antiquity. With the building of the cathedrals
originated a new style of art; a strange mixture of memories of paganism
and Christian imaginings was called into being for the adornment of
those great strongholds of urban Catholicism, and in this the coarse and
brutal materialism of the