For while during centuries the feeling for the grotesque or absurd, together with the almost inborn propensity for the exposure of foibles and vices in an enemy, a rival, or an obnoxious public character, had its outlets only through the agency of art, and the sculptor or draughtsman was the sole resource of those who loved caricature and farce, the introduction of caligraphy by no means diminished the call for the graphic delineators of comedy and satire. The English artists of the Georgian epoch were equally prolific and unsparing; and even now, when all the civilised communities of the world have their printing presses without number at command, the pencil remains a favourite vehicle for the exhibition of humorous or unpopular traits in distinguished persons of the day, and among many connoisseurs and students a volume of Gillray or Rowlandson is a more welcome object of attention or notice than a printed record. The engraving has in all ages enjoyed over its literary counterpart or equivalent the great advantage, that it immediately attracts the eye, and enables one to embrace every point of view and the whole story at a glance; whereas in the other case the same effect is scarcely produced on the mind by many pages of letterpress or the most elaborate inscription on metal or stone. The spectator is in fact a far older student than the reader or the listener to a reading, or than the audience of the minstrel of yore. The organs of sight have been the direct media through which innumerable generations of mankind have received all the knowledge and culture which they ever possessed; and we perceive at the present moment how far the cheap print and the gay shop-window go to supply such Englishmen of the nineteenth century as have small leisure and perhaps equally small inclination for books with notions of current sentiments and transactions. The manuscript or printed page has not a co-ordinate power with the mural sketch or other pictorial representation, with or without its adjunct of hyperbole and broad colouring, in an instantaneous appeal to the passions, or to the sense of the ridiculous, or, again, to the public instinct of wrong. The press bears its part; but whatever its development in the future may prove to be, it will never completely obliterate the demand and admiration for the labours of the graphic illustrator, whose origin is positively lost in antiquity, and whose pursuit was, doubtless, among the subjects of the Rameses dynasty themselves-an accomplishment derived from Oriental (possibly Turanian) instructors; for the most archaic published examples manifest a tolerable intimacy with design and the combination of effect, as well as a capability of awakening hilarious sensations by the burlesque perversion of serious matters. * * * * *