Busch unites an uncommonly sharp eye with a marvellously flexible hand. Wild as his subjects generally are, he solves the greatest difficulties as easily as though they were child's play. His heroes appear in situations of the most urgent kind, which place their bodily parts in violent and exceedingly uncomfortable positions: they thrash others or get thrashed themselves, they stumble or fall. And in what a masterly way are all these anomalies seized, the boldest foreshortenings and the most flying movements! Untrained eyes see only a scrawl, but for those who know how to look, a drawing by Busch is life itself, freed from all unnecessary detail, and marked down in its great characteristic lines. And amid all this simplification, what knowledge there is under the guise of carelessness, and what fine calculation! Busch is at once simpler and more inventive than the English. With a maze of flourishes run half-mad, and a few points and blotches, he forms a sparkling picture. With the fewest possible means he hits the essential point, and for that reason he is justly called by Grand Cartaret the classic of caricaturists, _le roi de la charge et la bouffonnerie_. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DEBUCOURT. IN THE KITCHEN.] _Oberländer_, without whom it would be impossible to imagine _Fliegende Blätter_, has not fallen silent. He works on, "fresh and splendid as on the first day." A gifted nature like Busch, he possesses, at the same time, that fertility of which Dürer said: "A good painter is inwardly complete and opulent, and were it possible for him to live eternally, then by virtue of those inward ideas of which Plato writes he would be always able to pour something new into his works." It is now thirty years ago that he began his labours for _Fliegende Blätter_, and since that time some drawing of his, which has filled every one with delight, has appeared almost every week. Kant said that Providence has given men three things to console them amid the miseries of life--hope, sleep, and laughter. If he is right, Oberländer is amongst the greatest benefactors of mankind. Every one of his new sketches maintains the old precious qualities. It might be said that, by the side of the comedian Busch, Oberländer seems a serious psychologist. Wilhelm Busch lays his whole emphasis on the comical effects of simplicity; he knows how to reduce an object in a masterly fashion to its elemental lines, which are comic in themselves by their epigrammatic pregnancy. He calls forth peals of laughter by the farcical spirit of his inventions and the boldness with which he renders his characters absurd. He is also the author of his own letterpress. His drawings are unimaginable without the verse, without the finely calculated and dramatic succession of situations growing to a catastrophe. Oberländer gets his effect purely by means of the pictorial elements in his representation, and attains a comical result, neither by