In another print is represented a Roman soldier riding on a boar, and bearing a banner, on which is painted the Pope with his insignia. A man stabs himself and tears his hair, and behind him is a raving woman. This picture has a blunt signification: "The bore signifieth Wrath, and the man on his back Mischief; the Pope in the flag Destruction, and the flag Uncertaine Religion, turning and chaunging with every blaste of winde; the man killing himselfe, Desperation; the woman, Madness." There are fourteen specimens in this quaint manner in the collection of the British Museum, all executed and published in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth. As art, they are naught. As part of the record of a great age, they have their value. [Illustration: Titian's Caricature of the Laocoön.] Germany, England, and France fought the battle of the Reformation--two victors and one vanquished. From Italy in that age we have one specimen of caricature, but it was executed by Titian. He drew a burlesque of the Laocoön to ridicule a school of artists in Rome, who, as he thought, extolled too highly the ancient sculptures, and, because they could not succeed in coloring, insisted that correctness of form was the chief thing in art. Since Titian's day, parodies of the Laocoön have been among the stock devices of the caricaturists of all nations. CHAPTER IX. IN THE PURITAN PERIOD. [Illustration: The Papal Gorgon. (Reign of Elizabeth, 1581.)] The annexed picture,[15] a favorite with the Protestants of England, Holland, and Germany for more than a century, is composed of twenty-two articles and objects, most of which are employed in the Roman Catholic worship. A church-bell forms the hat, which is decorated by crossed daggers and holy-water brushes. A herring serves for a nose. The mouth is an open wine-flagon. The eye is a chalice covered by the holy wafer, and the cheek is a paten, or plate used in the communion service. The great volume that forms the shoulders is the mass-book. The front of the bell-tiara is adorned by a mitred wolf devouring a lamb, and by a goose holding a rosary in its bill; the back, by a spectacled ass reading a book, and by a boar wearing a scholar's cap. At the bottom of the engraving the pierced feet of Christ are seen resting upon two creatures called by the artist "the Queen's badges." The whole figure of Christ is supposed to be behind this mass of human inventions; for in the original these explanatory words are given, "Christ Covered." [Footnote 15: From "Malcolm's Caricaturing," plate 2, and p. 23. See, also, "Catalogue of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum," Division I., vol. ii., p. 177.]