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_.

The pen of Swift and the graver of Hogarth in the early eighteenth
century found in England conditions not very dissimilar to those which
awaited Philipon and Honore Daumier[1] in Paris of the early nineteenth
century--that is, a public which had come through a period of intensely
active political existence to a complete and complex self-consciousness,
and which enjoyed (just as in Paris _La Caricature_, when suppressed,
found a speedy successor in _Le Charivari_) sufficient political freedom
to render criticism a possibility. And from Hogarth through Sandby and
Sayer and Woodward to Henry William Bunbury, and onwards to that giant
of political satire, James Gillray, and his vigorous contemporary Thomas
Rowlandson, what a feast of material is spread before us; what an
insight we may gain, not only into costume, manners, social life, but
into the detailed political development of a fertile and fascinating
period of history. In the earlier age Hogarth is ready to present the
very London of his time in the _levee_ and drawing-room, in the vice and
extravagance of the rich, in the industrious and thriving citizen, and
those lowest haunts where crime hoped to lurk undisturbed. In the
century's close Gillray's pencil notes every change of the political
kaleidoscope. In his prints we seem almost to hear the muffled roar of
the Parisian mob, clamorous for more blood in those days of Terror; or
we watch the giant forms of Pitt and Buonaparte fronting each other as
the strife comes nearer home to Britain.

To attempt within the limits of this little volume to exhaust a subject
so rich in magnificent material would be obviously impossible. All that
is permitted me here by imperative