attitude, exception being made of a few notable
figures, such as Michael Angelo Woolf, born in England, and of a
somewhat Cruikshankian technique. He came to America while young, and
contributed a long series of what may be called slum-fantasies,
instinct alike with laughter and sorrow, at times strangely combining
extravagant melodrama with a most plausible and convincing
impossibility. His drawings must always lie very close to the
affections of the large audience that welcomed them. American also by
adoption is Henry Mayer, a German by birth, who has contributed to
many of the chief comic papers of France, England, Germany and
America.

Entirely native in every way is the art of A.B. Frost (b. 1851), a
prominent humorist who deals with the life of the common people. His
caricature (he is also an illustrator of versatility and importance)
is distinguished by its anatomical knowledge, or, rather, anatomical
imagination. Violent as the action of his figures frequently is, it is
always convincing. Such triumphs as the tragedy of the kind-hearted
man and the ungrateful bull-calf; the spinster's cat that ate rat
poison, and many others, force the most serious to laughter by their
amazing velocity of action and their unctuousness of expression. Frost
is to American caricature what "Artemus Ward" has been to American
humour, and his field of publication has been chiefly the monthly
magazine.

The influence of the weekly periodicals has been briefly traced. A
later development was the entrance of the omnivorous daily newspaper
into the field of both the magazine and the weekly. For many years
almost every newspaper has printed its daily cartoon, generally of a
political nature. Few of the cartoonists have been able to keep up the
pace of a daily inspiration, but C.G. Bush has been unusually
successful in the attempt. Yet an occasional success atones for many
slips, and the cartoonists are known and eagerly watched. The most
influential has doubtless been Homer C. Davenport, whose slender
artistic resources have been eked out by a vigour and mercilessness of
assault rare even in American annals. He has a Rabelaisian complacency
and skill in making a portrait magnificently repulsive, and his
caricatures are a vivid example of the school of cartoonists who
believe in slashing rather than merely prodding or tickling the object
of attack. Charles Nelan (1