If I am asked what is caricature, how can I define it? Ah, here it is explained by some great authority--whom I cannot say, for I have it under the heading of "Cuttings from Colney Hatch," undated, unnamed. Kindly read it carefully: [Illustration: THE STUDIO OF A CARICATURIST.] "The word itself, 'caricature,' is related etymologically to our own 'cargo,' and means, in all Italian simplicity, a _loading_. So, then, the finely analytical quality of the Italian intellect, disengaging the ultimate (material) element out of all the (spiritual) elements of pictorial distortion and travesty, called it simply a 'loading.' After all, 'exageration' only substitutes the idea of mound, or _agger_ for _carica_--the heaping up of a mound--for the common Italian word 'load' or 'cartload.' One can easily understand how a cold, cynical, and hating Neapolitan, pushed about by the police for a likeness much too like, would shrug his shoulders, and say, possibly, the likeness was loaded. But when we look at the character of the loading, there may be anything there, from diabolical and malignant spite up to the simplest fun, to say nothing of the almost impossibility of drawing the real truth, and the almost necessary tendency to exaggerate one thing and diminish another. But if the Italian mind, with a head to be chopped off by a despot for a joke, discovered the colourless and impregnable word 'load,' the French _gamin_, on his own responsibility, hit upon the identical word in French, namely, 'charge'--_une charge_ meaning both a pictorial or verbal goak or caricature, and a load. When did the word 'caricature' first obtain in the Italian language, and how? When did the word 'charge' acquire a similar meaning in France, and was it or not suggested by the Italian word? But the thing caricature goes back to the night of ages, and is in its origin connected with the subjective risible faculty on the one side and the objective tendency to making faces on the other. Curiously enough, the original German ideas of caricature appear to have hinged precisely upon the distortion of the countenance, since _Fratze_, the leading word for caricature, signifies originally a grimace. Then we have _Posse_, buffoonery (Italian, _pazzie_), which, without original reference to drawing, would exactly express many of Mr. ----'s very exquisite drolleries, diving as they do into the weirdest genius--conceptions of night and of day, of dawn and of twilight--the mixture of the terrible, the grotesque, the gigantic, the infinitely little, the animal, the beast, the ethereal, the divinely loving, the diabolically cynical, the crawling, the high-bred, all in a universal salmagundi and lobster nightmare, mixing up the loveliest conceptions with croaking horrors, the eternal aurora with the everlasting _nitschewo_ of the frozen, blinding steppe. Caricature! What can we English call it?"