Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands.Parton, James
History
Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands.
Parton, James
Caricature -- History
Political caricature rapidly assumed prominence, though, as long as
Louis XIV. remained on the throne of France, the chief aim of politics
was to create safeguards against the possible return of the Catholic
Stuarts. The accession of Queen Anne, the career of Bolingbroke and
Harley, the splendid exploits of Marlborough, the early conflicts of
Whig and Tory, the attempts of the Pretenders, the peaceful accession of
George I.--all these are exhibited in broadsheets and satirical prints
still preserved in more than one collection. Louis XIV., his pomps and
his vanities, his misfortunes and his mistresses, furnished subjects for
hundreds of caricatures both in England and Holland. It was on a Dutch
caricature of 1695 that the famous retort occurs of the Duc de
Luxembourg to an exclamation of the Prince of Orange. The prince
impatiently said, after a defeat, "Shall I, then, never be able to beat
that hunchback?" Luxembourg replied to the person reporting this, "How
does he know that my back is hunched? He has never seen it."
Interspersed with political satires, we observe an increasing number
upon social and literary subjects. The transactions of learned societies
were now important enough to be caricatured, and the public was
entertained with burlesque discourses, illustrated, upon "The Invention
of Samplers," "The Migration of Cuckoos," "The Eunuch's Child," "A New
Method of teaching Learned Men how to write Unintelligibly." There was
an essay, also, "proving by arguments philosophical that Millers, though
falsely so reputed, yet in reality are not thieves, with an intervening
argument that Taylors likewise are not so."
[Illustration: A Quaker Meeting, 1710--Aminidel exhorting Friends to
support Sacheverell.]
A strange episode in the conflict between Whig and Tory was the career
of Sacheverell, a clergyman who preached such extreme doctrines
concerning royal and ecclesiastical prerogative that he was formally
censured by a Whig Parliament, and thus lifted into a preposterous
importance. During his triumphal tour, which Dr. Johnson remembered as
one of the events of his earliest childhood, he was escorted by
voluntary guards that numbered from one thousand to four thousand
mounted men, wearing the Tory badges of white knots edged with gold, and
in their hats three leaves of gilt laurel. The picture of the Quaker
meeting reflects upon the alliance alleged to have existed between the
high Tories and the Quakers, both having an interest in the removal of
disabilities, and hence making common cause. A curious relic of this
brief delirium is a paragraph in the _Grub Street Journal_ of 1736,
which records the death of Dame Box, a woman so zealous for the Church
that when Sacheverell was relieved of censure she clothed herself in
white, kept the clothes all her life, and was buried in them. As long as
Dr. Sacheverell lived she went to London once a year, and carried a
present of a dozen larks to that "high-flying priest."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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