NELSON RECRUITING WITH HIS BRAVE TARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF THE NILE. _By Thomas Rowlandson_ " 82 FILIAL AFFECTION(Colour-print). _By Thomas Rowlandson_ " 86 A BALL AT THE HACKNEY ASSEMBLY ROOMS. _By Thomas Rowlandson_ " 90 A THEATRICAL CANDIDATE. _By Thomas Rowlandson_ " 92 OLD JOSEPH NOLLEKENS AND HIS VENUS. _By Thomas Rowlandson_ " 94 I INTRODUCTORY The word Caricature does not lend itself easily to precise definition. Etymologically it connects itself with the Italian _caricare_, to load or charge, thus corresponding precisely in derivation with its French equivalent _Charge_; and--save a yet earlier reference in Sir Thomas Browne--it first appears, as far as I am aware, in that phrase of No. 537 of the _Spectator_, "Those burlesque pictures which the Italians call _caracaturas_." Putting the dry bones of etymology from our thought the essence, the life-blood of the thing itself, is surely this--the human creature's amusement with itself and its environment, and its expression of that amusement through the medium of the plastic arts. So that our _caracatura_, our burlesque picture of life, stands on the same basis as comedy or satire, is, in fact, but comedy or satire finding its outlet in another form of expression. And this is so true that wherever we find brilliant or trenchant satire of life there we may be sure, too, that caricature is not far absent. Pauson's grotesques are the correlative of the Comedies of Aristophanes; and when the development of both is not correlative, not simultaneous, it is surely because one or other has been checked by political or social conditions, which have been inherently antagonistic to its growth.