ave found not only necessary, but
unavoidable.

INJUSTICE OF THE CARICATURISTS.

THEY MISTAKE THE CHARACTER OF BONAPARTE.

Caricature, like literary satire (as we all know from the days of the
"Dunciad" downwards), has little concern with justice; but we who look
back after the lapse of the greater part of the century, and have
moreover studied the history and the surroundings of Napoleon Bonaparte,
may afford at least to do him justice. Gillray is a fair exponent of the
intense hatred with which Bonaparte was regarded in this country, when
not only the little "Corsican," but those about him, were held up to a
ridicule which, oftentimes vulgar, partook not unfrequently of absolute
brutality. Who would imagine, for instance, that the fat blousy female
quaffing deep draughts of Maraschino from a goblet, in his famous satire
of the _Handwriting on the Wall_, was intended for the refined and
delicate Josephine? Occasionally, however, James Gillray descended to a
lower depth, as in his _Ci Devant Occupations_ (of 20th February, 1805),
in which we see this delicate woman, with the frail but lovely Spaniard,
Theresa de Cabarrus (Madame Tallien), figuring in a manner to which the
most infamous women of Drury Lane would have hesitated to descend.
Josephine de la Pagerie, as we all know, was anything but blameless;
which indeed of _les Deesses de la Revolution_ could pass unscathed
through the fiery furnace of the Terror?[14] But this miscalled satire
of James Gillray, which he dubs "a fact," is nothing less than a
poisonous libel. As for _le petit Caporal_ himself, everyone now knows,
that while he viewed the carnage of the battlefield with the
indifference of a conqueror, he shrank in horror from the murderers of
the Swiss; from Danton and his satellites, the Septembrist massacrists;
from the mock trials and cold-blooded atrocities of the Terrorists.
Standing apart from these last by right of his unexampled genius, with
Danton, Marat, Robespierre, Couthon, Carrier, Napoleon Bonaparte has
nothing whatever in common. Looking back upon the ruins of his empire,
the mistakes he had made, the faults he had committed, Napoleon, with
reference at least to his own personal elevation, might say with truth:
"Nothing has been more simple than my elevation. It was not the result
of intrigue or _crime_. It was owing to the peculiar circumstance of the
times, and because I fought successfully against the enemies of my
country. What i