laugh—even at her own expense. While the Bastille still frowns over France, the Inquisition and the Jesuits are an incubus 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 Honoré 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

    levée

   and drawing-room, in the vice and 

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