Those conditions--favourable or antagonistic--it becomes part of our inquiry at this point to examine. We have this to ask, even granting that our "burlesque picture" is a natural, almost a necessary, accompaniment of human life,--was found, we may quite safely assume, in the cave-dwelling of primitive man, who probably satirised with a flint upon its walls those troublesome neighbours of his, the mammoth and the megatherium,--peers out upon us from the complex culture of the Roman world in the clumsy _graffito_ of the Crucifixion,--emerges in the Middle Ages in a turbulent growth of grotesque, wherein those grim figures of Death or Devil move through a maze of imagery often quaint and fantastic, sometimes obscene or terrible--takes a fresh start in the _Passionals_ of Lucas Cranach, and can be traced in England through her Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century. Why, we have to ask, even granting that William Hogarth's "monster Caricatura" is thus omnivorous and omnipresent, does he tower aloft in some countries and under some conditions to the majesty of a new art, and in others dwindle down to puny ridicule? Taking the special subject of this little volume, the eighteenth century itself, we find little to interest us in French pictorial satire until that monstrous growth of political caricature created by the Revolution. Italy in the same period has but little to offer us, Germany as little or less; and it is to England that we must turn for the pictorial humour, whether social or political, of that interesting epoch. And this because the England of that time is a self-conscious creature, emergent from a successful struggle for freedom, and strong enough to enjoy a hearty laugh--even at her own expense. While the Bastille still frowns over France, the Inquisition and the Jesuits are an incubus upon Spain and Italy, while Germany is split up into little principalities, Dukedoms, Bishoprics, Palatinates, England has already won for herself the great boon of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religious and political opinion. The satirist could here find expression and appreciation. The birth of the pictorial satirist who is the subject of my first chapter coincides pretty closely with the creation of that _Tale of a Tub_, of which Dean Swift, in all the ripeness of his later talent, exclaimed: "Good God! what genius I had when I wrote that book"; and no print from the artist's graver--even his "Stages of Cruelty," or his "Players dressing in a Barn"--could excel in coarseness of fibre the great satirist's _Strephon and Chloe_.