Vainly, therefore, will the most vigilant collector search for _French_ caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte published during his reign. His government was a despotism _not_ tempered by epigrams, and it was controlled by a despot who, though not devoid of a sense of humor, had all a Corsican's mortal hatred of ridicule. No man in France was less French than Napoleon, either in lineage or in character. His moral position in Paris was not unlike that which Othello might have held in Venice, if Othello had been base enough to betray and expel the senate which he had sworn to serve. We can imagine how the shy, proud Moor would have writhed under the pasquinades of the graceful, dissolute Venetian wits whom he despised. So Napoleon, who never ceased to have much in him of the semi-barbarian chief (and always looked like one when he was dressed in imperial robes), shrunk with morbid apprehension from the tongue of Madame De Staël, and wrote autograph notes to Fouché calling his attention to the placards and verses of the street-corners. There is something more than ludicrous in the spectacle of this rude soldier, with a million armed men under his command, and half Europe at his feet, sitting down in rage and affright to order Fouché to send a little woman over the frontiers lest she should say something about him for the drawing-rooms of Paris to laugh at. [Illustration: Talleyrand--the Man with Six Heads. (Paris, 1817.)] In place of caricature, therefore, we have only allegorical "glory" in the fugitive pictures of his reign, few of which are worthy of remembrance. English Gillray, on the other side of the Channel, made most ample amends. Modern caricature has not often equaled some of the best of Gillray's upon Napoleon. In 1806, when the conqueror had finally lost his head, dazzled and bewildered by his own victories, and was setting up new kingdoms with a facility which began to be amusing, Gillray produced his masterpiece of the "Great French Gingerbread Baker drawing out a New Batch of Kings." It is full of happy detail. Besides the central figure of Bonaparte himself drawing from the "New French Oven" a fresh batch of monarchs, we see Bishop Talleyrand kneading in the "Political Kneading-trough," into which Poland, Hanover, and Prussia have just been thrown. There is also the "Ash-hole for Broken Gingerbread," into which Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and broad-backed Holland have been swept. On a chest of drawers stand a number of "Dough Viceroys intended for the Next Batch," and the drawers are labeled "Kings and Queens," "Crowns and Sceptres," "Suns and Moons." Gillray burlesqued almost all the history of the gingerbread colossus from the Egyptian expedition onward, but he never surpassed the gayety and aptness of this picture, which was all the more effective in English eyes because gilt gingerbread made into figures of kings, queens, crowns, anchors, and princes' feathers, is a familiar object at English fairs.