Mr. Thackeray, who was but nineteen when Louis Philippe came to the throne, witnessed much of the famous contest between this knot of caricaturists and the King of the French; and in one of the first articles which he wrote for subsistence, after his father's failure, he gave the world some account of it.[36] At a later period of his life he would probably not have regarded the king as the stronger party. He would probably not have described the contest as one between "half a dozen poor artists on the one side, and His Majesty Louis Philippe, his august family, and the numberless placemen and supporters of the monarchy, on the other." Half a dozen poor artists, with an unscrupulous publisher at their head, who gives them daily access to the eye and ear of a great capital, can array against the object of their satire and abuse the entire unthinking crowd of that capital. A firm, enlightened, and competent king would have united against these a majority of the responsible and the reflecting. Such a king would truly have been, as Mr. Thackeray observed, "an Ajax girded at by a Thersites." But Louis Philippe was no Ajax. He was no hero at all. He had no splendid and no commanding traits. He was merely an overfond father and well-disposed citizen of average talents. He was merely the kind of man which free communities can ordinarily get to serve them, and who will serve them passably well if the task be not made needlessly difficult. Hence Philipon and his "half a dozen poor artists" were very much the stronger party--a fact which the king, in the sight and hearing of all France, confessed and proclaimed by putting them in prison. [Footnote 36: In the _London and Westminster Review_ for April, 1839, Article II.] It was those prosecutions of Philipon that were fatal to the king. Besides adding emphasis, celebrity, and weight to the sallies of _Le Charivari_, they presaged the abandonment of the central principle of the movement that made him king--the freedom of utterance. The scenes in court when Philipon, or his artist, Daumier, was arraigned, were most damaging to the king's dignity. One, incorrectly related by Thackeray, may well serve to warn future potentates that of all conceivable expedients for the caricaturist's frustration, the one surest to fail is to summon him to a court of justice.