presented to the young couple their family Bible—a fact which is recorded upon the fly-leaf in our artist's own handwriting. Of the two sons that were born to Henry and Catherine Bunbury, their special hopes seem to have centred on the eldest, Charles John, the lovely child for whom Sir Joshua himself had improvised fairy tales to keep him amused while busy on his portrait; but those hopes were not fulfilled, for his manhood did not bear out the promise of his schooldays, and he died comparatively early.

   Bunbury's caricatures commence as early as his foreign tour, though some of the best refer to his later military life in England; especially to the time when he was in camp at Coxheath, during the troubled days of the American War. For we have now left far behind the days of Swift and Bolingbroke and Oxford, of Marlborough's battles, and of the great political settlement which marked the Hanoverian succession. Dettingen and Fontenoy are now old soldiers' tales, and the invasion of England by Charles Stuart, the younger Pretender—in which connection we may remember Hogarth's print of the march of the Guards to Finchley—lies equally behind us: we have passed through the long

   Ministry of Walpole and that of the elder Pitt, we have seen the war with France, and been stirred by Wolfe's victory and heroic death upon the Heights of Abraham. In a word, we have turned the corner with the year of our artist's birth, and are going downwards into the latter half of the eighteenth century.

   George III. has now taken his father's place upon the throne of England: the Tories have returned again to be a power in political life as in the days of Bolingbroke, and against the "King's friends," the party subservient to Court influence, there appears in the nation a very strong democratic movement with John Wilkes as its leader and idol. Meanwhile the fatal policy of Grenville had led to the alienation of the great American colonies, and the passing of the Stamp Act in 1765 brought a complete rupture. But this phase of politics enters but little into our present subject. It is of more interest to inquire, apart from this complex turbulent world of home or foreign politics, what were the people themselves in their home life, their outdoor life, their tastes, aspirations, sympathies, social surroundings? I think we shall get an answer to some of these questions—an answer none the less

   valuable because it comes to us indirectly—from the study of Henry William Bunbury's social caricatures. These appear to commence with (or are in some special cases even earlier 

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