are so infamous that, by a natural reaction of
feeling, they inspire a sort of esteem for those they try to make you
despise; others, those which were seen by everyone during the siege, are
less vile, because, of the patriotic rage which originated them, and
excused them; but they are as odious as they can be nevertheless. But
the amateurs of collections who neglected to buy fly-sheets one by one
as they appeared, must be satisfied with the above.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: As a power for the encouragement of virtue and the
suppression of vice, caricature cannot be too highly estimated, though
often abused. It is doubtful which exercises the greater influence, poem
or picture. In England, perhaps, picture wields the greater power; in
France, song. Yet, "let me write the ballads and you may govern the
people," is an English axiom which was well known before pictures became
so plentiful or so popular, or the refined cartoons of Mr. Punch were
ever dreamt of. In Paris, where art-education is highly developed,
fugitive designs seems to have, with but few exceptions, descended into
vile abuse and indecent metaphor, the wildest invective being exhausted
upon trivial matters--hence the failure.

The art advocates of the Commune, with but few exceptions, seem to have
been of the most humble sort, inspired with the melodramatic taste of
our Seven Dials or the New Out, venting itself in ill-drawn heroic
females, symbols of the Republic, clad in white, wearing either mural
crowns or Phrygian caps, and waving red flags. They are the work of
aspiring juvenile artists or uneducated men. I allude to art favourable
to the Commune, and not that coeval with it, or the vast mass of
pictorial unpleasantly born of gallic rage during the Franco-Prussian
war, including such designs as the horrible allegory of Bayard, "Sedan,
1870," a large work depicting Napoleon III. drawn in a caleche and four,
over legions of his dying soldiers, in the presence of a victorious
enemy and the shades of his forefathers', and the well-known subject, so
popular in photography, of "The Pillory," Napoleon between King William
and Bismarck, also set in the midst of a mass of dead and dying
humanity. Paper pillories are always very popular in Paris, and under
the Commune the heads of Tropmann and Thiers were exhibited in a wooden
vice, inscribed Pantin and Neuilly underneath. And, again, in another
print, entitled "The Infamous," we have Thiers, Favre, and MacMa