Suppressed Plates, Wood-engravings, &c. / Together with Other Curiosities Germane Thereto; Being an Account of Certain Matters Peculiarly Alluring to the Collector
Date: 2017-10-08T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Engraving; Engraving -- Collectors and collecting

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Suppressed Plates, Wood-engravings, &c.

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Title: Suppressed Plates, Wood-engravings, &c.

Author: George Somes Layard

Release date: October 8, 2017 [eBook #55710]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPPRESSED PLATES, WOOD-ENGRAVINGS, &C. ***

SUPPRESSED PLATES

AGENTS

AMERICA

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

CANADA

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.

27 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO

INDIA

MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.

MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY

309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA

The title-page of the unwritten “Death in London”

SUPPRESSED PLATES

WOOD ENGRAVINGS, &c.

TOGETHER WITH OTHER CURIOSITIES GERMANE THERETO

BEING
AN ACCOUNT OF CERTAIN MATTERS
PECULIARLY ALLURING TO
THE COLLECTOR
BY
GEORGE SOMES LAYARD

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1907

Published November 1907

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO
MY TWO BOYS
JOHN AND PETER
WHO
I SINCERELY HOPE, WILL NOT HAVE SO MANY
USELESS HOBBIES
AS
THEIR AFFECTIONATE
FATHER

CONTENTS

- 1. INTRODUCTORY … 1

- 2. “THE MARQUIS OF STEYNE” … 7

- 3. THE SUPPRESSED PORTRAIT OF DICKENS, “PICKWICK,” “THE BATTLE OF LIFE,” AND “GRIMALDI” … 26

- 4. DICKENS CANCELLED PLATES: “OLIVER TWIST,” “MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT,” “THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN,” “PICTURES FROM ITALY,” AND “SKETCHES BY BOZ” … 43

- 5. ON SOME FURTHER SUPPRESSED PLATES, ETCHINGS, AND WOOD ENGRAVINGS BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK … 59

- 6. HOGARTH’S “ENTHUSIASM DELINEATED,” “THE MAN OF TASTE,” AND “DON QUIXOTE” … 82

- 7. CANCELLED DESIGNS FOR “PUNCH” AND “ONCE a WEEK” BY CHARLES KEENE AND FREDERICK SANDYS … 127

- 8. MISCELLANEOUS … 149

- 9. THE SUPPRESSED OMAR KHAYYAM ETCHING … 179

- 10. ADAPTED OR PALIMPSEST PLATES … 192

- 11. ADAPTED OR PALIMPSEST PLATES (continued) … 226

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Printed Separately

The Title-page of the unwritten “Death in London” ▶ … Frontispiece

The Third Marquis of Hertford. (From the engraving by W. Holl, of the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence) ▶ … Between pages 20 and 21

The Fourth Marquis of Hertford. (From a photograph) ▶ … Between pages 20 and 21

The Third Marquis of Hertford when Lord Yarmouth. (From the coloured caricature by Richard Dighton) ▶ … Facing page 24

The suppressed portrait of Charles Dickens ▶ … Facing page 28

The “Pickwick” suppressed plate: “The Cricket Match.” (By R. W. Buss) ▶ … Facing page 30

The “Pickwick” suppressed plate: “Tupman and Rachel.” (By R. W. Buss) ▶ … Between pages 32 and 33

“Tupman and Rachel.” (By H. K. Browne) ▶ … Between pages 32 and 33

“The Last Song,” with the suppressed border (By George Cruikshank) ▶ … Facing page 40

The suppressed plate from “Oliver Twist” ▶ … Facing page 48

1. “The Fireside Scene”

2. “The Fireside Scene,” as worked upon by Cruikshank

The suppressed plate from “Sketches by Boz” ▶ … Facing page 56

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggar’s Petition.” (From the only known uncoloured impression of the plate) ▶ … Between pages 64 and 65

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggar’s Petition.” (From a coloured impression of the plate, with the figure of the valet obliterated with lamp-black) ▶ … Between pages 64 and 65

“Enthusiasm Delineated. (Humbly dedicated to his Grace the Arch Bishop of Canterbury by his Graces most obedient humble Servant Wm. Hogarth”) ▶ … Between pages 88 and 89

“Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism. A Medley” ▶ … Between pages 88 and 89

Portrait of Hogarth with his Dog Trump ▶ … Facing page 112

The plate reversed and in its last state, now entitled “The Bruiser” … Facing page 112

The Cancelled Cartoon. (By Charles Keene) ▶ … Facing page 128

The Cancelled “Social.” (By Charles Keene) ▶ … Facing page 136

Suggestion by Joseph Crawhall for the Cancelled “Social” … Facing page 136

“The Painted Chamber.” (From Antiquities of Westminster, 1807) ▶ … Facing page 150

The suppressed portrait of “John Jorrocks, Esq., M.F.H., etc.” (By Henry Alken, the younger) ▶ … Facing page 160

The suppressed frontispiece for “Omar Khayyam.” (By Edwin Edwards) ▶ … Facing page 188

“L’Europe alarmée pour le Fils d’un Meunier.” (The plate in its first state) ▶ … Between pages 204 and 205

The plate in its second state, now entitled “La Cour de Paix solitaire, entre les Roses piquantes et les Lis” ▶ … Between pages 204 and 205

Queen Anne presiding over the House of Lords. (The plate in its first state) ▶ … Between pages 236 and 237

The plate in its second state, now representing George I. presiding over the House of Lords ▶ … Between pages 236 and 237

“The Races of the Europeans, with their Keys.” (The plate in its first state) ▶ … Between pages 238 and 239

“A Skit on Britain.” (The plate in its second state) ▶ … Between pages 238 and 239

The Headless Horseman. (The plate with the head burnished out) ▶ … Facing page 240

The plate with Cromwell’s head ▶ … Between pages 242 and 243

The plate with Charles I.’s head ▶ … Between pages 242 and 243

Undescribed palimpsest plate. (First state and second state) ▶ … Facing page 244

Undescribed palimpsest plate. (First state and second state) ▶ … Facing page 246

Printed in the Text

1. The Suppressed Portrait of the Marquis of Steyne ▶ … 15

2. The Battle of Life. “Leech’s Grave Mistake” ▶ … 35

3. Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb. (The substituted plate in two states) ▶ … 51

4. The Strange Gentleman ▶ … 55

5. “A Trifling Mistake”—Corrected— ▶ … 71

6. Philoprogenitiveness ▶ … 77

7. “Drop it!” ▶ … 79

8. Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated” ▶ … 85

9. The Chandelier in “Enthusiasm” ▶ … 95

The Chandelier in “Credulity” … 95

10. The Man of Taste ▶ … 105

11. Burlington Gate as it appeared prior to 1868 ▶ … 109

12. Don Quixote, No. 1.—The Innkeeper ▶ … 115

13. Don Quixote, No. 2.—The Funeral of Chrysostom ▶ … 117

14. Don Quixote, No. 3.—The Innkeeper’s Wife and Daughter ▶ … 119

15. Don Quixote, No. 4.—Don Quixote seizes the Barber’s Basin ▶ … 120

16. Don Quixote, No. 5.—Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves ▶ … 122

17. Don Quixote, No. 6.—The First Interview ▶ … 123

18. Don Quixote, No. 7.—The Curate and the Barber ▶ … 125

19. Danaë in the Brazen Chamber ▶ … 143

20. Suppressed Illustration from The Vicar of Wakefield ▶ … 172

21. Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its first state) ▶ … 218

22. Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its second state) ▶ … 219

23. Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper. (The plate in its first state) ▶ … 229

Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper. (As adapted by the Anti-Jesuits) … 229

24. The Stature of a Great Man, or the English Colossus ▶ … 234

25. The Stature of a Great Man, or the Scotch Colossus ▶ … 235

26. Aan den Experten Hollandschen Hoofd-Smith. (The plate in its first state) ▶ … 245

27. Aan den Experten Hollandschen Hoofd-Smith. (As adapted by the Anti-Jesuits) ▶ … 245

28. An adapted Copperplate. (First state) ▶ … 247

29. An adapted Copperplate. (Second state) ▶ … 247

30. A History of the New Plot. (First state) ▶ … 249

31. A History of the New Plot. (Second state) ▶ … 249

SUPPRESSED PLATES, ETC.

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY

NO one who has the itch for book-collecting will deny that suppressed book illustrations are, what the forbidden fruit was to our mother Eve, irresistible. Whether such appetite represents the very proper ambition to have at his elbow the earliest states of beautiful or interesting books, of which the subsequently suppressed plate or wood engraving is in general a sort of guarantee, or the less defensible desire to possess what our neighbour does not, must be settled by the conscience of each. The fact remains that such rarities are peculiarly alluring to those whom Wotton calls “the lickerish chapmen of all such ware.” {2}

There are, of course, ridiculous1 people who value such books as the first issue of the first edition of Dickens’s American Notes just because there is a mistake in the pagination; or a first edition of Disraeli’s Lothair because the prototype of “Monsignor Catesby” is divulged by misprinting the name “Capel”; or Poems by Robert Burns, first Edinburgh Edition, because in the list of subscribers “The Duke of Roxborough” appears as “The Duke of Boxborough”; or Barker’s “Breeches” Bible of 1594, because on the title-page of the New Testament the figures are transposed to 1495; or the first edition in French of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, because the translator, maltreating the author’s name, has declared the book to be “traduit de l’Anglais de M. Irwin Washington,” and in the dedication has labelled Sir Walter Scott, Barronnet; or indeed a book of my own, in which I described as “since dead” a gifted and genial gentleman who I am glad to think still gives the lie to my inexcusable carelessness. {3}

But it is not because of such errors that a true book-lover desires to own editiones principes of famous works. That ambition is legitimate enough, but its legitimate reason is otherwhere to seek.

In the case of such a book as Rogers’s Italy, with the Turner engravings, the matter is very different. Here the fact that the plates on pp. 88 and 91 are transposed is a guarantee that the impressions of the extraordinarily delicate engravings are of the utmost brilliancy, for the error was discovered before many impressions had been taken. The same applies, though in lesser degree, to such a book as Mr. Austin Dobson’s Ballad of Beau Brocade, illustrated by Mr. Hugh Thomson, in the earliest edition of which certain of the illustrations are also misplaced.2 There is reason in wishing to possess these. See what Ruskin himself has said of the omission of the two engravings which had appeared in the first edition of The Two Paths. He writes in the preface to the 1878 reissue:

1 I am quite aware that “ridiculous” is a dangerous stone to throw, when one lives in a glass house oneself.

2 Compare also the early issues of the first edition of Ainsworth’s Tower of London, in which the plates at pp. 28 and 45 vary from those in the later issues.

{4}

“I own to a very enjoyable pride in making the first editions of my books valuable to their possessors, who found out, before other people, that these writings and drawings were good for something . . . and the two lovely engravings by Messrs. Cuff and Armytage will, I hope, render the old volume more or less classical among collectors.” From this we gather that “the Professor” was of the right kidney.

It is hardly necessary to say that it is not my intention to make this book a devil’s directory to illustrations which have been suppressed because of indecency, and are referred to in the catalogues of second-hand booksellers, whose cupidity is stronger than their self-respect, as “facetiæ” or “very curious.” Indeed, this book would itself in that case also very properly be put on the index expurgatorius of every decent person. My purpose is to gather together, correct and amplify the floating details concerning a legitimate class of rarities, and to put the collector on his guard, where necessary, against imposition.

By its very nature this treatise cannot be complete, but I have included most of the {5} examples of any importance which, during many years of bibliomania, have come under my observation. To these I have added certain re-engraved or palimpsest plates, which are germane to the subject.

As to these last I find amongst my papers a curious note from the pen of R. H. Cromek, the engraver, who flourished at the end of the eighteenth century.

“One of these vendors,” he writes (publishers of Family Bibles), “lately called to consult me professionally about an engraving he brought with him. It represented Mons. Buffon seated, contemplating various groups of animals surrounding him. He merely wished, he said, to be informed whether, by engaging my services to unclothe the naturalist, and giving him a rather more resolute look, the plate could not, at a trifling expense, be made to do duty for ‘Daniel in the lions’ den’”!

That would be a palimpsest well worth possessing, if ever it were carried into effect. It would be as fascinating an object of contemplation as the Stothard designs for Clarissa Harlowe, {6} which the same authority informs us were later used to illustrate the Scriptures! But the history of the cliché, pure and simple, has yet to be written. Our concern is with higher game than that.

CHAPTER II “THE MARQUIS OF STEYNE”

PERHAPS the most celebrated of suppressed book illustrations is the wood-engraved portrait of the “Marquis of Steyne,” drawn by Thackeray as an illustration to Vanity Fair, for which, if we are to believe the statement of a well-known bookseller’s catalogue, “libellous proceedings (sic) were threatened on account of its striking likeness to a member of the aristocracy.” With the accuracy of this statement I shall deal in due course.

Before, however, proceeding to the consideration of the suppressed illustration itself, it will be as well to pause for a moment to consider what antecedent probability there was that Thackeray would pillory a well-known roué of the period in terms that would make the likeness undoubted and undeniable. And in pointing out what the great {8} novelist’s practice was in this respect I would guard myself against the charge of presuming to censure one who is not here to answer for himself, and whose nobility of character was sufficient guarantee of good faith and honourable intention. Let it always be remembered that, if Thackeray flagellated others, he never hesitated to taste the quality of his own whip first. Even in his book illustrations, as I have pointed out elsewhere, he was as unsparing of his own feelings as he was in his writings. And, in using himself as a whipping-boy for our sins, he probably believed that he was making himself as despicable as a Rousseau. Hence he came to the like treatment of other real personages not with unclean hands.

Some of us may have seen, though very few of us can possess, a very rare pamphlet, which was sold for as much as £39 on one of its infrequent appearances in the auction-rooms, entitled Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Yates, and the Garrick Club. In it was published a never-sent reply to a letter written by Thackeray remonstrating with Yates on the contents of a “pen-and-ink” sketch published by the latter in No. 6 of a periodical called Town {9} Talk, which resulted in Yates’s expulsion from the Garrick Club.

In this unsent letter he charged Thackeray with having unjustifiably introduced portraits both in his letterpress and illustrations. Mr. Stephen Price appeared as Captain Shindy in the Book of Snobs. In the same book Thackeray drew on a wood block what was practically a portrait of Wyndham Smith, a fellow-clubman. This appeared amongst “Sporting Snobs,” Mr. Smith being a well-known sporting man. In Pendennis he made a sketch of a former member of the Garrick Club, Captain Granby Calcraft, under the name of Captain Granby Tiptoff. In the same book, under the transparent guise of the unforgettable Foker, he reproduced every characteristic, both in language, manner, and gesture, of Mr. Andrew Arcedeckne, and even went so far as to give an unmistakable portrait of him, to that gentleman’s great annoyance.

Besides the examples given by Yates, who was himself recognisable as George Garbage in The Virginians, we know, too, that in the same novel Theodore Hook appeared as Wagg, just as he did {10} as Stanislaus Hoax in Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, and that Alfred Bunn was the prototype of Mr. Dolphin. Archdeacon Allen was the original of Dobbin, Lady Langford of Lady Kew; and last, but not least, we have lately learned from Mrs. Ritchie that the inimitable Becky had undoubtedly her incarnation.

So we see that the antecedent improbability is as the snakes in Iceland; for the above examples, which no doubt could be largely added to, prove that Thackeray did not hesitate to draw direct from the model when it suited his purpose.

So far so good. Let us now proceed to inquire into the identity of the “Marquis of Steyne.”

That his prototype was a Marquis of Hertford is axiomatic with all those who have ever taken any interest in the subject; but when we come to inquire which marquis we find that opinions are astonishingly at variance. It would seem almost as though any Marquis of Hertford would serve, whereas in point of fact the portrait would be the grossest libel upon each of that noble line save one; and so incidentally we shall, by making the matter clear, rescue from calumny an honourable {11} race, which has hitherto through heedlessness been tarred with the same brush as its least honourable representative.

To show that this is not a reckless charge of inaccuracy, I quote from four letters in my possession written by four persons most likely to have special knowledge upon the subject.

The first, which is from a well-known printseller, informs me “that the Marquis of Steyne in Vanity Fair was Francis, second Marquis of Hertford, who died in 1822.”

The second, which is from one more intimately acquainted with the family than any other living person, says, “Unquestionably Francis, third Marquis of Hertford, the intimate friend of George IV., was the prototype of the Marquis of Steyne in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.”

The third letter, which is from a well-known London editor, in general the best-informed man I have ever met, says, “It was the fourth Lord, who died in 1870.”

The last of the four letters supports this view and says: “It was the fourth, not the third, Marquis of Hertford who was supposed to be the prototype {12} of Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne. . . . He was Richard Seymour Conway, who was born in 1800 and died in 1870.”3

Now, considering that these are the only opinions for which I have asked, and that they are so curiously divergent, it will, I think, be clear that it is time an authoritative declaration were forthcoming, based upon independent inquiries.

It may as well, then, be stated once for all that no one who has taken the trouble to investigate the lives of the three marquises above mentioned can hesitate for a moment in identifying the “Marquis of Steyne” with the third Marquis of Hertford. To those who are curious to know very full particulars about these noblemen I would recommend the perusal of an interesting article entitled “Two Marquises” in Lippincott’s Magazine for February 1874. Nor should they fail to read Disraeli’s Coningsby, and compare “Lord Monmouth” and his creature “Rigby,” whose prototypes were the same Marquis of Hertford and his creature Croker, with the {13} “Marquis of Steyne” and his managing man “Wenham.”

And, whilst we are identifying the third Marquis in Coningsby and Vanity Fair, reference may be made to another most unflattering portrait of that notorious nobleman in a book published anonymously in 1844, which was immediately suppressed, but is now not infrequently to be found in second-hand book catalogues. The book was (I believe) written by John Mills, and had ten clever etched plates by George Standfast (probably a nom de plume). Copies in the parts as published are excessively rare. The title of the book is D’Horsay; or the Follies of the Day, by a Man of Fashion.4 It dealt with the escapades, vices, and adventures of well-known men of the day under the following transparent pseudonyms: Count d’Horsay, the Marquis of Hereford, the Earl of Chesterlane, Mr. Pelham, General Reel, Lord George Bentick, Mr. George Robbins, auctioneer, the Earl of Raspberry Hill, Benjamin D——i, Lord Hunting-Castle, and others. The {14} account of the “closing scene in the life of the greatest debauchee the world has ever seen, the Marquis of Hereford,” is too horrible to repeat.

3 As I write, a great daily newspaper informs the world that it was the first Marquis.

4 This scurrilous and poorly written book has lately been thought worthy of resurrection and republication.

So much for the identity of the “Marquis of Steyne” as described in Thackeray’s letterpress, which need not be dwelt upon here at greater length, seeing that the immediate object of this chapter is to deal with the accompanying engraving and its history. And in proceeding to this examination it should not be forgotten, in fairness to the novelist, that Thackeray has explained that his characters were made up of little bits of various persons. This is no doubt true enough. At the same time, we cannot but be aware that, although the details may have been gathered, the outline has been drawn direct from the life.

The Suppressed Portrait of the Marquis of Steyne

Vanity Fair was issued originally in monthly parts. Its first title was Vanity Fair: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society. Its first number was dated “January 1847,” and had “illustrations on steel and wood by the Author.” On p. 336 of the earliest issue of this first edition appeared the wood engraving of the Marquis of Steyne, wanting which a first edition is, to the {15} bibliomaniac, Hamlet with Hamlet left out. In the later issues, the engraving (which I here reproduce) was omitted, as also was the “rustic type” in which the title appeared on the first page.5 The publishers were Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, {16} as was natural, Thackeray being at this time on the staff of Punch. In later editions of the novel, published by Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., the engraving reappears—viz. on p. 22 of vol. ii. in the standard edition, and on p. 158, vol. ii., of the twenty-six-volume edition.6

5 To the rabid bibliophile I here present another variation, which has hitherto escaped the bookseller. In the first edition, on p. 453, will be found the misprint “Mr.” (for “Sir”) Pitt and Lady Jane Crawley.

6 It does not appear amongst the illustrations to the biographical edition, which are restricted to the full-page plates.

What was the reason for its sudden removal immediately after publication? As I have said above, it is commonly stated to have been in consequence of a threatened action for libel, of course on account of the undoubted likeness of the “Marquis of Steyne” to the third Marquis of Hertford. But how does this tally with facts? Lord Hertford had died in 1842, whilst the first number of Vanity Fair did not appear until 1847. Now every lawyer knows that you cannot libel a dead man. This was made clear some few years ago (I think) in the case of the Duke of Vallombrosa against a well-known English journalist. Therefore it is quite certain that, although legal proceedings might have been threatened, they would certainly have collapsed. {17} Further than that, those who knew the fourth Marquis are aware that he was the last man in the world to embark upon a lawsuit or court publicity in any way. And if any doubt upon the matter should still remain, I am able to state positively that no trace is to be discovered amongst the Hertford family papers of any action threatened or brought against Thackeray on any grounds whatsoever. I think, then, that we may dismiss once for all this aspect of the case.

At the same time it is not impossible that some hint may have reached the novelist’s ears that the illustration gave pain to persons then living, and that he promptly had it removed. But against this view there is a very strong presumption. If we turn the leaves of our original issue of Vanity Fair, we shall, on p. 421, find another wood engraving, and opposite p. 458 a full-page steel engraving, “The Triumph of Clytemnestra,” both containing portraits of “The Marquis of Steyne.” Now, considering that that nobleman’s august features are as recognisable in these as in the suppressed engraving, it seems unreasonable to suppose that the one would have been removed {18} without the others, in consequence of family representations.

Possibly the real truth of the matter is a very much simpler one. It may have been either that Thackeray was himself disgusted with the brutal frankness of the picture when he saw it printed, and insisted on its removal, or that the block met with some accident. Indeed, I am inclined to think, judging from my memory of the subject, that the idea of an action for libel is one that has only found expression in more modern booksellers’ catalogues. If I am not mistaken, the older booksellers used to speak of the engraving not as “suppressed,” but as “extremely rare,” and that it was supposed to have disappeared from later issues because it was broken before many impressions were taken. Of course, a threatened action for libel, on account of its striking likeness to a member of the aristocracy, added piquancy to the affair, and so redounded to the benefit of the vendor of the earliest issue of a first edition; and the identification of Lord Steyne’s prototype, in the letterpress, gave colour to the idea. Once set going, we may be certain that {19} the legend would not be allowed to lapse for lack of advertisement. To adapt what Dr. Johnson said of the “Countess,” “Sir,” said he to Boswell, “in the case of a (marquis) the imagination is more excited.”

The accompanying portraits of the third and fourth Marquises of Hertford give the reader an opportunity of forming his own opinion in the matter of identity. That of the third Marquis is from the engraving by William Holl of the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and certainly seems to suggest, in the prime of life, the features and expression which Thackeray has portrayed in old age. The bald head, and the arrangement of the whiskers—which are allowed to approach the corners of the mouth—are incontestable points of resemblance; and if the old voluptuary is somewhat more battered than Lawrence’s rather spruce model, we must remember that his portrait was painted by the courtly President of the Royal Academy many years before the period of life at which he is introduced to us by the novelist. Certainly he is not an attractive object; and I was amused to receive a letter from a member of the family to whom I first showed the wood {20} engraving in which these words occur: “I find we have no portrait whatever of the Lord Hertford in question, and am not surprised at it if he at all resembled that of the Marquis in Vanity Fair!”7

As regards the fourth Marquis, it is a curious fact that, notwithstanding his vast wealth, and his tastes as an artist and connoisseur, no painted or engraved portrait of him is known. The photograph here reproduced is the only counterfeit presentment extant, and is enough, if further evidence were needed, to dispose for ever of the idea that he was the prototype of the Marquis of Steyne. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that it is to him, through Sir Richard and Lady Wallace, that the nation owes a debt of gratitude for the splendid collection now housed in perpetuity in Hertford House.8

7 This is the description of the Marquis in Coningsby: “Lord Monmouth was in height above the middle size, but somewhat portly and corpulent; his countenance was strongly marked: sagacity on the brow, sensuality in the mouth and jaw; his head was bald, but there were remains of the rich brown hair on which he once prided himself. His large, deep blue eye, madid, and yet piercing, showed that the secretions of his brain were apportioned half to voluptuousness, half to common sense.” This might well pass as a description of the Thackeray drawing.

8 Just before Lady Wallace’s death, an examination of the Hertford House library failed to discover a first edition of Vanity Fair, in which I fancied some note might possibly have been found. This was probably due to the fact that a large number of the Hertford books were destroyed in the Pantechnicon fire.

The Third Marquis of Hertford.(From the engraving by W. Holl, of the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence)

The Fourth Marquis of Hertford. (From a photograph)

{21}

It will be noticed that in this photograph Lord Hertford wears his Star of the Order of the Garter, to obtain which he made the “tremendous sacrifice” of which an amusing account is given in the Lippincott article mentioned above. Of him the Speaker wrote at the time of his death:

Living in Paris a quiet and rather solitary life—in habits more a Frenchman than an Englishman; in tastes an artist and a connoisseur; in purse and opportunity unlimited by any niggard need of self-control—the fourth Marquis of Hertford busied himself in gathering together from the treasure-houses of Europe innumerable precious specimens of the painter’s, the goldsmith’s, and the cabinetmaker’s art. Year after year, with tranquil perseverance, he heaped up on every side of him all the beautiful objects on which he could lay hands—pictures, miniatures, furniture, enamels, china and plate, bronzes, and coats of armour—until his storehouses were full to overflowing of treasures which, except for the pleasure of procuring them, he could hardly ever have enjoyed. In this congenial task he was assisted by a young Englishman, the secret of whose connection with the Hertford family, if any such there was, the public has never penetrated yet. To this young Englishman, who was well known and liked in Parisian society in the tawdry splendour of the Second Empire, and whose active generosity {22} won him wide esteem in that desolated capital amid the terrible events of the winter of 1870–71, Lord Hertford bequeathed the wonderful possessions which he had accumulated in a lifetime of discriminating labour. When the Franco-German War and the Commune were over, Richard Wallace brought his spoils safely home, and exhibited them for a time at the Bethnal Green Museum while he built the great galleries to hold them in Manchester Square. But even here they were not destined to bring much happiness to their possessor. After a short time Sir Richard Wallace was left heirless—like Lord Hertford—by a cruel stroke of fate; and now, by his widow’s gift, the splendid inheritance, which has passed so quickly from the keeping of the hands that laid it up, goes to enrich a public which will not be ungrateful for the donor’s rare munificence, or unmindful of the sad and curious story it recalls.9

9 A footnote on p. 229, vol. iv. of G. E. C.’s Complete Peerage says: “[The fourth Marquis] is said never to have been in England. He left his Irish estates (worth £50,000 a year) and most of his personalty (which included the well-known Hertford collection of pictures) to Sir Richard Wallace, Bart. (so cr. 1866), who is supposed to have been an illegit. son, either of himself (when aged 18), or of his father, or even (not improbably) of his mother; which Richard (b. in London, 26th July 1818) d. s.p. at Paris, 20th July 1890, in his 72nd year, and was bur. in the family vault at Père-la-Chaise. Sir Richard’s ‘art treasures’ (derived as above stated) were valued at his death in 1890 at above two millions.”

To return again to the suppressed wood engraving itself, it is curious to notice that old “Lady Kew” of The Newcomes was sister to Lord Steyne. Now the name “Kew” at once suggests {23} to those conversant with the early doings of the century the nickname of the notorious Duke of Queensberry, known to all and sundry as “Old Q,” and sets us considering why the name should suggest itself to Thackeray in connection with Lord Hertford. And what do we find?

When the third Marquis was but twenty-one, he married a young lady named Marie Fagniani. She was believed to be the daughter of the Duke of Queensberry and an opera dancer of that name. Nothing would be more natural, therefore, than that Thackeray, having saturated himself with the surroundings of the prototypes of his characters, should, probably half unconsciously, have seized upon a capital name suggested to him in the course of preparing for his novel, and so adapted it to his requirements. This suggestion I only make for what it is worth. It may, of course, merely be that a search through the suburban directory suggested the name, as was no doubt the case in apportioning to her ladyship’s husband his second title of Lord Walham. At any rate, the coincidence seems worth recording.

In conclusion, there can be no possible doubt {24} that so far as Thackeray’s letterpress is concerned, the prototype of the Marquis of Steyne (Lord of the Powder Closet, etc. etc.) was Francis Charles Seymour Conway (third Marquis of Hertford) of his branch; Earl of Hertford and Yarmouth, Viscount Beauchamp, Baron Conway, and Baron of Ragley in England; and Baron Conway and Kilultagh in the peerage of Ireland; and as regards the suppressed wood engraving, there will, I think, be little question that Thackeray the artist dotted his i’s by an intentional representation of the noble lord’s not altogether attractive features.

The Third Marquis of Hertford when Lord Yarmouth.(From the coloured caricature by Richard Dighton)

It is, however, only fair to state that Lord Hertford was probably by no means the unmitigated scoundrel that those familiar with the “Marquis of Steyne” might be led to suppose. That he participated in all the amusements and most of the follies of a notorious society there can be little doubt. At the same time, we have it on record (in the somewhat pompous diction of the period) that he was extensively read in ancient and modern literature, that his judgment was remarkable for its solidity and sagacity, and that his {25} conversation was enlivened by much of that refined and quaint pleasantry which distinguished his near relative, Horace Walpole. He was a distinguished patron of all the arts; and those who were more intimately acquainted with his private life gave him the still higher praise of being a warm, generous, and unalterable friend. “It is but justice to add,” to quote the final words of the notice referred to, “that the writer has accidentally become acquainted with instances of his Lordship’s benevolence, the liberality of which was equalled only by the delicacy with which it was conferred, and the scrupulous care with which he endeavoured to conceal it.”

The caricature portrait of the third Marquis here reproduced was etched, as will be seen, by Richard Dighton in 1818, when this Marquis’s father was alive, and he was only the Earl of Yarmouth. The watermark on the paper is 1826, which explains the inscription “Marquis of Hertford,” evidently a later addition—an ex post facto puzzle which proved insoluble until it occurred to me to hold the portrait up to the light.

CHAPTER III THE SUPPRESSED PORTRAIT OF DICKENS, “PICKWICK,” “THE BATTLE OF LIFE,” AND GRIMALDI

HAVING dealt in the last chapter with the suppression of the well-known Thackeray wood-cut of the “Marquis of Steyne,” we naturally turn next in order to the other great Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens. Much, of course, has been written about the Buss plates in Pickwick, and much about the “Fireside Scene” in Oliver Twist. All readers of Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens know something of the wood engraving in The Battle of Life which ought to have been, but never was, cancelled; and some know what to look for in the vignette title of Martin Chuzzlewit. It is, however, time that the scattered details should be grouped, that reproductions of the plates themselves should make reference easy to those {27} who would identify their possessions, and that the additional information which is in some cases scattered about in various impermanent writings of my own and others should be focussed for the greater convenience of the collector.

In the first place, I shall present to the reader a suppressed portrait of the great novelist, which has, I believe, never since been reproduced. It was published about the year 1837 by Churton, but as to the name of the artist by whom it was etched there is a mystery which yet awaits solution. The plate is, as will be noticed, signed with the familiar pen-name “Phiz,” but was almost immediately repudiated by the chartered bearer of that title, H. K. Browne. It was promptly withdrawn from publication, and is now, as a necessary consequence, much sought after by the collector.10 Of it the author of Charles Dickens, the Story of his Life, writes:

A very remarkable [portrait] was etched about 1837 with the name “Phiz” at the foot. It represents Dickens {28} seated on a chair and holding a portfolio. In the background a Punch-and-Judy performance is going on. The face has none of that delicacy and softness about it which are observable in the Maclise portrait. It looks, however, more like the real young face of the older man, as revealed in the photograph now publishing [i.e. just after Dickens’s death]. This portrait is very rare, and it is understood that it was withdrawn from publication soon after it appeared. Mr. Hablot K. Browne, the genuine “Phiz,” denies all knowledge of it.

10 Since writing this, I have experienced a piece of scurvy luck. Entering a shop in the outskirts of Birmingham, I saw an impression of the etching lying on a table. I inquired its price and was met by the answer that it had just been sold to a lady for eighteenpence!

The Hotten memoir thus whets the appetites of its readers, but does not offer to satisfy them by a reproduction. This obvious duty I therefore here take the opportunity of discharging, and would advise the book-hunter to make a mental note of the etching in that pix of the brain where is secreted the reagent which separates the rare gold of the bookseller’s threepenny box from its too ordinary dross. The reproduction here given is about the size of the original etching.

So much for the suppressed portrait. Now let us take up our first edition of Pickwick, and say what has to be said about the much-discussed Buss plates and their substitutes.

The suppressed portrait of Charles Dickens

Pickwick, as we all know, was first published in parts, and only one number had appeared when {29} Robert Seymour, its illustrator, died by his own hand. Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the publishers, were at their wits’ end to get the new number illustrated in time for publication. Jackson, the well-known wood-engraver, who was at the time working for them, proposed for the task R. W. Buss, a “gentleman already well known to the public as a very humorous and talented artist.” The publishers gladly adopted the suggestion, and the appointment was made.

All this we find very fully set out in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s History of Pickwick, to which I would refer the reader who is anxious to acquaint himself with details of the transaction. The Buss etchings, which we here reproduce, had for their subjects “The Cricket Match” and “Tupman and Rachel,” and are to be found respectively opposite pp. 69 and 74 of the earliest issues of the first edition of the immortal romance. They were, in the words of the artist himself, “abominably bad,” and he was immediately superseded as illustrator by H. K. Browne, who was destined to be inseparably connected with the novelist’s work for so long a period. {30}

This episode has been so often dwelt upon, and so exhaustively dealt with, that I shall not do much more than point out how those who have written on the subject have altogether missed what is perhaps the most important link in the whole chain of circumstances. So put to it, as I have said, were the publishers to get the new number out in time lest an expectant public should be disappointed, that they were forced to fix upon Seymour’s substitute without consulting Dickens. This was really the whole crux of the situation. The author only recognised the failure of the plates. He knew nothing of the difficulties under which Buss had laboured, and so naturally made no allowances, and knew of no reason why subsequent ones should be better. The plates unquestionably were poor, but we find from Mr. Buss’s own private MS., to which, by his son’s kindness, I have had access, that this was not by any means mainly the fault of the artist. He had previously had no experience in etching, and only undertook the work after much pressure, to accommodate the publishers. To quote from his own account: {31}

The “Pickwick” suppressed plate: “The Cricket Match.”(By R. W. Buss)

At Seymour’s death, Hall engaged me to illustrate Charles Dickens’s Pickwick. I commenced practice, and worked hard, I may say day and night, for at least a month on etching, and I furnished the illustrations for Pickwick. Without any reason assigned, Hall broke his engagement with me, in a manner at once unjust and unhandsome.

As a matter of fact, the plates, as they appeared, were not etched by Buss at all, but by a professional etcher after his designs. And it is curious to note that each of the plates is, notwithstanding, inscribed, “Drawn & Etch’d by R. W. Buss.”

The artist’s bitterness against his employers was not unnatural. At the same time, we must remember that the fact that they had on the spur of the moment to decide upon an artist, without consulting Dickens, puts the matter in a very different light. The fortunes of the venture were at stake. The author, at all hazards, must be humoured. His will was paramount, and when he insisted upon Buss’s supersession by H. K. Browne, there was practically an end of the matter. Happily Buss’s labour was not all lost, and it was with much pleasure that I seized the opportunity offered me by the editor of the {32} Magazine of Art in June 1902, to point out in that publication how perverse has been the fate which has made the name of an artist of no mean order more familiar by his few failures than by his many successes. It is not generally known that there are in existence two etched plates by Buss showing that he contemplated a series of extra illustrations to Pickwick. The one is a title-page with Mr. Pickwick being crowned; the other is rather a poor rendering of “The Break-down.”

But to return to the plates themselves: only about seven hundred copies were published when plates by Browne were substituted for them. “The Cricket Match” was wholly suppressed, and the subject of “Tupman and Rachel” was etched over again, considerably altered, but evidently founded upon the Buss plate. The latter is here reproduced for the purpose of comparison.

The “Pickwick” suppressed plate “Tupman and Rachel.”(By R. W. Buss)

“Tupman and Rachel.” (By H. K. Browne)

That every Dickens collector desires to possess one of the seven hundred copies of the first issue of the first edition which contain the Buss plates, is a matter of course, and enough has been said to make clear the reason of such desire. Should any of my readers fail to sympathise, he must take {33} it as an incontrovertible sign that he is immune from that most delightful of all diseases, bibliomania.

It need only be added that, in the beautiful “Victorian Edition” of the novel, published in two volumes by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in 1887, facsimiles may be seen of the original drawings made for the suppressed plates, as well as two unpublished drawings prepared by Mr. Buss, but not used. The subjects of these are “Mr. Pickwick at the Review,” and “Mr. Wardle and his Friends under the Influence of the Salmon.” The first is an excellent drawing, and goes far to prove that, had Buss been given time, he would have no more failed as illustrator of Pickwick than he did as illustrator of various other most successful publications. The same edition also contains facsimiles of an unused drawing by “Phiz,” “Mr. Winkle’s First Shot,” and of a water-colour drawing of “Tom Smart and the Chair,” sent in to the publishers by John Leech as a specimen of his work. From which it will be seen that the “Victorian Edition,” limited to two thousand copies, is also one which every Dickens lover ought, if possible, to possess. {34}

The originals of the Buss drawings were in the possession of the artist’s daughter, Miss Frances Mary Buss, the well-known founder of the North London Collegiate and Camden Schools, until her death a few years ago. They were then sold, and I have been unable to discover into whose hands they have passed.

So much for the Pickwick suppressed plates, which, if strict chronology were to be observed, should naturally be followed by an account of the “Rose Maylie and Oliver” plates in Oliver Twist. These, however, we shall hold over for another chapter, as they will have to be considered at some length. Meanwhile, we will deal shortly with the curious wood engraving in The Battle of Life, and with the etching of “The Last Song” in The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. The former is so far germane to our subject that it should have been suppressed, but, out of consideration for the artist, was not.

The Battle of Life. “Leech’s grave mistake”

Every Dickens collector desires to possess the complete set of the “Christmas Books” in their dainty red cloth bindings, dated from 1843 to 1848. A really desirable set includes, of course, {36} the Christmas Carol,11 with coloured plates by Leech, with the green end-papers and “stave 1”; The Chimes, with the publishers’ names within the engraved part of the title-page; and The Battle of Life, with the publishers’ names on both titles. But it is only the last of these that is entitled to mention in a treatise on cancelled illustrations, and that, as I have said, not because it was suppressed, but because it should have been.

11 It may be mentioned that there are two or three copies of the Christmas Carol known with the title-page and half-title printed in green and red, instead of in red and blue. Much store is laid by this variation amongst really moonstruck collectors.

By those who are familiar with the story it will be remembered that an early part of the plot leads one to suppose that Marion Jeddler had eloped with Michael Warden, when, as a matter of fact, she had merely escaped to her aunt. Leech, who was engaged as illustrator, was immensely busy, and only read so much of the story as seemed necessary for his purpose. As a result he was deceived, as Dickens intended his readers should be, and designed the double illustration here reproduced, in which the festivities to welcome the bridegroom at the top of the page {37} contrast with the flight of the bride in company with Michael Warden represented below. Thus was Dickens curiously “hoist with his own petard.” And the curious thing is that, notwithstanding the publicity given to the mistake in Forster’s Life of Dickens, this tragic woodcut, which wrongs poor Marion’s innocence and makes a hash of the whole story, is reproduced in the reprints up to this very day. The poor girl’s tragic figure remains, and seems likely to continue to do so, a victim to the stereotype.

This episode is generally referred to as “Leech’s grave mistake,” and grave undoubtedly it was; but the matter has its bright side, which redounds to the credit of the great novelist. I take the liberty of quoting from what has always seemed to me a very noble letter when we remember that Dickens was of all men most sensitive to any shortcomings in the work of his collaborators. He writes to Forster:

When I first saw it it was with a horror and agony not to be expressed. Of course I need not tell you, my dear fellow, Warden has no business in the elopement scene. He was never there. In the first hot sweat of this surprise and novelty I was going to implore the printing of that sheet to {38} be stopped, and the figure taken out of the block. But when I thought of the pain that this might give to our kind-hearted Leech, and that what is such a monstrous enormity to me, as never having entered my brain, may not so present itself to others, I became more composed, though the fact is wonderful to me.

Of course, had it been in these days of hurried publication, Dickens would hardly have given the matter a second thought. The average illustrator of to-day is curiously superior to the requirements of his author. He either does not read the episodes that he is called upon to illustrate, or, if he reads them, he does not grasp their meaning, or, if he grasps their meaning, the meaning does not meet with his approval. At any rate, he constantly makes a hash of the whole thing. Take for example Penelope’s English Experiences, by Miss Kate Wiggin, now lying before me. Look at the illustration, opposite p. 58, of Lady de Wolfe’s butler, who struck terror into Penelope’s soul because he did not wear a livery, and try, if you can, to recognise him in the shoulder-knotted, stripe-waistcoated, plush-breeched, silk-stockinged menial with an “unapproachable haughtiness of demeanour,” which the illustrator has portrayed. {39} Nor is this one of a few exceptional cases: their number might be multiplied ad infinitum.

But to return to The Battle of Life. Curiously enough, there is another little episode connected with this book, never, I believe, noticed before, which accentuates our impression of the generosity of Dickens’s character.

Three years after its publication a somewhat scurrilous little volume (now excessively rare), bearing the allusive title The Battle of London Life; or Boz and his Secretary, issued from the press. It was illustrated by six lithographs signed with the name of George Augustus Sala. It was a poor enough performance, but attracted attention by its ad captandum title, and the portrait of “Boz in his Study.” It is an imaginary and far from complimentary account of Dickens’s employment of a secretary, whose occupation it is to show him round the haunts of vice in London, by way of providing “local colour” for the novels. Eventually the secretary turns out to be a detective, who has been told off by the Government to discover the nature of the novelist’s intimacy with the revolutionist, Mazzini. It is a vulgar little {40} brochure, and, for all its futility, must have been very distasteful to the idol of the day. It was therefore the more magnanimous of Dickens to ignore the part which Sala had in it, and to speak so generously of him as we find him doing in the Life, besides employing him and pushing him, as he did largely later on, in his periodicals. A smaller man would not have allowed himself to forget such youthful indiscretions, for “memory always obeys the commands of the heart.”

Judged as a work of art, The Battle of Life is perhaps the least successful of Dickens’s “Christmas Books.” Edward FitzGerald’s opinion of it was shown in an autograph letter which came into the market only the other day. “What a wretched affair is The Battle of Life!” he writes; “it scarce even has the few good touches that generally redeem Dickens.”

“The Last Song” with the suppressed border. (By George Cruikshank)

Whilst we are on the subject of an illustration which should have been suppressed but was not, it should be pointed out that this was not the only occasion upon which Leech misunderstood Dickens’s purport. This we learn from Mr. F. G. Kitton’s monumental work, Dickens and {41} his Illustrators. Here he tells us that in another Christmas book, The Chimes, Leech delineated, in place of Richard as described in the text, an extremely ragged and dissipated-looking character, with a battered hat upon his head. When the novelist saw it the drawing had already been engraved, but the woodcut was promptly suppressed; there still exists, however, an impression of the cancelled engraving, which is bound up with what is evidently a unique copy of The Chimes (now the property of Mr. J. P. Dexter), where blank spaces are left for some of the woodcuts. This particular copy is probably the publishers’ “make-up,” which had accidentally left their hands.

Let us now consider for a moment a very remarkable etching which was, so far only as regards an important portion of it, cancelled in all but the very first issue of The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. These were published in two volumes in 1838. Besides writing the preface, Dickens was only responsible for the editing of Mr. Egerton Wilks’s manuscript, which had been prepared from autobiographical notes. A good deal of fault was found with the work, particularly {42} on the ground that Dickens himself could never have seen Grimaldi. To this he very pertinently replied, “I don’t believe that Lord Braybrooke had more than the very slightest acquaintance with Mr. Pepys, whose memoirs he edited two centuries after he died!”12

The volumes are now most valued for the twelve etchings by George Cruikshank; but the important thing from the bibliolater’s point of view is to possess the earliest issue with “The Last Song” surrounded by a grotesque border. This border, which is here produced, was removed from the plate after the first issue of the first edition. I have just had offered to me a copy of this edition containing “The Last Song” in the two states, i.e. with and without the border, for the modest sum of eight guineas!

12 My attention was lately called to a copy of the memoirs in which the former owner had pasted the following amusingly irrelevant note:—“At the Beckford sale a copy of the famous Grimm—the Grimm with the illustrations printed in bronze-coloured ink—fetched £64.” I have a very shrewd suspicion that the annotator had an unmethodical brain, and believed Grimm to be short for Grimaldi! Requiescat in pace.

CHAPTER IV DICKENS CANCELLED PLATES: “OLIVER TWIST,” “MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT,” “THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN,” “PICTURES FROM ITALY,” AND “SKETCHES BY BOZ.”

IN dealing with the episode of the suppressed plate in Oliver Twist we must be careful to bear in mind the fact that between the publication of Pickwick and the later novel there was an essential difference. The former was first published in self-contained parts, whereas the latter was published serially in Bentley’s Miscellany. Hence, the first editions of Pickwick in book form are to be met with bound from the parts, whereas the first editions in book-form of Oliver Twist are only to be found as issued by the publishers complete in three volumes. And unless we grasp this distinction at the outset we shall find it impossible to understand the apparently erratic appearance and disappearance {44} of the suppressed plate of “Rose Maylie and Oliver: the Fireside Scene” and its substitute.

The first instalment of the novel was published in the second number of Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837, and it continued to run for nearly two years and a quarter. From this it will be seen that the last instalment of the novel was not published until three months of the year 1839 had elapsed.

In the meantime, however, the novel and the illustrations had been completed, and the whole story was printed in book form and published in three volumes in the second year of its serial issue, the exact date being November 9, 1838.

As a consequence we shall find the following curious result—namely, that the owners of the very earliest issue of Oliver Twist find themselves not in the happy possession of the suppressed plate, as would be naturally expected, but in the melancholy possession of its exceedingly ugly substitute.

This, to the uninitiated, would prove as great a puzzle as to Macaulay’s New Zealander would appear the fact that in Truro Cathedral the older {45} structure is of a later style than the new. But this is comparing small things with great. For we are fain to confess that, unlike the law, de minimis curat helluo librorum.

Thus, then, we have to face this apparent anomaly, that, to possess a copy of Oliver Twist with brightest impressions of the etchings throughout, we are under the necessity of combining the early plates from Bentley’s Miscellany with the later plates from the first edition published in volume form. This not uninteresting fact I may, I believe, claim to be the first to point out, and it goes far to explain a very misleading note on p. 151 of Reid’s monumental Catalogue of George Cruikshank’s Works, which shows clearly that the late Keeper of the Prints was greatly at sea in the matter.

Referring to the “Fireside Scene,” he says: “The plate was used in 1838, when the work reappeared in three volumes, in lieu of the preceding (‘Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb’), which was thought by the publisher to be of too melancholy a nature for the conclusion of the story.” From which any casual reader would be {46} led to the conclusion that “Rose Maylie and Oliver at the Tomb” was the suppressed plate, and that the “Fireside Scene” was substituted for it, whereas exactly the opposite was the case.

The novel was ready for publication complete in three volumes in the autumn of 1838. The illustrations for the last volume had been somewhat hastily executed “in a lump.” And Dickens, who always was most solicitous about the work of his collaborating artists, did not set eyes upon them until the eve of publication. One of them, “The Fireside Scene,” he so strongly objected to that it had to be cancelled, and he wrote to the artist asking him to design “the plate afresh and to do so at once, in order that as few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth.”13 The publication of the book, however, could not be delayed, and thus we have it that the earliest issue of the first edition of Oliver Twist in book-form contains the “Fireside Scene” opposite p. 313, vol. iii., which it is the desire of every Dickens collector to possess, while the later issue of the latter part of the novel in Bentley’s Miscellany {47} contains that which Cruikshank substituted for it at the novelist’s request.

Both the plates are here reproduced for the convenience of the owner of this or that edition.

But this is not all that has to be said upon the subject of the “Rose and Oliver” plates, and again I claim to be the purveyor of a little exclusive information.14

It has generally been supposed that Cruikshank, although naturally put about by Dickens’s disapproval, did immediately proceed to carry out his author’s suggestion. For example, we find Mr. Francis Phillimore, in his introduction to the Dickens Memento, published by Messrs. Field and Tuer, saying: “The author was so disgusted with the last plate that he politely but forcibly asked Cruikshank to etch another. This was done at once.” I am, however, in a position to prove that this was emphatically not the case. And it is what one would naturally expect, for George was the last person in the world to acquiesce calmly and unhesitatingly in the condemnation of work which he had himself deemed sufficiently good. {48}

In the year 1892 I had the privilege of examining the splendid collection of Mr. H. W. Bruton, of Gloucester, which has since been dispersed. On that occasion he drew my attention to a unique impression of the “Fireside” plate in his possession, from which we (he was the first to see the point) drew the necessary conclusion which follows. The importance of the impression lies in the fact that it shows that a large amount of added work had been put into the plate, principally of a stipply nature, after all the impressions which had so displeased Dickens had been struck off. By which it is evident that George tried hard to improve the original plate instead of at once falling in with the suggestion that the subject should be designed afresh. This proof was probably submitted to Dickens and again rejected, for no impressions of the plate with stippled additions are known to have been published.15 And plainly it was only after considerable effort to make the plate do, that the artist designed the {49} far worse picture of “Rose Maylie and Oliver before the Tomb of Agnes,” which is a questionable adornment to the later issues of the story. And had it not been for the delay so caused, it is more than probable that the suppressed plate would have been even a greater rarity than it actually is.

13 Vide Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, vol. i. p. 101. (Library Edition.)

14 I first alluded to this in Temple Bar for September 1892.

15 It need hardly be said that if any of my readers finds that his copy contains “The Fireside Scene” differing from the first of those here produced, he may congratulate himself on the possession of a great rarity.

The suppressed plate from “Oliver Twist”: “The Fireside Scene” | The suppressed plate from “Oliver Twist”: “The Fireside Scene,” as worked upon by Cruikshank

As I have said above, Mr. Bruton’s collection was dispersed in 1897 at Sotheby’s. No. 145 in that sale was an unrivalled run of the Oliver Twist illustrations, seeing that it consisted of a complete set of proofs of the etchings, and included, with other rarities, the unique proof just mentioned. The lot sold for £32:10s. By the kindness of its late owner, I am enabled to present to my readers a reproduction of this unique impression of the plate in its second state.

So much then for the story of the suppressed plate. There is, however, something more to be said of its substitute.

If we turn to our edition of Oliver Twist, so long as it does not happen to be one published subsequently to 1845, or one containing the suppressed plate, we shall find Rose standing with her {50} arm on Oliver’s shoulder before a tablet put up to his mother’s memory, and we shall find that Rose’s dress is light in colour save for a dark shawl or lace fichu, which is thrown across her shoulders and bosom. In the 1846 edition of the book, the plate has been largely touched up and shaded, and Rose’s dress turned into a black one.16 Now, it is perfectly evident that it is the old plate altered and used over again and not a new plate copied from the old, for every line and every dot in the illustration to the earlier editions reappears in this. The perplexing matter that I have to draw your attention to, however, is that, in the same lot (145) at the Bruton sale mentioned above, there was sold a proof of this plate with Rose Maylie in the black dress, and this a proof before letters, an impossible nut for the amateur to crack who does not know that the lettering of plates may be stopped-out or burnished away or covered up for the striking off of misleading impressions; from which the moral may be drawn that it is better to believe in proof impressions after letters where they are well {52} authenticated, than to presume that a proof is before letters merely because those letters do not appear. Verb. sat sap. The plate in this state is here reproduced for the sake of comparison.

The plate in its first state.

The plate in its second state.

Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb. (The substituted plate in two states)

16 The dress is also black in a reprint of the first edition published by Messrs. Macmillan in 1892, and in the large edition with the illustrations coloured, published by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in 1895.

Before passing from Oliver Twist, it should be pointed out that the first issue of 1838, which contains the suppressed plate, is also differentiated from the second issue of the same year by what is sometimes alluded to as the “suppressed title-page,” which runs as follows:—“Oliver Twist; / or, the / ‘Parish Boy’s Progress;’ / by ‘Boz,’ / in three volumes, / Vol. I (II. or III.) / London: / Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street. / — — / 1838.”

The second issue, with the substituted plate, has:—“Oliver Twist / By / Charles Dickens, / Author of ‘The Pickwick Papers,’” the rest of the title being as in the first. It is curious to notice, further, that in a later edition the original title is resumed.

So much for Oliver Twist. We must not, however, quit Dickens without mentioning one or two other items, which more or less of right find their place in a treatise on “Suppressed Plates.” {53}

There is, for example, the etched title-page to the first issue of the first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit, where the reward on the direction post appears as “100£” instead of “£100,” which is often wrongly labelled “suppressed.” As a matter of fact it was not suppressed at all. It is nothing more than the first state of a plate which was afterwards altered. However, the bait is so valuable a one with which to entice the bibliomaniac, that there is no prospect of the description being lightly relinquished, and as it is one object of this treatise to protect the unwary, allusion to it is not out of place. The fact that it is the title-page issued after the book had appeared serially with its forty illustrations, disposes of any lingering idea that in acquiring it we are assured of the possession of early impressions of the other plates. But the undiscriminating bibliomaniac requires no logical justification, and the plate will still retain its market value.

A like variation is to be found in a well-known etching by George Cruikshank, entitled “The Worship of Wealth.” The head of Mammon is represented by a small money-bag, and the {54} features of the face by the letters GOLD. Of this plate only one state was known until in a happy moment one of our best-known collectors discovered and secured a unique proof with all the letters printed in reverse, thus:—

—a triumph which only the true dilettante will appreciate at its proper value.

Another variation of the same kind is to be found in the first and second issues of Pine’s beautiful edition of Horace (1733), in which the text is engraved throughout. In the first there is the misprint “Post est” on the medal of Cæsar. In the second “Potest” has been substituted. Copies containing the mistake fetch twice as much in the market as those containing the correction! This is, however, justifiable, as the mistake connotes an early set of impressions.

The Strange Gentleman

Another Dickens plate demanding mention is the exceedingly rare etched frontispiece by “Phiz,” to be found in only a few copies of The Strange {55} Gentleman, published in 1837 by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. This “Comic Burletta” was founded upon “The Great Winglebury Duel,” in Sketches by Boz, and was first performed at the St. James’s Theatre in September 1836. A second edition was {56} published in 1860 with a coloured etching by Mr. F. W. Pailthorpe, the last illustrator to carry on the tradition of Cruikshank and H. K. Browne. The “Phiz” etching is here reproduced. Even the second edition is extremely rare, and readily sells for between two and three pounds. The reason for the disappearance of the “Phiz” plate is not known, and I only give particulars of it here because of its excessive rarity, and because it is constantly referred to as “suppressed,” though with no strict justification. The British Museum copy of the book only contains Mr. Pailthorpe’s frontispiece, but a copy with the “Phiz” plate is to be found in the Forster Library, South Kensington.

Then, again, we have Dickens’s Pictures from Italy, published by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans in 1846, with the beautiful “vignette illustrations on the wood,” by that master engraver, Samuel Palmer. For some reason or other that representing “The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii,” on the title-page, disappears after the exhaustion of the first and second editions, both published in the same year. It reappears, however, in the late {57} reprint of 1888, and is also only here alluded to because sometimes referred to as “suppressed.”

The suppressed plate from “Sketches by Boz”

The last of the Dickens illustrations germane to our subject is that much-desired etching of “The Free and Easy,” which should be found opposite page 29 of the “second series” of Sketches by Boz. Both the first and second series were originally published in 1836. In 1839 another edition appeared with all the etchings to the original edition enlarged (except “The Free and Easy,” which was cancelled), and with thirteen additional plates. An edition on the lines of the first issue of the second series, only with the illustrations in lithography, was published in Calcutta in 1837.

It is important, in collating the first editions of the Sketches, to bear in mind the fact that the first series was in two volumes and the second in one. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why “Vol. III.” is engraved on each of the plates in the second series. As showing how eagerly these volumes in fine condition, and of course uncut and in the original cloth binding, are sought after, it may be mentioned that thirty pounds is by no means an unheard-of price. {58}

Unfortunately the plates will in most cases be found to be badly foxed. The tissue of the paper itself has in many cases been attacked by damp and rotted right through.

In such cases any remedy except the drastic one of punching is of course out of the question. Hence the rarity of a really “desirable” set of the plates,—a rarity which is largely due to the hoarding away of books in glass cases; for books require fresh, dry air, with the rest of God’s creatures.

It may not be out of place here, whilst on the subject of foxing, to warn the collector that every plate in a book should be carefully examined before any extravagant price is given for what is called a fine copy. No doubt we are much indebted to the clever “doctors” of prints who punch the fatal spots out and pulp them in, who fill up the worm-holes and vamp up the cleaned prints with green-wood smoke and coffee infusions to a respectable appearance of age. At the same time we must never allow ourselves to forget that there are such occupations as vamping and “improving,” and that it is not for vamped and improved copies that we should pay excessive prices.

CHAPTER V ON SOME FURTHER SUPPRESSED PLATES, ETCHINGS, AND WOOD ENGRAVINGS BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK

IN Chapter III. we have incidentally considered the suppressed grotesque border to the etching of “The Last Song” by George Cruikshank in the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. In this chapter we shall treat of certain other suppressions to which the “inimitable” George’s work was subjected.

The first to which I shall direct your attention has a curious and romantic history attaching to it, instinct with the rough and brutal methods of our immediate ancestors. It is a highly-coloured etched broadside published in 1815, the very year of the tragic death of the gifted and ill-fated Gillray, whose mantle, as political caricaturist, was now fallen upon his brilliant young contemporary. {60} These were the days of hard hitting, of reckless charges, of imprisonment for libel, of dramatic political episodes, and the wonder is that George Cruikshank escaped the fates of the Burdetts, the Hones, and the Hobhouses of the period. The fact is that George was a very shrewd young man and had a very shrewd idea of how far it was safe to go. Indeed, in this partially suppressed cartoon we find him upon the very verge of recklessness and only drawing back from danger just in the nick of time.

I have spoken of the partial suppression of this broadside, and in this partial cancellation it is differentiated from all others with which we have hitherto dealt. Brutal enough as is the satire as we see it, there is a brutality curiously hidden within, which, unsuspected by the uninitiated, proves to what astounding lengths satire of that period was sometimes ready to go.

Before dealing in detail with this “Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggar’s Petition” it will be as well to relate the circumstances which led up to its perpetration.

Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, born {61} 1771, was perhaps the best hated of all the royal personages of the period then in England, and this notwithstanding the fact that he was a man of conspicuous bravery. He was, for a few years after Queen Victoria’s accession, next heir to the throne of England. Later he ascended the throne of Hanover under the regulations of the Salic law, and gained the affection of his people, proving himself a wise and beneficent ruler. Probably William IV. put his character into a nutshell when he said: “Ernest is not such a bad fellow, but if any one has a corn he is sure to tread on it.”

However that may be, there is no doubt that there is hardly a crime in the whole decalogue which was not at one time or another laid at his door, and not the least among these was the crime of murder.

To quote the succinct account of this affair given in the Dictionary of National Biography:—“On the night of 31st May 1810 the duke was found in his apartments in St. James’s Palace with a terrible wound in his head, which would have been mortal had not the assassin’s weapon struck against the duke’s sword. Shortly afterwards his {62} valet, Sellis,17 was found dead in his bed with his throat cut. On hearing the evidence of the surgeons and other witnesses, the coroner’s jury returned a verdict that Sellis had committed suicide after attempting to assassinate the duke. The absence of any reasonable motive... caused this event to be greatly discussed, and democratic journalists did not hesitate to hint that he really murdered Sellis.” One of these, Henry White, was sentenced in 1815 to fifteen months’ imprisonment and a fine of £200 for publishing the rumour. The story again cropped up in 1832, when the duke had made himself particularly obnoxious to the radical press, and was exploited by a pamphleteer named Phillips. The duke prosecuted him, and he was promptly found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.

17 Not Serres, as Reid has it in his descriptive account of Cruikshank’s works. The keeper of the prints evidently confused the name of the valet with that of Mrs. Olive Serres, who later on called herself Princess Olive of Cumberland, and claimed to be the duke’s legitimate daughter.

Notwithstanding this, there was little abatement in the persecution of the duke. Even Lord Brougham in the House of Lords sneeringly called {63} him to his face “the illustrious duke—illustrious only by courtesy.” I take up a few consecutive numbers of that venomous little contemporary paper, Figaro in London, and find week by week some very plain speaking. Here are a few examples:—

“That he’s ne’er known to change his mind Is surely nothing strange; For no one ever yet could find He’d any mind to change.”

Again:—

“He boasts about the truth, I’ve heard, And vows he’d never break it; Why zounds a man must keep his word When nobody will take it.”

Again, referring to a youth dressed à la Prince de Cumberland, who had been brought up at Bow Street charged with being an expert pickpocket, Figaro says: “A similarity to the Duke of Cumberland is a very serious matter, and in the opinion of Mr. Halls (the police magistrate) quite sufficient to entitle any one to a couple of months’ imprisonment, as a common thief or an incorrigible vagabond.”

Again:— {64}

“INQUEST EXTRAORDINARY

Found dead of fright, a child, (how sad a case!) Verdict—Saw Cumberland’s mustachioed face.”

Again:—“The new piece announced at Drury Lane under the title of The Dæmon Duke or The Mystic Branch has no reference whatever to his Royal Highness of Cumberland.”

But these might be multiplied almost to infinity. The examples quoted make it sufficiently plain why it was that the Whig Cabinet of the day felt it advisable to hurry on our late Queen’s marriage.

So much for a general review of the duke’s career. We will now return to the year 1815 and the publication of the broadside with which we are more particularly concerned.

The duke had just announced his intention of marrying the Princess of Salm, who had been twice a widow. The Prince Regent had raised no objection, but the Queen, who had a rooted aversion to second marriages, made no secret of her disapproval. The country, too, was indignant, because another royal marriage spelt, in accordance with what was now the ordinary usage, a further burden upon the exchequer.

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From the only known uncoloured impression of the Plate)

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From the only known uncoloured impression of the Plate)

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From a coloured impression of the plate, with the figure of the valet obliterated with lamp-black)

“A Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggars Petition.” (From a coloured impression of the plate, with the figure of the valet obliterated with lamp-black)

{65}

On July 3 the proposal was made in the Commons to increase the duke’s pension of £18,000 a year, which he held in addition to his salary of £3000 a year as Colonel of the 1st Hussars, by £6000. The House was equally divided on the vote, when a dramatic incident occurred. Lord Cochrane, heir to the Dundonald peerage, and a member of the House of Commons, had, in the previous year, been wrongfully found guilty of participation in a Stock Exchange fraud and had been imprisoned. On this very 3rd day of July he was released from prison, and immediately repaired to Westminster. The House was at that moment going to a division. His lordship entered just in time to record his casting vote against the increase of the duke’s pension, and thus by an extraordinary coincidence the duke was the poorer and the country the richer by £6000 a year.

This is the moment seized by Cruikshank in the broadside here reproduced. Before the half-open door of “St. Stephen’s,” behind which is seen a crowd of members, Lord Cochrane fires, from a mortar decorated with a full-bottomed wig, a {66} cannon-ball labelled “casting vote.” This, striking the duke full in the rear, drives him towards a bank on which stand three grenadiers, the Princess of Salm (recognisable by the flag which she carries, labelled “Psalms”) and her little boy, who sings—

My daddy is a grenadier And he’s pleas’d my Mammy O, With his long swoard and broadswoard And his bayonet so handy O.

The duke, from whose hand falls his petition, and whose head is adorned with a cuckold’s horns, cries aloud, “Pity the sorrow of a poor young man”; whilst Cochrane thunders out, “No, no, we’ll have no petitions here. Do you thint (sic) we are not up to your hoaxing, cadging tricks? You vagrant, do you think we’ll believe all you say or swear? Do you think that your services or your merits will do you any good here? If you do, I can tell you from experience that you are cursedly mistaken. So set off and don’t show your ugly face here again. If you do, shiver my timbers if I don’t send you to Ellenborough Castle: aye, aye, my boy, I’ll clap you in the grated chamber, where there’s neither door, window, {67} onr (sic) fireplace. I’ll put you in the Stocks! I’ll put you in the Pillory! I’ll fine you. I’ll, I’ll play hell with you! D—— me, I think I have just come in time to give you a shot between wind and water.”

On the ground below the flying duke lie documents recording his pensions and salaries.

No wonder, you will say, that such a scandalous attack upon a personage so near the throne should be suppressed with a high hand. The marvel is that artist and publisher should have escaped the fate of Henry White and the pamphleteer Phillips. But you will be more surprised than ever when you learn that not only did artist and publisher go scot-free, but that the plate, so far from being suppressed, was published and scattered broadcast amongst the people without protest.

Why, then, it will be asked, does it take its place in a treatise on suppressed plates? I will tell you.

Do you not notice in the darker impression of the plate here reproduced—darker because the original has been painted—that such perspective as the picture has is destroyed by a great black blot {68} which reaches from the feet of the three soldiers right down to the path in the right-hand lower corner of the design? Well, that great black blot covers what would have inevitably landed George Cruikshank and Mr. W. N. Jones of 5 Newgate Street, publisher, in a larger building higher up the same street, if it had not been for a happy afterthought of Mr. W. N. Jones, which took shape in a liberal use of lamp-black.18

On the space so covered the reckless George, unmindful of the fate of Henry White, had etched the scantily clothed figure of the unhappy valet Sellis, with bleeding throat, crying aloud, “Is this a razor that I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it.”

18 This use of lamp-black has its parallel in the case of one of the tailpieces to Bewick’s Birds, in the first edition of which an apprentice was employed to veil certain indelicacies with a coat of ink. Unfortunately, from want of density, the colouring rather serves to accentuate than hide the offending details. In the next edition a plug was inserted in the block and two bars of wood engraved in the interests of decency.

After but one or two proofs had been pulled, George and his publisher would seem to have become appalled at their temerity, and the plate was only issued coloured and with the peccant {69} figure blotted out. For many years I hoped and hoped in vain to come across an uncoloured proof displaying the hidden figure. But it was not until 1905 that I was fortunate enough to light upon the probably unique proof here reproduced, which had passed out of the Bruton collection into that of the omnivorous collector, the late Edwin Truman.

For the sake of those who have preserved the valuable catalogue of the sale in 1897 of the Bruton collection of the works of George Cruikshank, it should be observed that Reid’s misnomer of the valet to which I have drawn attention above has been there repeated.

So much, then, for the partially suppressed broadside of 1815, which incidentally may be looked upon as the forerunner of the blottesque censorship of Russian newspapers. We will now pass on to another broadside which was not only suppressed in full, but of which the copies that had already been sold were assiduously bought up.

The circumstances surrounding this plate are by no means so dramatic as those with which we have last dealt. At the same time, by means of it we obtain one of those sharp contrasts in political {70} moods and tenses which pleasurably tickle the imagination. We learn how little is absolute in life, how much is relative. We realise how the reactionary of to-day may have been the reformer of yesterday. In a word, we see in this most conservative member of the Russell administration of 1846–1852 and of the Coalition of 1853, in this complacent recipient of the peerage of Broughton de Gyfford and the Grand Cross of the Bath, in this happy husband of a Marquis’s daughter,—we see, I say, in this Tory nobleman of the ’fifties the irreconcilable John Cam Hobhouse of the early years of the century, committed to Newgate for breach of privilege, the author of the subversive Letters to an Englishman, and the representative for Parliament of the Westminster mobocracy.

“A Trifling Mistake”——Corrected——

“A Trifling Mistake”——Corrected——

“A Trifling Mistake”——Corrected——[detail for epub/mobi editions]

In Cruikshank’s broadside here reproduced the future President of the Board of Control is represented twirling his thumbs in enforced retirement and with full leisure to repent of his indiscretions. Above the mantelpiece representations of St. Stephen’s and Newgate are placed in sharp contrast. Below the last a former occupant of the {72} cell has scratched a rude gibbet. The grate is empty. On the table stand an empty pewter pot and pipe. On the wall is seen a long quotation from his anonymous pamphlet A Trifling Mistake, for which he has been committed to prison. This, with a barbed addition, gives the title to the broadside itself. The quotation runs:—

“What prevents ye people from walking down to ye house and pulling out ye members by ye ears, locking up their doors and flinging ye key into ye Thames? Is it any majesty which lodges in the members of that assembly? Do we love them? Not at all: we have an instinctive horror and disgust at the very abstract idea of ye boroughmonger. Do we respect them? Not in the least. Do we regard them as endowed with any superior qualities? On the contrary, there is scarcely a poorer creature than your mere member of Parliament; though, in his corporate capacity, ye earth furnishes not so absolute a bully. Their true practical protectors, then—the real efficient anti-reformers,—are to be found at ye Horse Guards and ye Knightsbridge Barracks. As long as the House of Commons majorities are backed by the regimental muster roll, so long may those who have got the tax power keep it and hang those who resist”!!! !!! !!!

Vide Trifling Mistake.

Below this hangs a bill headed “Little Hob in the Well.” {73}

The reproduction of the etching here given is from a very interesting touched proof in the British Museum. Upon it the artist’s work in pencil can be plainly traced. To the right of the picture of Newgate another roughly drawn gibbet can be distinguished. On the bill the words have been added, “A New Song in Defence of the People, corrected,” etc. The profile of the prisoner has been carefully reduced, and a punning sub-title to the whole added, “How Cam you to be in that Hobble?”

The date on the margin is January 1, 1819 (obviously a mistake for 1820), and its publication, no doubt, went some way towards Hobhouse’s election as member for Westminster, which took place immediately after his release on the 20th day of the month in the year 1820.

After his elevation to the peerage Hobhouse took no active part in public affairs. He died as lately as 1869, leaving no issue. Probably the plate was suppressed on the ground that it contained the long quotation given above from the lawless pamphlet for which he was imprisoned.

As I have said in an earlier chapter, it is not my {74} intention to make this treatise in any way a devil’s directory for those in search of salacious curiosities. I shall therefore not dwell upon the suppressed woodcut, which is rather coarse than loose, of “The Dead Rider” in the Italian Tales of 1823. I merely mention it for the sake of those who may be collating the book, and would find themselves misled by Reid’s note on the subject. He speaks of the “Elopement” woodcut being “wanting in two or three copies consulted of the first edition,” as though this were a matter for surprise. He fails to draw the very obvious conclusion that “The Elopement” was substituted for “The Dead Rider,” so that the number of illustrations might continue to tally with the announcement on the title-page, “Sixteen illustrative drawings by George Cruikshank.” He has apparently been confused by the fact, which I notice confuses a good many secondhand booksellers, that every copy has a woodcut entitled “The Dead Rider,” but that it is only the first issue that has two woodcuts with the same title.

And, whilst touching on the subject of Cruikshank’s early indiscretions, it will, I think, be only {75} fair to repeat a story of pretty and spontaneous atonement which I have told elsewhere, and which deals with another suppressed broadside.

No. 887 in Reid’s catalogue is “Accidents in High Life, or Royal Hobbys broke down, Dedicated to the Society for the Suppression of Vice.” Its companion picture is “Royal Hobbys of the Hertfordshire Cock Horse,” which was suppressed as being too suggestive even for so latitudinarian an age as that of the Regency. In the former the artist portrays the discomfiture of the Prince and the Marchioness of Hertford through the pole of the hobby-horse, upon which they have been riding, breaking and throwing both of them to the ground. The lady is cursing her folly in trusting herself to “such an old stick,” while her admirer is exclaiming that he shall try the Richmond Road in the future, the Hertford one being so unsatisfactory. The Duke of York is suffering from a similar disaster, and congratulating himself upon the softness of the cushion by which his fall has been broken, in allusion to his income of £10,000 for having charge of his father.

Now Mr. Bruton, who, like the late Mr. Truman, {76} had the advantage of George Cruikshank’s friendship in later years, was able to obtain authentication or repudiation of doubtful unsigned work from the artist himself, and, amongst others, this plate was submitted to him for judgment. The man’s honesty forced him to acknowledge himself to be the author of this piece of full-blooded vulgarity, but his regret has altered the usual laconic record of “Not by me, G. Ck.,” or “By my brother, I. R. C.,” pencilled on the plate, to “Sorry to say this is by me, G. C.” The old man was, when he came to look back upon a long life of good and evil mixed, somewhat more human than that terribly pious hero of Pope’s—

Who calmly looked on either life, and here Saw nothing to regret, or there to bear; From nature’s temp’rate feast rose satisfy’d, Thank’d heav’n that he had liv’d, and that he dy’d.

He looked back with genuine remorse upon youthful extravagances, and, though doubtless inclined by nature to be something of a poseur, and though he attitudinised somewhat too much over his virtuous fads at last, was not going to bolster up his reputation by an easy forgetfulness of early indiscretions. {77}

Philoprogenitiveness

Only a few words need be said of the other Cruikshank suppressions here reproduced. The first is the well-known plate “Philoprogenitiveness,” which was published in the earliest separate edition of that noble Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank, written by Thackeray for, and reprinted {78} from, The Westminster Review in 1840. And surely it was a prurient and unnatural squeamishness which condemned this illustration to exclusion in the subsequent editions. It is from the Phrenological Illustrations, published in 1826, one of the most famous of Cruikshank’s publications. I shall follow Thackeray’s excellent example of refraining from any description, and just leave the design to speak for itself, for it is a ridiculous task “to translate his designs into words, and go to the printer’s box for a description of all that fun and humour which the artist can produce by a few skilful turns of his needle.”

The second is the cancelled wood engraving entitled “Drop it,” which appears on page 18 of the first edition of Talpa; or the Chronicle of a Clay Farm, an Agricultural Fragment, by C. M. H(oskyns), published in 1853. For some unknown reason it disappears from subsequent editions, and is only of importance to those who pride themselves on being the possessors of Cruikshank editiones principes.

“Drop it!”

There is another Cruikshank suppression which might, were we hard up for material, be dragged {79} into a treatise on suppressed illustrations. I refer to a wood engraving of the redoubtable George himself taking his publisher, Brooks, by the nose with a pair of tongs, which resulted in the suppression of the pamphlet entitled A Pop-gun fired off by George Cruikshank, etc., in which it appeared. But if we were to open these pages to the consideration of suppressed books and pamphlets, I should soon find my publishers remonstrating, and the volume too big to handle. Further, it affords me the gratifying opportunity of referring the reader to a small book of mine, published in 1897, by Mr. W. P. Spencer, of 27 New Oxford Street, and entitled George {80} Cruikshank’s Portraits of Himself which I, as the author, of course consider has not attained the circulation it deserves. There will be found a full account of the suppressed pamphlet, together with a reproduction of the offending design.

Let me close this chapter with “A Cruikshank Outrage,” which I originally contributed to The Gentleman’s Magazine. It is, I think, sufficiently apropos, and will, I hope, appeal to all good Cruikshankians.

This is the bookcase, this the key; None may open this lock but me;

And only those of the cult may come Into my sanctum sanc-to-rum.

Swear “by George” on his “Omnibus” You are assuredly one of us.

Swear “by George” on his “Almanack” You will return each volume back.

Swear by “Grimm” in the earliest state Theft and pillage you reprobate.

Yes, that’s bound by Rivière, but Here’s the original cloth, uncut.

The “Bee and the Wasp” on India, tilt, Zaehnsdorf binder, morocco, gilt.

But all my “Scourges” plain bound shall bide— Plenty of “guilt” may be found inside. {81}

Here’s my “Omnibus,” worth a fief Because I’ve the unpaged preface-leaf.

“London Characters,” set complete, Sm. 8vo, in hlf. clf. neat.

Here a set of gigantic frauds In the original LABELLED boards.

“Oliver Twist,” as you will have guessed, The “Rose and Oliver” plate suppressed:

Not with the stippling over-writ— Only Bruton19 can show you IT.

And here “The Bottle” COLOURED, date Eighteen-hundred-and-forty-eight.

Yes, no doubt, ’twas among the first Thrusts that the Master launched at Thirst.

! George, you say, was at best, you think, As a Temperance man denouncing drink !

!! You dare tell me you interlope In quest of books for your “Band of Hope” !!

!!! You swore “by George” on his “Omnibus” You were assuredly one of us !!!

!!!! Avaunt, I prithee, aroynt, vacate This orthodox shrine to George the Great !!!!

For only those of the cult may come Into my sanctum sanc-to-rum.

19 Since the Bruton sale in 1897 this, alas, is no longer true.

CHAPTER VI HOGARTH’S “ENTHUSIASM DELINEATED,” “THE MAN OF TASTE,” AND “DON QUIXOTE”

IN Mr. Austin Dobson’s Hogarth, to which all students of that master are so deeply indebted, the following sentence concludes the list of “Prints of an Uncertain Date”: “It has been thought unnecessary to include two or three designs, the grossness of which neither the ingenuity of the artist nor the coarse taste of his time can reasonably be held to excuse.” And in this book I have made it a cardinal point to emulate Mr. Dobson’s excellent example.

We remember in one of Mr. G. Russell’s amusing books the story of the erstwhile Member of Parliament who had accepted a peerage, notwithstanding his profession of democratic sentiments. Thereupon one of his late supporters, {83} with excellent, though somewhat brutal, metaphor, remarked, “Mr. —— says as how he’s going to the House of Lords to leaven it. I tell you he can’t no more leaven the House of Lords than you can sweeten a cart-load of muck with a pot of marmalade.” Per contra, let us always bear in mind, that were the cart full of marmalade, and the pot of muck, the latter would be fully sufficient to render the whole an abomination. Fortunately for us, the Hogarth “Suppressed Plates” which are befitting are of exceptional interest. And it may as well be pointed out here that those peculiarly gross ones which are often alluringly alluded to as “suppressed” are nothing of the sort. So far from being indeed effectively withdrawn from observation, they have had, as a matter of fact, particular attention drawn to them by the fussy ingenuity with which their concealment has been emphasised.

The first of the Hogarth plates which we here reproduce—“Enthusiasm Delineated”—is of far greater intrinsic importance than any of those with which we have already dealt in the preceding chapters. It differs essentially from them not {84} only in the fact that here the artist himself is the fount and origin of the suppression but also in the fact that it is a fine example of those palimpsest plates of which more particular description will be found in later chapters of this book. Peculiar interest, too, attaches to the circumstance that, superb as it was in execution, and elaborate to a degree though it was in conception, it was no sooner finished than the artist deliberately decided against its publication, and destroyed the engraving after only two impressions had been taken from the copper. Fortunately for us, one of these is now in the possession of the British Museum.

It will be interesting to those who are the happy possessors of Hogarth Illustrated and the Anecdotes to compare this with the reduced copy (a very different matter) made by Mills and published in these volumes. For it must always be remembered that Hogarth’s autograph engravings are infinitely more interesting than the copies, however eminent the journeyman engraver may have been.

Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated”

Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated”

Another plate was engraved by Mills of the size of the original, and published separately by Ireland {86} in 1795. The date of the original plate is given in the British Museum Catalogue as 1739, but how that date is arrived at I am at a loss to understand.

It will be noticed that there are upon the margin of our reproduction some curious remarques inscribed “the windmill,” “the scales,” and others. These were drawn in pen-and-ink by Hogarth on the margins of the two original impressions. They also appear engraved in facsimile on the second state of Mills’s full-sized plate. It will therefore be well for owners of this last not to jump to the hasty conclusion that they are the fortunate possessors of one of the two impressions mentioned above! It should be added that the MS. inscription on the British Museum copy differs considerably from that engraved by Mills.

The method by which the suppression of this plate came about is exceedingly curious.

It is probable that, after the design was completed, Hogarth came to the conclusion that the intention of the satire might be mistaken, and that, instead of bringing ridicule upon “the superstitious absurdities of popery and ridiculous {87} personification delineated by ancient painters,” it might be considered that his objective was religion itself.

If this were so, the episode redounds greatly to the artist’s credit, and throws an effective light upon a little-known side of his character. It was an act of great nobleness to suppress what was the result of long toil, nay, more than that, what was perhaps his highest mental, though by no means his highest artistic, achievement, from what some might consider hyper-conscientious motives.

It must be remembered that Hogarth lived in a gross and irreligious age, and that what appears to us exceedingly profane was largely the result of the outspokenness of the times.

Ireland says that he altered and altered this plate piecemeal until its final suppression. This, however, I venture to doubt, for reasons given below. At all events, in the end he had beaten out and re-engraved every figure save one, and changed, as Mr. Dobson says, what “was a compact satire” into “a desultory work—a work of genius for a lesser man, but scarcely worthy of Hogarth.” The final design was entitled {88} “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism: a Medley,” and was published in March 1762.

Let us now compare the two designs. Hogarth’s general purpose in the first was, in his own words, to give “a lineal representation of the strange effects of literal and low conceptions of Sacred Beings, as also of the idolatrous tendency of Pictures in Churches and Prints in Religious Books.” In the second his text was, “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God, because many false Prophets are gone out into the world.”

Before comparing the designs in detail, I should like to say that, besides carefully examining the plates for myself, I have collated the various descriptions of Ireland, Nichols, Mr. Austin Dobson, and Mr. F. G. Stephens, whose conclusions I have not hesitated to adopt, add to, discard or modify, as the circumstances have seemed to require.

Let us now particularise the incidents portrayed on the two states of the plate, both of which are here reproduced for purposes of comparison.

PLATE I. “Enthusiasm Delineated. (Humbly dedicated to his Grace the Arch Bishop of Canterbury by his Graces most obedient humble Servant Wm. Hogarth”)

PLATE I. “Enthusiasm Delineated. (Humbly dedicated to his Grace the Arch Bishop of Canterbury by his Graces most obedient humble Servant Wm. Hogarth”)

PLATE II. “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism. A Medley”

PLATE II. “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism. A Medley”

Beginning with the preacher, we notice that {89} his is the only figure practically unaltered and common to both engravings. By his “bull-roar” (vide the “scale of Vociferation” hanging on the wall to his left) he has apparently succeeded in cracking the sounding-board above his head. Notice his shaven crown, exposed by the fallen wig, which intimates that he is a Papist in disguise; and the harlequin jacket underneath his gown, which suggests that he is a religious merry-andrew. A point worth remarking is that the halo surrounds his wig, and not his head!

From his right hand (Plate I.) he suspends a puppet (caricatured from a picture of Raphael’s) supporting the sacred triangle, which, in attempting to personify the Trinity, was considered by some to be a profane materialisation of a mystical idea. This he has ingeniously turned into a gridiron or trivet of the Inquisition by the simple addition of three legs. In Plate II. this puppet has been removed and its place taken by a witch, riding on a broom-handle, who is suckling what appears to be a huge rat. Beyond the preacher’s hand we find a further addition in the shape of a cherub, hunting-cap on head, bearing in its mouth {90} a letter directed “To St. Moneytrap.” The sermon paper, too, has been turned about so as to bring the words “I speak as a fool” into greater prominence. In which connection it may be noticed that in “Enthusiasm Delineated” all the lettering would seem to be from the burin of Hogarth, whilst that in the “Medley” has been put in by a writing engraver, with considerable weakening of the general effect. Dangling from the preacher’s left hand is a devil with a gridiron (after Rubens), practically identical in both plates, though obviously re-engraved.

Further puppets hang ready for use on the panels of the pulpit. In Plate I. they are caricature representations, from pictures of the Old Masters, of Adam and Eve (suggested by Albert Dürer), of Peter with his Key, and Paul in a black periwig armed with two swords and elevated by high-heeled shoes (travestied from Rembrandt), and of Moses and Aaron. In Plate II. these scriptural puppets are exchanged for the superstitious images of Mrs. Veal’s ghost (see the writing on the book), who, according to Defoe, appeared the day after her death to Mrs. Bargrave {91} of Canterbury, September 8, 1705; of Julius Cæsar’s apparition, starting at its own appearance in the looking-glass; and of that of Sir George Villers (sic), not “Villiers” as Ireland has it, whose appearance to an officer at Windsor, charging him to warn his son, the Duke of Buckingham, of his approaching assassination, is recorded by Lord Clarendon and Lilly the astrologer.

In the foreground, on the right, we have in both plates a most remarkable mental thermometer, the bulb of which is inserted in a Methodist’s brain. In Plate I. the mercury stands at “low-spirits”; in Plate II. at “lukewarm.” In the first a dove surmounts the whole; in the second the Methodist’s brain rests upon “Wesley’s Sermons,” and “Glanvid” (an evident misprint for “Glanvil”) on “Witches.” The lettering, too, is altered, and, in place of the inscription in the top division, is a picture of the Cock Lane Ghost, of which Walpole wrote—“Elizabeth Canning and the Rabbit Women were modest impostors in comparison of this.” The whole is surmounted by a figure of the Tedworth drummer immortalised by Addison. {92}

In the adjoining pew a nobleman, as can be seen by the decoration half concealed by his coat, makes love to a girl, who discards a heavenly for a very earthly affection, point to which is given by the quotation from Whitfield’s hymn which can be read on the paper hanging over the adjacent clerk’s desk. The “mixed expression of religious hypocrisy and amorous desire” on the girl’s face is marvellously expressed. The other occupant of the pew is a repentant thief, as may be seen from the “T” branded on his cheek.

In the first account of the plate given in the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, the suggestion that the felon sniffs at a bottle of spirits held in the hands of the image is obviously incorrect. He is dropping his tears into the bottle. In Plate II. a less aristocratic and somewhat more decently behaved pair of lovers occupy the pew. The puppet held by the man is clearly a repetition of the Cock Lane Ghost, only bearing in its hand a lighted candle in place of a hammer. What the meaning of this is I fail to understand. Of the two other occupants of the pew one is weeping and the other asleep. {93} A winged devil whispers evil thoughts into the sleeper’s ear.

In both plates, on a bracket attached to the side of the pew and inscribed “The Poor’s Box,” rests a wire rat-trap in place of the proper receptacle.

Turning now to the clerk’s desk, which in Plate I. has the inscription “Cherubim and Seraph [ — ] do cry,” and in Plate II. “Continually do cry,” we find a hideous and brutal-looking clerk singing lustily from a book which he half supports in his claw-like fingers. Supporting him are two winged cherubs, the ridiculous nothingness of whose bodies (so envied by Thackeray in his days of pupilage) is accentuated by the significant addition of ducks’ feet. Their pitiful faces accord with the punning inscription on the edge of the desk. In Plate II. the ducks’ feet have been removed, but to make up for the loss we have the clerk himself, now a lean and hungry-looking individual, also decorated with a pair of wings.

Below the desk in Plate I. howls a dog, his collar engraved with Whitfield’s name, whilst, below the hassock on which he sits, a ragged {94} figure squats embracing an image. In Plate II. a book entitled Demonology, by K. James Ist., surmounted by a shoeblack’s basket in which Whitfield’s Journal is stuck, takes the place of the dog, whilst the boy of Bilston, vomiting forth nails, displaces the ragged figure. From the neck of the bottle in his hand a figure, similar to that held by the man in the pew, rises expelling the cork, which falls to the ground.

In the forefront of Plate I. lies the bloated figure of Mother Douglas, who, after a most licentious life, was said to have become a rigid devotee. Hogarth, who has portrayed her in other of his plates, here ridicules her conversion. A hand belonging to a figure outside the plate holds a bottle of salts to her nose. In Plate II. Mary Tofts, “ye Godliman woman,” takes her place. Her well-known imposture, which it would be out of place to particularise here, gave rise to a voluminous literature, and a sheaf of remarkable caricatures. In place of the salts a glass of cordial is applied as a restorative.

The Chandelier in “Enthusiasm”

The Chandelier in “Credulity”

The Chandelier in “Enthusiasm”

The Chandelier in “Credulity”

In Plate I., behind the prostrate woman a bearded Jew regards the preacher with mock {96} devotion, what time he kills a flea between his thumb-nails. Before him lies a book open at a picture of Abraham offering up Isaac. In Plate II. the figure of the Jew is much weakened, whilst a knife inscribed “Bloody” is laid across a picture of an altar on the page of the open book.

In the background of both plates a motley collection of devotees assists at these religious orgies. To the extreme left of Plate II., which, by the addition of several persons in the congregation, has become greatly overcrowded, a minister directs the attention of a terrified wretch, whose hair bristles with fear, to the extraordinary double-globed chandelier above their heads.

Final emphasis is given to the whole satire by the figure of a Turk (slightly varied in the two plates), who regards with amusement through the window the idolatry of those “dogs of Christians.”

So much for the details of the plates. As regards the general effect of the whole, the superiority of the suppressed design will be evident at a glance. In lighting, balance, and composition, the substituted design is immeasurably removed from the original. Nor would this be wonderful if, {97} as Ireland surmised, “the alterations were made by degrees.”

With this view, however, I find it, as I have said above, impossible to concur. If, as he suggests, the figures were beaten out one by one, their substitutes would occupy practically identical spaces on the plate; but a little measurement demonstrates the fact that, with the exception of the figure of the preacher, which has been left where it was, and of the mental thermometer, which has been raised, almost the whole of the design has been shifted downwards.

I am therefore inclined to think that from the first Hogarth, from one cause or another, made up his mind to change the direction of his satire, and at once beat out all the figures on the plate save one. That the arrangement of the new design should coincide generally with that of the first is, I think, no more than one would naturally expect, and does not in any way weaken the argument.

In conclusion, it should be pointed out, for the sake of those who would study the matter further, that the accounts of the impressions of the several plates in the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings {98} in the British Museum are not easily found, being somewhat arbitrarily placed at pages 301–307, vol. iii., part i., and pages 644–648, vol. ii., respectively.

So far we have seen Hogarth in his character of general iconoclast and antipapist. It is now our business to deal with him in what was a more personal polemic.

In the year 1731 Pope first published his notorious attack upon the Duke of Chandos in his satire Of Taste: An Epistle to the Right Hon. Richard, Earl of Burlington.

Hogarth forthwith entered the lists, and designed and published a well-deserved pictorial counterblast, allusively entitled “The Man of Taste,” or “Burlington Gate.” This was immediately “suppressed” on a prosecution being threatened because of what was deemed its scurrilous and defamatory character.

Notwithstanding this prompt suppression, however, the design reappeared the following year, reduced in size, as frontispiece to a pirated edition of Pope’s “Epistle,” which was included in a pamphlet entitled A Miscellany on Taste; by {99} Mr. Pope, etc., published by Lawton and others. Its contents were (1) Of Taste in Architecture, an Epistle to the Earl of Burlington, with Notes Variorum, and a complete Key; (2) Of Mr. Pope’s Taste in Divinity: viz., the Fall of Man, and the First Psalm, translated for the use of a Young Lady; (3) Of Mr. Pope’s Taste of Shakespeare; (4) His Satire on Mr. P——y; and (5) Mr. Congreve’s fine Epistle on Retirement and Taste, addressed to Lord Cobham. In this copy of the plate Pope, who is shown in the original by means of the back of his head and figure, and as wearing a full-bottomed wig, is more distinctly satirised, his face being displayed in profile, and his head enclosed by a linen cap instead of a wig. Amongst a few other minor alterations, it may be noticed that the palette held by Kent is transferred from one hand to the other.

Referring to the republication of Hogarth’s cartoon in this form, Mr. Dobson seems somewhat inclined to argue against the story of its “suppression,” or, at any rate, its effectual suppression; but he does not allude to the important fact that the publisher of this pamphlet {100} was also promptly prosecuted, and the sale strictly prohibited. From which it is clear that the suppression was as unqualified and as prompt as could reasonably be expected.

Steevens indeed mentions a copy upon which the following inscription had been made:—

“Bot. this book of Mr. Wayte, at the Fountain Tavern, in the Strand, in the presence of Mr. Draper, who told me he had it of the Printer, Mr. W. Rayner.

“J. COSINS.”

The signatory was an Attorney, and the wording of the memorandum suggests the intended prosecution.

To return to Pope’s poem. In it he passes the most scathing criticism upon the splendid but tasteless surroundings of “Timon” at his stupendous villa.

“Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdingnag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a town, His pond an ocean, his parterre a down: Who but must laugh, the master when he sees, A puny insect, shivering at the breeze! Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! The whole, a labour’d quarry above ground. Two cupids squirt before: a lake behind Improves the keenness of the northern wind. His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold the wall! {101} No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each valley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other.”

And then, at the end of it all, he proceeds to justify Providence, in giving riches to those who squander them, in a way that will hardly commend itself to the student of the dismal science. A bad taste, he says in effect, employs more hands, and diffuses wealth more usefully than a good one! One would like to have heard John Stuart Mill on the subject of “Pope.”

The “Epistle” was addressed to Pope’s patron, the Earl of Burlington, who was one of the noblemen who had helped to screen him a few years before on his publication of the Dunciad.

“Timon” (mainly though not entirely) referred to the Duke of Chandos, who was, Johnson says, a man perhaps too much delighted with pomp and show, but of a temper kind and beneficent, and who had consequently the voice of the public in his favour.20 {102}

A violent outcry was therefore raised against the ingratitude and treachery of Pope, who was said to have been indebted to the patronage of Chandos for a present of a thousand pounds, and who gained the opportunity of insulting him by the kindness of his invitation to “Canons,” the Duke’s seat near Edgware.

In a pamphlet entitled Ingratitude published in 1733, of which only a portion of the frontispiece is in the British Museum,21 the matter is thus alluded to. “A certain animal of diminutive size, who had translated a book into English metre (or at least had it translated for him), addressed himself to a nobleman of the first rank, and in the style of a gentleman-beggar requested him to subscribe a guinea for one of his books. The nobleman entertained him at dinner in a sumptuous manner, and continued so to do as often as the insignificant mortal came to his house. After dinner this generous man of quality, taking him aside, put a bank-note for five hundred pounds into his hands, and desired he might have but one book. But {103} what was the consequence of this? Why, truly, the wretch, who is a composition of peevishness, spleen and envy, having no regard to the benefits he had received, in a few years after, and without any manner of provocation, or the least foundation for truth, publishes a satire, as he terms it, but in reality it is an infamous and calumnious libel, calculated, with all the malice and virulency imaginable, to defame and render odious the character of his best benefactor.”

20 Bowles says, “As Pope was the first to deal in personalities, the following severe retaliation was published in the papers of the time:

“Let Pope no more what Chandos builds deride, Because he takes not Nature for his guide; Since, wond’rous critic! in thy form we see That Nature may mistake, as well as he.”

21 Vide Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division I., Satires, vol. ii., No. 1935.

From which it will be seen that Hogarth was not out of the fashion in retaliating upon Pope’s devoted head with the cartoon which we here reproduce.

Let us examine it in detail. The gate, which is the main feature in the picture, is a travesty of that which is familiar to old frequenters of Piccadilly. Until as lately as 1868, it formed the frontage to Burlington House. It was the joint design of Lord Burlington and Colin Campbell, and, although well-proportioned and inoffensive, hardly justifies the fulsome praise which has been bestowed upon it. Kent, originally a coach-painter, with whose statue Hogarth has surmounted the {104} structure, was patronised by, and brought his practical knowledge to the assistance of, Lord Burlington, himself undoubtedly a man of enlightened taste. The alteration and reconstruction of the original Burlington House, which had been built by his great-grandfather, the first Earl, was the first of his many architectural projects. It was eventually taken down to make way for the existing Royal Academy and Science Buildings. Lord Hervey laughed at its inconvenience in the following couplet:—

“Possessed of one great hall of state, Without a room to sleep or eat.”

The best of Lord Burlington’s and Kent’s joint work is to be found in the northern park front of the Treasury Buildings in Whitehall, “which,” says Fergusson, “if completed, would be more worthy of Inigo Jones than anything that has been done there since his time.”

The Man of Taste

The Man of Taste

Flanking the ex-coach-painter, Hogarth has placed reclining figures of Raphael and Michael Angelo, who regard the modern architect with respectful admiration! On the platform is Pope rough-casting the front of the structure, and {106} incidentally bespattering the passers-by with whitewash from his huge brush. Chief amongst these is the Duke of Chandos, who vainly strives to protect himself with his hat. Ascending the ladder is Lord Burlington, who carries up more whitening for the beautifying of his own gate and the defilement of his neighbours’ clothes. Over the gate Hogarth has sarcastically inscribed the solitary word “TASTE.” The double distribution of flattery and satire is an excellent pictorial burlesque of the Epistle to Lord Burlington, and who can say that it was not richly deserved? At any rate, stroke and counterstroke were fierce and unhesitating in those days, and, although Pope’s and his patrons’ influence was sufficient to get Hogarth’s witty plate suppressed, it is a tribute to the wholesome respect which the poet had for the artist, that, pugnacious and irrepressible as his pen generally was, Pope never ventured to make any written retaliation upon the libeller.

It should be mentioned that this was not the first occasion upon which Hogarth had attacked the charlatanry of Kent. In the first plate published on his own account, in 1724—“Masquerades and {107} Operas”—he had included him in his ridicule of what Mr. Dobson calls “foreign favourites and dubious exotics.” In that plate, also, he had ridiculed “Burlington Gate,” and, curiously prompted by the spirit of prophecy, had labelled it “Accademy (sic) of Arts!” He had also, in the following year, burlesqued Kent’s scandalous altarpiece at St. Clement Danes, which had lately been taken down in response to the outcry against its sacrilegious impudence.

By the kindness of the publisher of The Builder, I am enabled to reproduce a wood engraving of Burlington Gate as it actually was, which appeared in that journal on October 28, 1854. Comparing this with the cartoon, it will be seen that Hogarth did not scruple to heighten the effect of his satire by depriving Lord Burlington’s edifice of such merits as it undoubtedly possessed.

So much for Hogarth in his polemic with Pope. We will now turn for a moment to Hogarth and his quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill, in which we shall find him working over an old plate as in the case of “Enthusiasm Delineated,” but with a very different object in view. Here he adopts a method {108} of retaliation which, as we shall learn from later chapters of this book, had become already customary amongst the producers of political broadsides in the seventeenth century. Hitherto Hogarth had kept clear of politics, but now, in his sixty-fifth year, he threw himself into the fray. John Wilkes had started a paper called The North Briton in opposition to The Briton, the organ of the Tory party of which Lord Bute was the leader. Hogarth had long enjoyed Bute’s favour. He had also until now been on friendly terms with Wilkes and his henchman Charles Churchill, the poet. On September 7, 1762, taking sides with his patron, he published The Times (Plate I.). This so enraged Wilkes that he retaliated on the Saturday following, in the seventeenth number of The North Briton, with a violent attack on Hogarth both as man and artist. In the May following Hogarth retorted by publishing a portrait of John Wilkes which, professing to be a likeness, cleverly exhibited his most repulsive characteristics. Wilkes being now on his trial for libel, Churchill came to the rescue with his savage and slashing Epistle to William Hogarth. This was published on August 1. {110} With a promptitude astonishing in those days of tardy copper-plate engraving, Hogarth, by a clever expedient, retaliated within a month with his exceedingly venomous print of “The Bruiser.” The plate from which this was printed had already done duty as a portrait of Hogarth himself with his dog Trump, engraved from the well-known painting now in the National Gallery.

Burlington Gate as it appeared prior to 1868

Pressed for time, in ill-health, and apprehensive lest the public might attribute delay in replying to inability to do so, he took the old plate, burnished out his own portrait, and substituted in its place the head of a bear, with torn and soiled clerical bands about its neck, ruffles on its wrists, and clasping against its chest a foaming pot of beer, in allusion to the personal habits of the poet and ci-devant parson. With his left paw the beast clasps a huge club, the knots of which are labelled “Lye 1,” “Lye 2,” referring to the falsities of The North Briton. There are other minor alterations which may be seen at a glance. The whole was entitled “THE BRUISER, CHARLES CHURCHILL (once the Revd.!) In the character of a RUSSIAN HERCULES, regaling himself after having killed {111} the MONSTER CARICATURE, that so sorely gall’d his virtuous friend, the Heaven-born Wilkes.” The plate thus altered is to be found in five states, particulars of which may be found on p. 286 of Mr. Austin Dobson’s William Hogarth, 1891. That here reproduced is from a copy of the last state engraved by Dent for John Ireland.22 It is only in the last two states that the clever little engraving in front of the palette is to be found.

22 In copying, the design, as will be seen, has been turned from left to right.

So far we have dealt with work done by Hogarth in his individual capacity. Let us now turn to such of his collaborative work as suffered cancellation.

In dealing with the series of suppressed Quixote plates we shall be brought into touch with two not uninteresting and accessory episodes in the artist’s career. In the first of these Hogarth made a great success, where a rival artist had made a signal failure. In the second, by way of righting the balance of things, fate ordained it that this same artist should badly best Hogarth, and that in a manner peculiarly galling to the latter’s vanity.

Hogarth’s father-in-law was Sir James Thornhill, {112} whose drawing academy in Covent Garden had not proved as valuable an institution as had been anticipated. Johan Van der Banck, the rival artist above alluded to, had been one of Sir James’s pupils. By heading a secession and establishing a rival school he had undoubtedly largely contributed to the failure of his master’s venture. However, in due time, his school too proved to be lacking in the elements of success, and came to an untimely end.

On Sir James’s death the “neglected apparatus” of his father-in-law passed into Hogarth’s hands, and he set to work to establish the academy on a different footing. The result was that it became a successful educational centre, which only ceased to exist many years afterwards on the establishment of the Royal Academy. A picture by Hogarth of the interior of the school with the students drawing from life is to be seen on the staircase leading to the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House.

In this case Hogarth had the laugh on his side. In the other, which is immediately relevant to our subject, the laugh was with Van der Banck.

Portrait of Hogarth with His Dog Trump* | The plate reversed and in its last state, now entitled “The Bruiser”

Portrait of Hogarth with His Dog Trump*

The plate reversed and in its last state, now entitled “The Bruiser”

* The plate being re-engraved for Hogarth Illustrated became transposed.

In 1738 Lord Carteret’s Spanish edition of Don {113} Quixote was published. For this Hogarth had been commissioned to design a series of illustrations. Eight of these were executed, but, on being submitted to Lord Carteret, did not meet with his approval. The commission was consequently transferred to Johan van der Banck, who thus succeeded in revenging himself for his former failure, and at the same time unconsciously provided us with matter for consideration in these papers. His sixty-eight designs were engraved by Van der Gucht and republished in the English edition of 1756, of which Charles Jarvis was the translator. Of Hogarth’s unsuccessful venture John Ireland writes with some indignation, “As they are etched in a bold and masterly style, I suppose the noble peer did not think them pretty enough to embellish his volume and therefore laid them aside for Vandergucht’s engravings from Vanderbank’s designs.” It is a slight satisfaction to know that Hogarth’s completed etchings were paid for!

One curious fact about Jarvis’s edition demands our attention. The plate representing the Don’s first sally in quest of adventure is without any {114} signature, but the “style of the etching and the air of the figures” indisputably determine for us the fact that it is from the pencil and burin of Hogarth, so that it is open to any one who has access to this edition to judge for themselves of the justice of Ireland’s strictures upon Lord Carteret.

For those who have not access to Jarvis’s edition it may be mentioned that a copy engraved by J. Mills appears in Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated and in the Anecdotes of William Hogarth, published by Nichols in 1833. Of Hogarth’s eight designs we are therefore left with only seven, which were “suppressed.” Of these six were published from Hogarth’s own plates in Baldwin, Cradock and Joy’s splendid collection of the Works in 1822; whilst previously, in 1798, John Ireland had published small copies of them together with an unfinished design of “The Innkeeper” in his possession, engraved by J. Mills. These plates were used over again in the Anecdotes of 1833 with altered lettering and the etchings considerably worn.

Don Quixote No. 1.—The Innkeeper

The accompanying reproductions are, save for {116} No. 1., not made from any of the foregoing, but from the early states of the plates, never before published, to be found in the British Museum. Thus they will prove not only of interest to the casual reader but also valuable, for purposes of comparison, to the possessors of any of the three editions of Hogarth’s Works mentioned above. The full descriptions of the plates may be found in Ireland and Nichols, but for the convenience of the reader I append a short commentary.

No. I. The Innkeeper is from an unfinished etching and is of particular interest. By some its authenticity is doubted, but John Ireland believed in it, and I, for one, see no reason to call his judgment into question, more particularly as this figure bears a more than chance resemblance to that of “The Innkeeper” in the undoubted Hogarth referred to above published in Jarvis’s edition. In the Van der Banck plate, which represents the knighting of the Don by the Innkeeper, it is also evident that Hogarth’s rival has done him the compliment of adopting his model.

Don Quixote No. II.—The Funeral of Chrysostom

No. II. The Funeral of Chrysostom, Marcella vindicating herself. This scene was also taken {118} by Van der Banck for illustration, and a comparison of the two plates is not favourable to Hogarth.

No. III. The Innkeepers Wife and Daughter taking care of the Don after he had been beaten. “Much superior to the same scene designed by Van der Banck.”

No. IV. Don Quixote seizes the Barber’s Basin for Mambrino’s Helmet. On the whole inferior to Van der Banck’s. The barb of the Don’s weapon is different from that in the Hogarth design published by Jarvis. The stirrups and saddling of the horse too are different. These points have not been referred to before, but I mention them by way of argument against the authenticity of the Jarvis plate. As I have said before, personally I have no doubt that it is from Hogarth’s burin.

No. V. Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves. Here the Don is found wearing the barber’s basin as his helmet. By a not unusual oversight it will be noticed Hogarth has made his figures left-handed, forgetful of the reversing process due to printing from a plate. A superior design to that of Van der Banck, who, as Ireland says, “has {121} given to two or three of the thieves the countenances of apostles.”

Don Quixote No. III.—The Innkeeper’s Wife and Daughter

Don Quixote No. IV.—Don Quixote seizes the Barber’s Basin

No. VI. The First Interview of the Valorous Knight of La Mancha with the Unfortunate Knight of the Rock. Distinctly superior to Van der Banck.

No. VII. The Curate and Barber disguising themselves to convey Don Quixote home. An excellent representation of the curate assuming the dress of a distressed virgin who, by his tale of having been wronged by a naughty knight, hopes to induce the Don to return to his home.

Whilst on the subject of Don Quixote it may be mentioned that, much earlier in his career, Hogarth had designed and engraved a plate dealing with “Sancho’s feast,” but this must not be in any way identified or confused with the series begun for Lord Carteret, although Ireland groups them all together.

Don Quixote No. V.—Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves

Don Quixote No. VI.—The First Interview

So much for Hogarth’s suppressed illustrations, and it is, it must be confessed, something of a relief to turn again from his cognate art to that which is individual and typical. For we do not much value Hogarth as an illustrator. In this character he rarely does more than repeat for us {124} in another medium the obvious matters already dealt with in the letterpress. “Illustration,” as Mr. Laurence Housman has well said, “should be something in the nature of a brilliant commentary throwing out new light upon the subject, an exquisite parenthesis of things better said in this medium than could be said in any other: in a word, the result of another creative faculty at work on the same theme.” And this in no way describes Hogarth’s work as an illustrator. It is as a great original painter working out consummately the homeliest of morals that he appeals to us. Those morals which, to quote Thackeray, are “as easy as Goody Twoshoes,” the moral of “Tommy was a naughty boy and the master flogged him, and Jacky was a good boy and had plum-cake.” For it is in “Marriage à la Mode,” “A Rake’s Progress,” “Industry and Idleness,” that he succeeds inimitably, carrying out the motto beneath “Time Smoking a Picture”:—

“To Nature and your Self appeal Nor learn of others what to feel.”

Don Quixote No. VII.—The Curate and the Barber

But this only in passing, for our subject debars us from lingering over Hogarth’s best. {126} From the nature of our theme we are confined to the examination in the majority of cases of that which verges upon failure either from artistic or social considerations.

CHAPTER VII CANCELLED DESIGNS FOR PUNCH AND ONCE A WEEK

[CHARLES KEENE AND FREDERICK SANDYS]

IN the present chapter I propose to deal with three masterly drawings prepared for the publications of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans (the predecessors of Messrs. Bradbury and Agnew) which were suppressed for various reasons. Two of them are drawings by Charles Keene done for Punch, which were never even “brought to the block.” The third is by Frederick Sandys, designed for Once a Week, and actually engraved, but cancelled before publication for reasons which shall appear.

For leave to reproduce the first—one of the rare cartoons (in this case a double-page one) drawn by Keene for Punch—I am indebted to {128} the generosity of Messrs. Bradbury and Agnew, to whom the original drawing now belongs. For years it has hung amongst other well-nigh priceless treasures in the dining hall in Bouverie Street, Whitefriars, and, until reproduced by me in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1899, was only known to the privileged few whose good fortune it has been to penetrate into that Temple of the Comic Muse. It is therefore with the greater satisfaction that it is here reproduced for the delight of that surely increasing public which recognises in Charles Keene the greatest master of pen-and-ink drawing that England has produced. But this is not the place to linger over the qualities of artists. At the same time we cannot but congratulate ourselves that, by good fortune, our chosen subject brings us into contact not only with work to which adventitious interest attaches, but also with artistic work evidencing a technical mastery hard indeed to surpass.

The Cancelled Cartoon. (By Charles Keene)

The Cancelled Cartoon. (By Charles Keene)

The only public mention before the year 1899 made of this splendid pen-and-ink drawing is to be found on page 60 of Mr. Spielmann’s monumental work, The History of Punch. There, in his most {129} interesting description of The “Punch” Dining Hall, it is described as “a masterly drawing, 2 feet long, by Keene, bought by the late Mr. Bradbury at a sale—the (unused) cartoon of Disraeli leading the principal financiers of the day in hats and frock-coats across the Red Sea. (‘Come along, it’s getting shallower!’)”

Now, since this was written, further inquiries have been made upon the subject, and two theories present themselves for consideration. The first of them in its general outline supports Mr. Spielmann’s account, and maintains that the picture was bought direct from Keene himself by the late Mr. Agnew (not Mr. Bradbury), as a solatium on account of its not being used, and that the reason for suppressing it was the anti-Jewish feeling by which it was inspired.

In support of this view it should be remembered that Keene all along refused to accept a fixed salary for his Punch work, and was always paid by the piece. Considering, too, that the subject of the weekly cartoons was (and still is) a matter of general discussion at the Wednesday Punch dinners, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the {130} subject was embarked upon with the authority of the editor, and that other counsels only prevailed after the drawing had reached the stage at which it now appears.24 This being so, it seems not unlikely that a generous employer would feel himself in some degree answerable for the futile labour to which the artist had been put, and would offer to buy the picture as it stood rather than that the artist should in any way be prejudiced. If this were the case (which does not sound improbable) it throws an interesting and edifying side-light upon the relations existing between the artists and publishers of our great comic paper.

24 Of course Sir John Tenniel was cartoonist in chief, but sometimes the cartoon was duplicated, and on very rare occasions Sir John took a holiday.

Against this theory, however, I have the opinion of Sir John Tenniel and Mr. Linley Sambourne that the drawing was done on Keene’s own initiative by way of frontispiece to one of the Punch pocket-books. But this view of the matter I am, with submission, not myself inclined to accept, and for two reasons. First and foremost, the drawing differs in shape from the pocket-book folding frontispieces; and secondly, it was the {131} practice in these yearly productions rather to satirise some social folly or fashion of the period than to deal with matters political or international. In addition to which it does tally in shape with the double-page cartoons of Punch itself, and, as a matter of fact, Keene’s few cartoons were mostly done during the years 1875, 1876, and 1877, when the matter of the Suez Canal was making a new departure in politics—a fact which, as will appear, has some bearing upon the matter before us.

So much for the circumstances connected with the production and proposed destination of the picture. Let us now consider its subject and the probable reason of its suppression.

And, if we take down our volume of collected Punch cartoons and turn to those dealing with Disraeli, we shall be disinclined to think that it was out of any consideration for “Benjamin Bombastes” himself that this splendid drawing was withheld from publication. But thinly disguised contempt is the attitude almost invariably maintained towards him, whilst but thinly disguised personal admiration for his great rival discounts even the bitterest political taunts {132} flung at that devoted head. No! I am inclined to think that events at this time, to which this cartoon referred, were wringing unwilling approbation even from “The Asiatic Mystery’s” most bitter enemies, and that Bouverie Street could not but acknowledge that here at least “Ben-Dizzy” deserved well of his country. For surely the cartoon has reference to nothing less than that crowning act of wisdom, the purchase of nearly half the shares in the Suez Canal for four millions sterling. Here we have Disraeli with his umbrella pointing the way, not across the Red Sea as Mr. Spielmann imagines, but up the Canal towards the Red Sea. He calls out, “Don’t be afraid! it’s getting shallower,” thus possibly referring to the original notion (afterwards disproved) that the level of the Mediterranean was 30 feet below that of the Red Sea. On the right-hand, and Egyptian, side of the water, if we look carefully, we discover the shadowy outline of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, which latter rise dimly to the margin of the drawing. On the bank indistinct forms of the Liberal “Opposition” wave their arms, hurl stones and shout “Yah” at the {133} wading financiers. Such was the hardly congratulatory attitude assumed towards this masterly move by Charles Keene.

But when we turn to the cartoons dealing with this subject by Sir John Tenniel,25 which did appear, what do we find? The first is “Mosé in Egitto”!!! published on December 11, 1875, to which, in the collected cartoons, the following note is appended:—“Mr. Disraeli extorted the admiration of the country by purchasing for £4,000,000, on behalf of the Government, the shares in the Suez Canal held by the Khedive of Egypt.” The second is entitled “The Lion’s Share—Gare à qui la touche,” on February 26, 1896, to which the note appended runs: “The acquisition of the Suez Canal shares was accepted by the country as securing the safety of ‘The Key to India.’” These, as will be seen, frankly recognise the wisdom of the purchase. Hence it is not surprising if the feeling against the suggestion contained in Keene’s cartoon—that the financiers of the day were being put into a {134} ridiculous position by the Conservative Leader—was strong enough to result in its rejection. Its inclusion would have gone far to stultify the effect of the congratulatory attitude taken up by Punch’s chartered cartoonist. At any rate, this view of the case appears to be most reasonable, and I give it for what it is worth.

25 It may be mentioned as an interesting fact that no engraved cartoon after Sir John Tenniel has ever failed to find its place in the number for which it was designed.

The drawing is a fine example of Keene’s power of endowing his models with the qualities requisite to his design. Not a man of these seventeen financiers suggests a model posing, and yet all, for this was Keene’s invariable custom, were drawn from the life. Not one of them but is balanced as though he were wading in water up to his knees; and yet not one of them, we may be sure, was wading against a stream when, probably unconsciously, he was forced into the service of the artist’s pencil. The pose of one and all is as inevitable as is the expression on the face of each. I would ask all my readers who are seekers after consummate draughtsmanship to give more particular attention to this beautiful drawing than its mere subject would demand, remembering that Keene’s achievements in black-and-white are {135} unsurpassed, and, I am inclined to think, unsurpassable.

We will now turn to the consideration of the other suppressed Keene drawing. This, we shall find, owed its rejection not to political but to social considerations. And it is of peculiar interest, not only as showing the scrupulous care taken by the then editor of Punch to avoid the risk of offending the susceptibilities of his readers, but also as an example of the extensive collaboration which existed between Keene and the late Mr. Joseph Crawhall in the supply of “socials” to that paper week by week.

Let us pause for a moment, then, to recall the particulars of this remarkable co-operation. Early in the ’seventies, Keene, who was often gravelled for humorous subjects on which to exercise his pencil, was by good fortune introduced to the author of Border Notes and Mixty-Maxty, and many other droll books of a like character. This gentleman, always a lover of things quaint, grotesque and jocular, had been for years in the habit of jotting down any telling incident that came in his way, illustrating it at leisure for his {136} own amusement. He was no great artist; but, like Thackeray, his inadequate pencil was so compelled and inspired by the appreciation of his subjects that he was able to set them down pictorially in a manner so naïve and at the same time so intelligent that they are a joy to the beholder. These suggestive drawings, by the time the introduction had taken place, filled several volumes.

Keene’s delight, then, may be well imagined when he was given carte blanche to cull the best of the subjects for use in Punch. He wrote:—

“I can’t tell you how strongly I have felt your rare generosity and unselfishness in letting me browse so freely in your pastures.”

And again:—

“Many thanks for the loan of the sketch-books. I enjoyed them again and again, with renewed chucklings; but what a mouth-watering larder to lay open to a ravenous joke-seeker!”

The Cancelled “Social.” (By Charles Keene) | Suggestion by Joseph Crawhall for the Cancelled “Social”

The Cancelled “Social.” (By Charles Keene)

Suggestion by Joseph Crawhall for the Cancelled “Social”

Fortunately Mr. Crawhall was as delighted to be of service to the great artist as Keene was to avail himself of his opportunity. Hence we have that delightful partnership of which full particulars {137} may be found in my Life and Letters of Charles Keene of “Punch.”

It is necessary to say so much for the purpose of introducing the subject of the second of Keene’s cancelled drawings. By a great piece of good fortune I have in my possession Mr. Crawhall’s pictorial suggestion for the rejected picture itself, presented to me by the artist. I reproduce it here alongside Keene’s drawing for the purpose of comparison. The humour of it is certainly rather brutal, and one is not surprised to find that the editor considered that it would “jar upon feelings.” Keene, on the other hand, was naturally disgusted at his labour being thrown away, and vented his wrath somewhat unreasonably upon the “Philistine editor.”

For the sake of those who would like to gain some idea of the personality of the artist’s friend who acted, as Boswell did to Johnson, in the capacity of a “starter of mawkins,” it may be mentioned that an excellent back view of Mr. Crawhall, drawn by Keene, appears in Punch, March 11, 1882, over the following delicious “legend”:— {138}

LAPSUS LINGUÆ

PATER: “Now, look here, my boy, I can’t have these late hours. When I was your age my father wouldn’t let me stay out after dark.”

FILIUS: “Humph! nice sort o’ father you must have had, I should say.”

PATER (waxing): “Deuced sight better than you have, you young——”    (Checks himself, and exit.)

The original of the Punch drawing here reproduced was presented to Mr. Crawhall by Charles Keene. This was the latter’s method of repaying the former for his unqualified generosity. Mr. Crawhall was, however, somewhat embarrassed by what he considered to be excessive payment for services which he held required no other recompense than the honour thus conferred on his poor drawings. The result was a generous contest which resulted in his finally refusing to accept them, “For,” said he, “you don’t know the value of your work. The reward is too great, and our happy connection must cease if you put me under these obligations.”

Keene, nevertheless, always afterwards made a colourable excuse to send them when he could think of one, although by this time he was well {139} aware that he was as great a magician as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and could by a few strokes of his pen make the back of an old envelope rival the value of one of her crisp bank-notes.

But we must not linger over the cancelled drawings of an artist who, had he been as great in imagination as he was in originality of method and mastery over his pencil, would have been as great as the greatest in Art. It is now our delightful task to turn to another of the men of the ’sixties, whose imagination and sympathy with high romance has rarely been surpassed, and whose technical mastery, though not the equal of his great contemporary, was yet so distinguished that, even divorced from his other qualities, it would give him a niche in the Temple of Fame. Frederick Sandys has but lately left us, and how few there are who recognise the greatness of his work! For years it has been a matter of astonishment to me that his name was not on every tongue. Keene, alive, was practically unknown. Keene, dead, occupies an unassailable position. Sandys is known and esteemed only by {140} the few. The time will come when his pictures will be a fashionable craze, and every woodcut after him, whether it be in Once a Week, The Cornhill, Good Words, London Society, The Churchman’s Family Magazine, The Shilling Magazine, The Quiver, The Argosy, or what not, will be eagerly appropriated by those who wish to pass as discerning dilettanti.

But we must not generalise, for our concern is here with one particular design, and enthusiasm must not be allowed to run. Done for Once a Week, and cut exquisitely on the wood by Swain, that with which we have to do was at the last moment cancelled by a timidly fastidious editor.

If we turn to page 672 of vol. iv. of Once a Week (new series), 1867, we shall find the following set of verses, signed “W.,” the origin and authorship of which I am now able to make public:—

DANAË

The hour of noonday sleep was o’er, And Danaë dreamt her dream no more; Yet still its image lingered on her loom; For there in woven colours bright, And touched to life by purpling light, Smiled the one godhead of the captive’s room. {141} She raised her from the Tyrian sheet, And clasped her sandals on her feet, And lightly drew around her virgin zone; And sighed—and knew not why she sighed; And murmured, while her work she plied, “The World may leave my love and me alone.” Thus sang the maiden of the brazen tower, And longed, unconscious, for the golden shower.

“The days and months have grown to years, And I have dried my childish tears, And half forgotten why they ever ran; My soul is plighted to the sky, And we,—my wrinkled nurse and I,— What matter if we see no more of man? She wearies me with omens dire, My son foredoomed to kill my sire,— But sire and son are empty names to me. My love! I only rest awhile, To dream the beauty of thy smile. And only wake again to picture thee.” Thus sang the maiden of the brazen tower, And longed, unconscious, for the golden shower.

She ceased: for now began to fade The figure of that mighty shade, With loins and shoulders meet to sway the world; And awful through the gloom appeared His massive locks of hair and beard, Like clouds in lurid light of thunder curled. Yet, long as twilight glimmered there, She gazed upon a vision fair; His brow more beautiful than Parian stone, And nestling nearer like a dove, Soft on his lips she breathed her love, {142} And lit his eyes with lustre of her own. Then passion stung the maiden of the tower, And fast she panted for the golden shower.

She stood, with white arm fixed in air, And head thrown back, and streaming hair, “Oh, Lord of Dreams!” she cried, “dost thou behold?” Then thunderous music shook the cell, And, sliding through the rafters, fell On Danaë’s burning breast, three drops of gold. Her bosom thrilled—but not with pain:— Faster and brighter flowed the rain, And starred with light the chamber of the bride: Her cheek sank blushing on her hand, Her eyelids drooped, her silken band Unloosed itself,—and Jove was at her side. Black loured the earth around the captive’s tower, But Heaven embraced her in the golden shower.

I insert the poem here, as it constitutes the only trace in the pages of Once a Week of the matter with which we have to deal.

Before proceeding to detail the circumstances connected with the production and final suppression of the engraving, which prompted this passable set of verses, I shall endeavour to correct certain statements regarding it which have gained currency. In the Artist monograph on “The Art of Frederick Sandys,” in 1896, we find a few lines only given to the consideration of the {144} wood-engraving of “Danaë in the Brazen Chamber”; but in these few lines we have one undoubtedly incorrect statement, and another which is open to the gravest suspicion. The first is that the “Danaë” was engraved for The Hobby Horse in 1888; the second that it was drawn for Once a Week in 1860.

Danaë in the Brazen Chamber

Danaë in the Brazen Chamber

As regards its engraving, this was done by Swain for Once a Week, when the drawing was sent in. That it was first published in The Hobby Horse as an illustration to an article by the late J. M. Gray is another matter altogether. As regards the date of its design, 1860 is almost certainly some years too early. Indeed, I had it from Sandys himself that the probable date of the first sketch of the subject was as late as 1865, and that it was not till after he had traced it on a panel26 (the figure some two feet high) for a never-completed oil-painting, and later had made a chalk-drawing of it for a Yorkshire gentleman, that he decided to make a drawing on the wood at all. This being done, its beauty prompted two poems by two of his personal friends, the one {145} given above by Mr. Ward, the other, so far as I can gather never published, by Colonel Alfred Richards. Now, the fact that Mr. Ward’s poem did not appear in Once a Week till 1867 lends such overwhelming weight to Mr. Sandys’s recollection of the matter that we may, I think, unhesitatingly reject the date of 1860 given by the author of the Artist monograph and adopt a date at least five years later. Further evidence, too, is to be found in the fact that Mr. Sandys continued to draw on the wood certainly as late as 1866, and his recollection is clear as to “Danaë” being his last essay in that medium.

I have been thus particular to correct this matter because it will, I believe, prove of importance, when Sandys’s artistic career comes finally to be described, to get his different productions into chronological order for a proper understanding of his artistic development.

So far, then, we have arrived, at any rate approximately, at the date when Sandys did what proved to be not only his one “suppressed” drawing, but, as I have said, the very last drawing done by him on the wood. {146}

Let us now consider the circumstances under which it was produced for, but in the event suppressed by, the editor of Once a Week. And that this periodical is the poorer for its loss will be obvious to all who love beautiful drawing, “splendid paganism,” and fine wood-engraving.

Sandys began to draw for Once a Week in 1861, his initial effort being that splendid design, “Yet once more on the Organ play,” which is fit to rank with Rethel’s “Der Tod als Freund,” with which there is a certain similarity of sentiment. This was followed by eleven drawings within the five succeeding years, all breathing the spirit of Dürer, and carrying on the effort which Rethel, who had only died in 1859, had made to renew the life put into wood-engraving by the old German master. In either 1865 or 1866 Sandys projected an oil picture on the subject of “Danaë in the Brazen Chamber.” He had conceived a new version of the Danaë legend. Instead of Jove appearing to the imprisoned maiden in the form of a golden shower, he adopted the belief in Jove as the God of Dreams and adapted it to the legend.27 Danaë, {147} who has never seen a man, is haunted by the appearance of Jove as he has presented himself in her sleeping hours. To comfort herself and satisfy her passionate longing she has spent her days in weaving the image so vouchsafed to her in tapestry. For the moment her work is discarded. The ball of wool with which she has been working lies at her feet, and she stands, “with white arm fixed in air,” calling upon the “Lord of Dreams” to come to her in very sooth.

26 This is now, I believe, in the possession of Mr. Ashby-Sterry.

27 καὶ γὰρ τ’ ὄναρ ἐκ Διός ἐστιν.—Homer, Iliad i. 63.

Frankly sensuous as is the picture, one cannot but admit that the theme is treated with all necessary restraint. This, however, does not appear to have been the opinion of Walford, the then editor of Once a Week. He wrote to Sandys requiring a modification of the design. This the artist flatly refused. The design must appear as it was or not at all. In this refusal he was gallantly supported by the proprietors of the periodical, Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. The editor, however, would not give way, and the result was a deadlock. The block was actually engraved by Mr. Swain, and in his best manner, but the editor’s will was paramount, and it never {148} adorned the pages for which it was intended. It was reserved to the Century Guild Hobby Horse, in 1888, to rescue it from the oblivion into which it had passed.

I am indebted to Messrs. Bradbury and Agnew for permission to reproduce the design. Of it Mr. J. M. Gray says in his article on “Frederick Sandys and the Woodcut Designers of Thirty Years Ago”:—“It ranks among the very finest of Sandys’s woodcuts,” and the artist, who had not been uniformly satisfied with the engraved versions of his work, himself wrote to me: “It was engraved for Once a Week. Perfectly cut by Swain. From my point of view the best piece of woodcutting of our time.”

And all who love this beautiful but fast disappearing handmaiden of the arts will heartily endorse Mr. Sandys’s opinion.

CHAPTER VIII

MISCELLANEOUS

I PROPOSE in this chapter to group together certain sporadic suppressions in lithography, etching, wood-engraving, and process work. They are not sufficiently important each to demand a chapter to itself, nor do they fall into any particular categories as do the “Dickens,” “Hogarth,” and “Cruikshank” plates. At the same time each has an interest of its own, and is a footprint upon the byway of art with which we are concerned.

Fortunately for us the first of these cancelled illustrations is, at a time when we have but lately been celebrating the centenary of Senefelder’s great invention, lithography, of extraordinary interest, for it was one of the earliest book illustrations produced in England by this method. The {150} volume in which it appears (if we are lucky enough to possess one of the first three hundred copies issued) is the Antiquities of Westminster, with two hundred and forty-six engravings by J. T. Smith.

The date of the volume is 1807—a fact which would at first sight seem to tell against our claim to be dealing with a pioneer English lithograph. We must, however, remember that a book of this kind took many years to produce, and that the publication of the illustrations was, in many cases, of necessity years later than their execution.

Lowndes oddly refers to the lithograph as the first “stone-plate” ever attempted, but in this he claims for it too great a distinction. To name no others, there was, we know, as early as 1803 a portfolio containing drawings by West, Fuseli, Barry, and Stothard issued as Specimens of Polyautography, by which term lithography was for a few years described, which contains lithographs dated 1801 and 1802.

“The Painted Chamber.”
(From Antiquities of Westminster, 1807.)

The subject of the design here reproduced in facsimile is the inside of the Painted Chamber which was part of the Old Palace of Westminster. {151} The mural paintings which were discovered at the beginning of this century, after the removal of the tapestry hangings which are to be seen in the lithograph, were, it will scarcely be credited, promptly ordered by the authorities of the day to be “improved” away by a coat of whitewash because of their untidiness! And this although they were known to have been in existence since 1322, and although there were strong reasons for the belief even at that time that they were executed as early as the reign of Henry III.! Such an act of vandalism would be inconceivable were it not that we have learnt to look upon its like as so lamentably common.

The account of the preparation of the lithograph, and of the stone’s untimely fate, is fully set forth on pages 49 and 50 of the Antiquities. It is too long to quote in this place, but is well worth looking up by those who are interested in the history of this method. It is sufficient for our purpose to say that after three hundred impressions had been taken off, the stone was laid by for the night without care having been taken to keep it properly moist. The result was that {152} on the application of the ink balls in the morning they proved too tenacious, and on their removal were found to have torn up portions of the drawing from the stone. Consequently we have it that impressions of this, one of the first English lithographs, are exceedingly scarce, and are only to be found in the first three hundred copies of the book issued. This fact connotes the further result that the impressions of the etchings throughout the book in their earliest states are to be found in the copies containing the lithograph.

Before quitting this subject it should be stated that in “collating” this book we must bear in mind a very pretty quarrel which took place between the artist and J. S. Hawkins, who was largely responsible for the letterpress. As has been pointed out, the first 300 copies contained the “stone-plate.” But in only a very few copies is to be found the suppressed title-page bearing the name of John Sidney Hawkins, and the dedication to George III., signed “The Author.” These few copies contain the very earliest impressions of the plates. In the later copies the dedication is signed “John Thomas Smith,” and bound up {153} in most of these is found a “Vindication” by J. T. Smith in answer to “A Correct Statement and Vindication of the conduct of John Sidney Hawkins, Esq., F.A.S., towards Mr. John Thomas Smith, drawn up and published by Mr. Hawkins himself.” Lond. 1807, 8vo, p. 87. J. T. Smith’s answer was further replied to in another pamphlet by Hawkins dated 1808.

We will now turn from this specimen of lithography to a very remarkable example of the sister art of wood-engraving. (Vide Frontispiece.)

In the April number 1896 of Good Words, I dealt with some bibliographical curiosities, one of which was the remarkable suppressed title-page in my possession here reproduced. My object on that occasion was to verify the fact of which I felt practically certain, that the book for which it was prepared had never come into being, and that therefore we had the curious anomaly of an elaborately engraved title-page wanting a book. Books wanting their engraved title-page are unfortunately common enough, owing to the barbarism of certain ruthless collectors. But a title-page not only wanting a book, but which {154} never had one, was as extraordinary as the grin of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, which was left behind after its author had disappeared.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life.”

But then Alice had never seen this title-page of a book by “Sholto Percy” which was never written, and of which Death in London was to have been the title. The wood-block is a very beautiful one, cut by Mason, no doubt Abraham John, who engraved Cruikshank’s illustrations to Tales of Humour and Gallantry.

“Sholto Percy” was the pen-name of Joseph Clinton Robertson, who, with Thomas Byerley, published the Percy Anecdotes, 1821–23. Their full pseudonyms were “Sholto and Reuben Percy, Brothers of the Benedictine Monastery, Mount Benger.” The anecdotes were published in forty-one parts, at half-a-crown a-piece, before the close of the year 1823, and, of these, two hundred and sixty thousand copies were sold during the four years of issue! What number subsequent editions {155} have run to it is impossible to conjecture. The title of the book had its origin from the Percy Coffee-House in Rathbone Place, which the collaborators frequented. They also compiled London, or Interesting Memorials of its Rise, Progress, and Present State. 3 vols. 1823.

In the dedication of this last work to George IV. we find facsimile signatures of the two “Brothers.” That of “Sholto Percy,” the author of the book which was evidently projected but never published, tallies with that on the title-page here reproduced. From the fact that Reuben’s signature is absent we gather that, for some reason or other, the collaboration had come to an end. At any rate nothing more is heard of the partnership, nor indeed was anything else published under one or other of these noms-de-plume. And although I received various communications from strangers upon the subject of the bibliographical curiosities dealt with in the Good Words article, no light was thrown upon this perplexing title-page. Suppressed, therefore, it doubtless was, because it had no reason to be anything else, and remains a rather pathetic memorial of the gifted {156} artist and the author whose projected enterprise was perchance cut short by one of the forms of the Dread Enemy here portrayed.

The block is worthy of careful scrutiny. The only impression in existence (as I believe it to be) and in my possession is beautifully printed on India paper. In it we find Bewick’s white line used with excellent effect. Behind the main panel the colossal form of Death is just visible, holding in either hand “Death in the Cup” and “Death in the Dish.” At the lower corners his skeleton feet are just visible, fixed on the Arctic and Antarctic portions of the Globe. At the top of the panel Death drags a wheel off the chariot which is making a dash from London to Gretna Green. Immediately below this is a nail-studded coffin from which hangs a pall inscribed with the words “Death in London.” This overhangs the central group, in which Death spectacled and seated on a tombstone at a desk supported by human thighs, with a human skull as footstool, receives despatches and directs his myrmidons. Supporting this central panel two skeletons hurl death-dealing darts, whilst below one skeleton {157} starves in prison, and another, crowned with straw, rages as a maniac.

On the right-hand border a skeleton highwayman, pistol in hand, awaits his victim, ignoring the gallows which is seen under the moon in the background, and ignorant of the noose already round his neck, manipulated by a skeleton hangman in the division above. On the left-hand border a somewhat cryptic design represents a skeleton toper surmounting a skeleton quack physician who sucks a cane and, with medicine bottle in hand, goes forth on his death-dealing mission.

At the base Death, in a deluge of wind and rain, overturns a sailing boat, and incidentally presses down a struggling victim with his foot. The whole effect is finely decorative, and far surpasses anything else of Seymour’s of which I have knowledge.

But we must not linger too long over each item of our promiscuous collection of cancelled illustrations.

I shall now bring to your notice a very rare coloured plate by Henry Alken, which, though not suppressed in the strictest sense, is yet {158} sufficiently relevant to the subject to admit of its inclusion in these papers. It was undoubtedly prepared for a book of which Alken was the illustrator, but, for some reason or other, although engraved, it was not included among the published plates.

During the years 1831–39 there appeared in The New Sporting Magazine, edited by R. Surtees, a series of sporting sketches of which “Mr. John Jorrocks” was the hero. These papers were collected and published in 1838 under the alliterative title of Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, illustrated by “Phiz.” This volume was brought to the notice of Lockhart, who thereupon advised Surtees to try his hand at a sporting novel. The immediate result was Handley Cross. In 1843 a third edition of Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities appeared, with sixteen coloured plates after Henry Alken. The novels in the meantime were being issued with illustrations by Leech and “Phiz.” That the former has at this distance of time lost nothing of its popularity (rather, of course, on account of the illustrations than for the letterpress, which reads poorly enough now) is evidenced by {159} the fact that only the other day a copy fetched at public auction the remarkable sum of £20. One wonders what the bidding would have reached had the book been extra-illustrated with the unused illustration of which it is here my purpose to treat.

Now we must be careful, in considering any work signed “Alken,” to bear in mind the fact mentioned by Mr. R. E. Graves in the Dictionary of National Biography, that although the fertility of Alken’s pencil was amazing, the idea of it might be fictitiously enhanced if the fact were not grasped that he left two or three sons—one of whom was also named Henry—all artists and all sporting artists, who have, since their father’s time, been incessantly painting, lithographing, aquatinting and etching for the sporting publishers and for private patrons of the turf.

But the original Henry Alken did his work between 1816 and 1831; hence it is clear that the illustrations to Jorrocks were the work of Henry the younger. And this is a point which should be emphasised for the guidance of the bibliomaniac, for it is the practice of many second-hand booksellers to lump all work by “Alken” under one head, from {160} ignorance possibly—in some cases I fear from unworthy motives. For it is the work of Henry Alken, the founder of the line, which is of greatest rarity and greatest merit, and to palm off work done by a namesake as work done by him is plain cheating. We remember the parallel case of George Cruikshank, who exposed a certain publisher, in a somewhat intemperate pamphlet afterwards suppressed, entitled A Popgun fired off by George Cruikshank, etc., etc. In that case the publisher had been guilty of the more than questionable proceeding of advertising certain “story-books” as “illustrated by Cruikshank,” which were in reality the work of George’s nephew, Percy, who, I fancy, would have been the last to concur in what was an undoubted attempt to mislead the public.28

28 The woodcut of the irascible George suspending the unhappy Brooks by the nose from a pair of tongs is reproduced in my little book on Cruikshank’s Portraits of Himself.

The suppressed portrait of “John Jorrocks, Esq., M.F.H., etc.” (By Henry Alken, the younger)

Let it be clearly understood, then, that the plate which we here reproduce was the work of Henry Alken the younger. Though of little artistic merit, it is yet not unworthy of those which were published, and the reason of its {161} suppression is difficult to fathom. The plate should be undoubtedly annexed, on its very rare appearance, by him who values his Jorrocks. This would make his copy, in the words of the second-hand booksellers, a “really desirable” one. Our reproduction is not quite the size of the original, which exactly tallies in size and shape with the published plates. The line of publication runs: “London, Published by R. Ackermann at his Eclipse Sporting Gallery, 191 Regent St. 1843.” The method employed in its production is a mixture of etching and aquatinting, and this impression has been coloured by hand with the brilliant tints which appealed to our sporting forebears. There need be no complaint about its lowness of tone. It would put to the blush the most versi-coloured of kaleidoscopes! To parody Dr. Johnson’s animadversion upon a certain ode, it would be just from the strict artistic standpoint to say, “Bolder colour and more timorous meaning, I think, were rarely brought together.”

So much for some unattached suppressions of the first half of the century. We will conclude {162} this chapter with certain cancelled plates of only yesterday.

To those who have not yet grasped the fact (cried aloud in the wilderness by Mr. Kipling) that our age is as romantic as any other if we only know how to regard matters, the fact will probably come as something of a surprise that the last decade of the nineteenth century has as surely its crop of “suppressed plates,” as have those ages which were, we choose to flatter ourselves, more brutal than our own. Less unmannerly in some respects doubtless we tend to become, and that perhaps is the very reason (paradoxical though it may sound) why we do not have to search in vain for “modern instances.” For now that Mrs. Grundy is sharper-eyed than she was (notwithstanding her age), and the libel laws are more closely knit by precedents, slips which would have been treated as passing peccadilloes by our less squeamish forebears rise to the dignity of “copy” for the pressman, and form staple conversation for the insatiate tea-table.

And when we mention the late most five-o’clock and kind-hearted of artists, Mr. du Maurier, and {163} the still living most dainty limner of hoops and patches, Mr. Hugh Thomson, as the providers of century-end “cancelled illustrations,” we may be sure that the details will not be very scandalous, nor the outrages very shocking.

Not but that I was forced to go somewhat warily when originally recording the famous incident of du Maurier and the peccant illustration of the “Two Apprentices” in Trilby, for was I not thereby involving myself with another, and greater, artist (very much alive indeed!), whose pen was only not mightier than his pencil because the latter was unsurpassable, but who might in turn pillory me in his gallery of artfully constructed Enemies?

It was indeed a topsy-turvy world which found the “Butterfly,” which is popularly supposed to end its life wriggling upon the pin of the “soaring human boy,” revenging itself upon humanity with epigrams that “stick for ever.”

Sad to relate, Whistler could never be brought to see du Maurier’s rather caustic “retaliation,” particulars of which are given below, in its proper proportions. Indeed, when I asked him to allow me to reproduce, as a pictorial curiosity, the {164} suppressed print of the “Two Apprentices,” which only the owners of Trilby, as it appeared in serial form, are now destined to possess, he informed me in the politest manner possible that my doing so would involve me in an expensive and uncomfortable correspondence with his solicitors. And what could not be done then cannot be done now, for reasons into which I need not enter. Nevertheless, to treat seriously a hyperbolical and exaggerated caricature as anything more than a legitimate response to a not altogether kindly sarcasm on the part of Mr. Whistler himself, appears to me now, as it appeared to me then, well-nigh incredible. No one looked upon “Joe Sibley” as a true likeness, either pictorially or verbally. It was written and read as a joke, part true, but mostly false, and so would have stood had it not been given undue importance by the correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette. As a result, in book form “Joe Sibley” is wanting in that delightful gallery which contains “Durier,” Pygmalion to Trilby’s Galatea—a Galatea whose marble heart would never beat for him; “Vincent,” the great American oculist, “whose daughters are {165} so beautiful and accomplished that they spend their autumn holiday in refusing the matrimonial offers of the British aristocracy”; “The Greek,” who was christened Poluphoisboiospaleapologos Petrilopetrolicoconose “because his real name was thought much too long”; “Carnegie,” who “is now only a rural dean, and speaks the worst French I know, and speaks it wherever and whenever he can”; “Antony, the Swiss” (substituted for “Joe Sibley”); “Lorrimer,” who was so thoroughgoing in his worship of the immortals, Veronese, Tintoret and Co., and was “so persistent in voicing it, that he made them quite unpopular in the Place St. Anatole des Arts”; not to speak of “Dodor” and “l’Zouzou,” who were distinguished for being “les plus mauvais garniments of their respective regiments,” and the rest of Trilby’s delightful adorers. Why, it seems to me that to have obtained a niche in that pillory (forgive the mixing of metaphors), and to see the fun of a little exaggerated banter, and perchance learn a little lesson from it, would not be so very bad a fate after all. But I suppose it all depends on the point of view. {166}

As I say, I have by me a delightfully ironic missive from the late president of the Society of the Butterfly himself, acknowledging “the exceedingly amiable and flattering form of the playful request” contained in my letter, with a hint at the end that lawyers might look upon any reproduction of the forbidden matter as less than tolerable.

Alas! that it is so, and all I can do is to refer my readers to the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette for May 15 and 25, 1894, in which appeared Whistler’s two letters, and quote here the interview with du Maurier upon the matter. They form a curious commentary upon the “Gentle Art of Losing—Friends.”

Extract from Pall Mall Gazette, May 19, 1894.*

MR. WHISTLER AND MR. DU MAURIER THE “PUNCH” ARTIST’S ATTITUDE

Mr. George du Maurier, “hidden in Hampstead” as Mr. Whistler put it in his letter to us a day or two ago, was discovered by a Pall Mall Gazette reporter without the aid of any exploring party yesterday, when that representative called to see what the famous Punch artist had to say in reply to Mr. Whistler. Mr. du Maurier was not disposed at first to vouchsafe any answer. “If a bargee insults one {167} in the street,” he said, “one can only pass on. One cannot stop and argue it out.” But on second thoughts Mr. du Maurier added a few words. “I should,” he said, “have avoided all reference to Mr. Whistler, or anything which could have been construed into reference to him, if I had imagined it would have pained him. I should have written privately to him to say so, if his letter had been less violent and less brutal. Certainly, in the character of Sibley, in my serial story Trilby I have drawn certain lines with Mr. Whistler in my mind. I thought that the reference to those matters would have recalled some of the good times we used to have in Paris in the old days. I thought that both with Mr. Whistler and with other acquaintances I have similarly treated, pleasurable recollections would have been awakened. But he has taken the matter so terribly seriously. It is so unlike him.

* By kind permission of the Proprietor.

“You know of no reason why he should not have taken it all good-naturedly?”—“No. I thought it might have drawn from him something funny, something droll, to which I could have replied in kind. But, of course, a letter like his puts a reply out of the question. I think he must have been quite out of sorts to have allowed himself to get so angered.” “I believe Mr. Whistler has himself said things which the objects of them have not particularly relished!” “Why, he has gone about all his life in England making unkind remarks and publishing them. Here is a little book of his, The Gentle Art of making Enemies, and I am one of his victims. It is not very terrible what he says. It is rather droll. Listen! ‘Mr. du Maurier and Mr. Wilde, happening to meet in the rooms where Mr. Whistler was {168} holding his first exhibition of Venice jottings, the latter brought the two face to face, and, taking each by the arm, inquired, “I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?”’ The obvious retort to that on my part would have been that if he did not take care I would invent him, but he had slipped away before either of us could get a word out. This is really too small a matter to refer to; but the explanation of this bit of drollery of Mr. Whistler’s is that it suggested that I was unknown until I began to draw Postlethwaite, the æsthetic character, out of whom I got some fun. Postlethwaite was said to be Mr. Oscar Wilde, but the character was founded, not on one person at all, but a whole school. As a matter of fact, I had been drawing for Punch twenty years before the invention of Postlethwaite. However, that was Mr. Whistler’s little joke, and one would have thought that if he made jokes about me, he might have expected me to play the same game upon him without anticipating that I should hurt his feelings. Then Mr. Whistler implies that I am a foul friend, stating that I have thought a foul friend a finer fellow than an open enemy. I am neither his friend nor his enemy. I am a great admirer of his genius and his wit; but I cannot say that I could call myself his friend for thirty years past. We were intimate in the old days, but that is all. No, his whole letter is incomprehensible to me. Of course, he has been embittered through life, by reason of his genius not being recognised at its full value by the wide public, and it certainly has not. This circumstance, and possibly illness, may account for the leave he has taken of good manners. He talks of my pent-up envy and malice. I must ask you to believe that I am not {169} such a beast as that. I have no occasion either for malice or for envy, and, as I say, I should never have written even what I have, had I imagined it would give Mr. Whistler pain.”

“Do you contemplate deleting the character of Sibley when you publish in volume form?” “If I had a word or sign of regret from Mr. Whistler for the savage things he says in his letter I might consider that. I did what I did in a playful spirit of retaliation for this little gibe about me in his book. A man so sensitive as Mr. Whistler now seems to be should beware how he goes about joking of others. I had no idea of taking any notice of Mr. Whistler’s letter, but since you have come and asked me I say that if I had known it would have given pain and brought such a torrent of abuse upon me, I should have denied myself the little luxury of the playful retaliation in which I indulged.”30

Let me then here put it on record that Trilby in book form is not only innocent of “Joe Sibley” and the “cut” of the “Two Apprentices” but is in other respects far inferior to its serial issue. The illustrations have been greatly reduced, and in the process have lost much of their charm. There was, however, a large-paper edition of the novel published in 1895, containing the same number of {170} illustrations as the small-paper, together with “facsimiles of the pencil studies.” This is the most desirable edition outside Harper’s. The ideal form is, of course, the serial issue extracted from the Magazine and bound up, “Joe Sibley,” the suppressed “cut” and all.

This, then, is all that must be said about the “suppressed plate,” which is so rigidly put under hatches that it must not even be paraded, on this occasion only, with its fellows. “When the sleeper wakes,” perchance, and copyright is out, a cheap edition of this present volume, with the suppressed block inserted, will be published, and our children’s children will marvel.31

30 After reading Mr. Menpes’s Whistler as I knew Him, one discovers that extraordinary phenomenon, a man who would rather destroy a friendship by what he considered a brilliant phrase than sacrifice the brilliant phrase and preserve the friendship. It is not wonderful that all Whistler’s friends did not prove so complaisant and generous as Mr. Menpes.

31 The curious should refer to a delightful open Letter entitled Trilby from Mr. Whistler’s pen, which appeared in the initial number of Mr. Harry Furniss’s late lamented Lika Joko.

The whole episode is a nice commentary upon Mr. George Meredith’s distinction between Irony and Humour. “If,” says he, “instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod, to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under a semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered dubious whether indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of {171} Irony.” But “if you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun him, pity him as much as you expose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you.”

In conclusion, it may be interesting to record the fact that no communication passed between du Maurier and Whistler upon the subject, other than that which appeared in print.

So much for the episode of the suppressed Trilby illustration, which, as we have seen, was complicated by personal considerations.

Let us now turn our attention for a moment to a charming little tailpiece which has fallen a victim, not to the susceptibilities of an individual, but to an undue consideration for the feelings of that most living of Tom Morton’s creations, Mrs. Grundy. It is to be found in the first edition of the immortal Vicar of Wakefield as pictured by Mr. Hugh Thomson. And in, entering our protest against the deference which has in this instance been shown to prudishness, we must at the same time admiringly recognise the spirit by {172} which the action has been prompted. The “young person” no doubt succeeds on occasion in rendering us a little ridiculous. At the same time we must not forget that to her we largely owe our immunity from what would often shock even the moral olfactories of her elders.

Suppressed Illustration from The Vicar of Wakefield

Surely, however, the tender morals which could bear to read of Thornhill’s attempted seduction of Olivia could not logically find offence in the {173} charming little conceit, which by its suppression has rendered a first edition of the Vicar, as illustrated by Mr. Hugh Thomson, an allurement to the modern Mæcenas.

Unlike Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, illustrated by the same artist, after the first edition of which certain drawings also disappeared, but without others being substituted in the later editions, the first edition of the Thomson Vicar of Wakefield, dated 1890, which was published both on small and large paper, contains the same number of illustrations as those which succeeded it. This, of course, is because in this instance the type was not reset, and so it was obligatory to substitute an illustration for that which was suppressed.

The tailpiece, here reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. Thomson and Messrs. Macmillan, only appears on page 95 of the issues of 1890.

After that date we have a drawing which, though a pretty enough little picture of Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love, like the Vicar himself, to give the whole name), is to my mind far inferior to that {174} which seems to have given offence to some extraordinarily constructed purists.

Mr. Austin Dobson, to whom we are indebted for the enlightening Prefatory account, in this volume, of the more important illustrated editions of the Vicar, tells me that he has an impression that the immediate cause of the disappearance of the peccant tailpiece was a certain objection raised by a reviewer in the Spectator. In justice, however, to that organ I must at once put it on record that I can find no trace of its having so demeaned itself.

As a matter of fact I have reason to believe that suggestions were made by certain persons who arrogate to themselves a sort of private proprietorship in the “fine old English novel” and the “fine old English caricature” that the little tailpiece was in rather bad taste, and that the artist, rather than allow the slightest grounds for such an imputation to exist, hastened to remove the offender, and substituted one that was irreproachable. Personally I grieve to think that there should be any one in existence with a moral digestion so dyspeptic as to discover the least coarseness or ill-flavour in {175} this dainty little fancy, And though the artist, we may be sure, has not troubled himself unduly about the insinuation, I cannot but feel indignant that even a hint of indecorousness should be made against one who, above all others, has kept his pencil free from any taint of unworthiness. However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and we are fain to congratulate ourselves upon thus being enabled to enrol Mr. Hugh Thomson in a brotherhood which he certainly will not repudiate.

Passing allusion has been made above to certain illustrations which also disappeared from Mr. Outram Tristram’s very readable book Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, illustrated by Mr. Hugh Thomson and Mr. Herbert Railton, after the first edition of that very charming volume was exhausted. It had been my intention to reproduce these cancelled drawings here, but I have since come to the conclusion that it would be little short of an outrage to perpetuate what would be cruelly unrepresentative of Mr. Hugh Thomson’s work. So far as the artist himself is concerned no obstacle is raised, for he writes {176} to me in the most generous way, “‘Calling for the Squire’s Mailbag’ was withdrawn for the same reason as ‘Wild Darrell’ (viz. because it was not considered sufficiently good). I should like to withdraw scores of other drawings. However, one cannot help oneself. It is not very pleasant to have these reproduced again, but I quite understand the motive of your book, and should be very churlish indeed to put any obstacle in your way.” This seems to me so nobly altruistic an attitude that I feel I should be lacking in mannerliness were I to take advantage of it.

It will be enough merely to draw attention to facts which will be of interest to those who possess one or other of the editions of this book.

First and foremost then, take down your copy and note whether the number of the illustrations is 216 or 219. Happy as you are if you possess the latter, twice happy will you be if the former be yours, for in this case you will be the owner, not only of a first edition, not only of an edition containing the cancelled illustrations, but also of the edition from which the best idea of the beauty of the original drawings may be got. And for this {177} reason, that in all but this, the 1888 edition, the reproductions have been greatly reduced in size. Of course we are here concerned with the cancelled pictures, “Wild Darrell” on page 43 and “Calling for the Squire’s Mailbag” on page 311, but we must remember that their chief value lies in their being the guarantees of our having an editio princeps. So we have it that in this instance as in the case of Trilby the earliest issues have the double charm of satisfying at the same time our taste for the beautiful and our appetite for the curious. Unlike the case of Trilby, however, we have here no romantic circumstances such as appeal to the true bibliomaniac. The cancellation is merely the result of a laudable determination on the part of the artist and his publisher to eliminate such illustrations as they do not consider altogether exemplary. Incidentally of course their action enhances, in the eyes of the bibliomaniac, the value of those copies which they rightly consider marred by their inclusion. But this is no business of theirs. They are not concerned with diseased humanity but with the poor sane public for whom they cater. {178}

The above remarks apply of course to many minor suppressions of the same kind. There is, to take one example, the well-known case of Curmer’s 1838 edition of Paul et Virginie and La Chaumière Indienne superbly illustrated by Meissonier, Tony Johannot, Huet, and others. This book is a standing compliment to British wood-engraving of the day, for, though published in Paris by a French publisher, by far the larger number of the blocks were entrusted to Samuel Williams, Orrin Smith, and other British hands. In the earliest issue appears on page 418 the wood-engraving of “La Bonne Femme.” Engraved by Lavoignat after Meissonier it was suppressed in later issues probably because of its ugliness, whether the fault of artist or engraver I know not. At any rate the engraver was not one of the British contingent.

CHAPTER IX

THE SUPPRESSED OMAR KHAYYAM ETCHING

WHEN the iconography of Edward FitzGerald’s Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam comes to be compiled, there will be one item which will be found to be well-nigh unattainable by the enthusiastic collector. That item is not unnaturally dismissed in a very few words by Colonel W. F. Prideaux in his “Notes for a Bibliography of Edward FitzGerald.” He is dealing with the third edition, published by Quaritch in the year 1872. “It may be added,” he writes, “that a weird frontispiece to this edition was designed and etched by Mr. Edwin Edwards, the artist friend to whom FitzGerald lent his house at the beginning of 1871, and whose death in 1879 was a source of sorrow to him. A few copies of the etching were struck off, but it did not meet with the {180} approval of FitzGerald, and was consequently never used.”

Now, I am inclined to think that this, as I believe, the only published reference to an interesting rarity, will hardly satisfy the craving of the FitzGerald enthusiast. I shall therefore give the fullest information on the subject, whereby the modern Mæcenas will be afforded full particulars of what only a few of the cult of Omar can ever hope to possess.

Those who know their Ruba’iyat as they should will remember that there are several allusions made by the philosopher to the amusements of his countrymen.

Take the FitzGerald quatrain:—

“When you and I behind the veil are passed, Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last, Which of our Coming and Departure heeds As the Sea’s self should heed a pebble cast.”

Here, in the last line, we have what is probably an allusion to the game of “Ducks and Drakes,” “which,” says Mr. Edward Heron-Allen in the notes to his admirable translation, “was known to the Egyptians and also to the Greeks under the {181} name of ἐποστρακισμος. It was played with oyster-shells. The curious are referred to Minutius Felix (A.D. 207), who describes the game in his preface.” This last is a gentleman with whose name I am free to confess I have hitherto been unfamiliar, and to whose writings I have no access. I must therefore leave the enthusiastic reader to follow up the clue for himself. However, with the aid of Liddell and Scott, I find myself able to go one better than Mr. Heron-Allen, and would refer the reader to Archæologus Pollux, the author of Onomastikon, whose date is prior to Felix by twenty-nine years!

Another game which we find Omar Khayyam alluding to is that of chequers, which is familiar to us in FitzGerald’s oft-quoted quatrain:—

“But helpless pieces of the game he plays Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days; Hither and thither moves, and checks and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays”;

altered in the later edition to:—

“’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days, Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays; Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays And one by one back in the Closet lays.”

{182}

Again we have allusion to what is probably some form of the game of tennis in the following:—

“The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes, And He that tossed Thee down into the Field He knows about it all—HE knows—HE knows.”

Other passages might be quoted, but these are enough for our purpose, for the form of amusement with which we have immediately to concern ourselves is rather a toy than a game—a toy indeed which would seem to have been the forerunner of a somewhat elaborate apparatus which, being used at first for more frivolous purposes, has now been largely adapted to educational ends.

The Magic Lantern of modern times is generally referred back to Athanasius Kircher, who died in 1680, although, according to some, it was known four centuries earlier to Roger Bacon. This may be true enough so far as the “projecting lantern” is concerned, but it can hardly be doubted that it had in the line of its earlier ancestors the Persian Fanus i Khiyal or Lantern of Fancy, which is used with such effect by the Philosopher of Naishápur, and which instigated the design of the {183} rare suppressed etching of which I here propose to treat with some particularity.

As literally translated by Mr. Heron-Allen, the quatrain referring thereto runs as follows:—

“This vault of heaven, beneath which we stand bewildered, We know to be a sort of magic-lantern; Know thou that the sun is the lamp flame and the universe is the lamp, We are like figures that revolve in it.”

As literally translated by Mr. John Payne it run:—“This sphere of the firmament, wherein we are amazed, The Chinese lantern I think a likeness of it; The sun the lamp-stand and the world the lantern; We like the figures are that in it revolve.”

As metrically translated by him into a throwback quatrain it runs:—

“The Sphere and mankind, who therein in amaze are, Chinese-lantern like, well it may seem, to our gaze are; See, the sun is the lamp and the world is the lantern And the figures ourselves, that revolve round the blaze are.”

As rendered by FitzGerald more literally than is his wont it ran in its first state as follows:—

“For, in and out, above, below, ’Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show, Play’d in a box whose Candle is the Sun Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.”

{184}

As altered later, it assumed the following more familiar form:—

“We are no other than a moving row Of Magic-Shadow shapes that come and go Round with the Sun-illumin’d Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show.”

All who have read the published letters of Edward FitzGerald will have been struck by the infinite pains which he took to make this highest effort of his genius, the translation of Omar, as perfect as possible. His correspondence with his friend Professor Cowell teems with allusions to, and innumerable discussions on, minute points of meaning in the Persian.

Therefore it will not surprise us to find that the figure of the Fanus i Khiyal (literally the lanthorn32 of fancy), here made use of in so masterly a manner, had its characteristics and peculiarities carefully considered.

32 It is a not uninteresting fact that the old English spelling of the word “lantern” used above is due to the mistaken association of the word with the plates of transparent horn formerly used in place of glass.

By the kindness of Mrs. Edwin Edwards and the late Professor Cowell, I am enabled to give extracts from an unpublished letter written by the {185} latter to FitzGerald in the year 1868, dealing somewhat exhaustively with the matter. This letter appears to have been forwarded by FitzGerald to Edwin Edwards, the artist, by way of inspiration for an etched frontispiece to the edition of The Ruba’iyat which was to be published by Quaritch in 1871, not, I think, in 1872, as Colonel Prideaux has it.

From Professor Cowell to Edward FitzGerald.

MY DEAR E. F. G.—I have sent off one letter to you to-day, but I did not answer a question of yours in it, after all, which you remind me of in your letter just received by this evening’s post.

First as to the famous Fanus i Khiyal—you will find it explained in a note by the editor at the end of my Calcutta Review Paper. I have often seen them in Calcutta. The lantern is about a foot and a half high—and nearly a foot in diameter, and it moves round with a slow and slightly vibratory motion. The candle is placed inside, and the draught sends it round. The editor in his note explains how the draught is produced:—They are made of a talc33 cylinder with figures of men and animals cut out of paper and pasted on it. The cylinder, which is very light, is suspended on an axis, round which it easily turns. A hole {186} is cut near the bottom, and the part cut out is fixed at an angle to the cylinder so as to form a vane. When a small lamp or candle is placed inside, a current of air is produced which keeps the cylinder slowly revolving. (Here is a small drawing.)

I cannot recollect how it was suspended, the reviewer says, “on an axis.” I think it was hung by a string from the top over a candle. I remember seeing it go round one evening in our dining-room—the Khánsamah brought one to show me. . . .

Nicolas’s Fanus34 is more elaborate than our Calcutta one, but on the same principle. He says the figures move round from right to left or vice versa—as may be. His fanal35 is like mine, only it has a metal top and bottom—the cylindrical sides being of waxed cloth and painted; it has a handle fixed on the top which the man holds; the candle is placed inside on the metal floor. . . .

(Here is another small drawing.) . . .

Yours affectionately,

EDW. B. COWELL.

CAMBRIDGE,

January 16, 1868.

{187}

The letter was illustrated with two rough drawings of the Fanus for FitzGerald’s guidance. The last of them represented the toy held out by a truncated arm. Edwin Edwards, to whom the letter was forwarded, at once with true artistic instinct caught at the suggestion unintentionally conveyed, and, as will be seen from the etching here reproduced, accentuated the hidden presence of the “Master of the Show,” by making the arm which holds suspended this “Sun-illumined Lantern” of a world issue from the impenetrable darkness which hides its mysterious lord. Unfortunately, the Fanus is not etched with great success, although the artist made a special visit to the old India Museum, now dispersed, to study an example there on exhibition. Had the etching equalled the conception, the design could hardly have failed to satisfy even FitzGerald’s fastidious requirements. As it was, only a limited number36 of proofs (from twenty to twenty-five) were printed by that cleverest printer of etchings, Mrs. Edwin Edwards, and the plate destroyed. Hence their rarity.

33 This word is curiously enough misprinted “tall” in both Nichols’ and Quaritch’s editions of Mr. Heron-Allen’s book, whilst in the note to Professor Cowell’s article it is printed “tale.” It is something of a record, I should think, to find so many compositors and readers all at fault.

34 Professor Cowell here refers to J. B. Nicolas, author of a French translation of Omar, published at Paris, 1867. In a note to Les quatrains de Khéyam traduit du Persan, he says: “In Persia the lantern is made of two copper basins, separated by a shade of waxed calico about a yard high. The lower one contains the candle, and the upper one has a handle for the arm of the ferrásh who carries it. The shade is folded like the familiar ‘Chinese lantern.’ Ornaments are painted on the cloth, and it is to the vacillation of these, as the carrier shifts it from one hand to another, that Omar refers.”

35 Qy.: Has this French word for lantern the same root as Fanus?

36 At least six of these have lately gone to America where they were feverishly bought up by enthusiastic Omarians.

{188}

The conception is a really fine one, and might well have proved an illustration of the text in the best sense of that much-abused term, being, as it is, a very different thing from a mere translation of the words into pictorial form. It is far more than this. It is an illuminator of the meaning, and accentuates its spiritual significance. This is what illustration should do, but rarely does do, in these days of rapid and perfunctory production.

Of Edwin Edwards the artist I should like to take this opportunity of saying a word. His name is little known outside artistic circles, and it would be somewhat unfair to advertise it in connection with an etched plate which failed to give satisfaction without at the same time making allusion to pictorial work which was successful and meritorious. That he did produce work of real value is evident from the fact that one of his oil pictures of the Thames hangs at the Luxembourg in the Salle des Étrangers (for he was always more appreciated in France than in England), and that two years ago another canvas, and that hardly one of the best examples of his {189} work, was chosen by Sir Edward Poynter to be well hung in the Tate Gallery.

The suppressed frontispiece For “Omar Khayyam.” (By Edwin Edwards)

It may also be mentioned that high appreciation of his talents has been shown across the Channel by eulogistic articles in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, Les Beaux Arts Illustrés, La Vie Moderne, L’Art, etc., etc.

It is, however, on his work as an etcher that his reputation must chiefly rest, and it would be more than unjust to allow the artist who produced such a tour de force as the great etching of “London from the Greenwich Observatory,” to mention only one of his three hundred and seventy-one works in this medium, to be advertised by an etching, finely conceived it is true, but unsatisfactorily carried to an issue.

Not that these facts will in any way affect the thoroughgoing rarity-hunter in his estimate of the suppressed plate here described. It will be enough for him to know that not more than a quarter of a hundred of his rivals can own a proof of the etching to make him ready to sell his last shirt for its acquisition. He will continue to value a print for its rarity rather than for its beauty, {190} a book for its height in millimetres rather than for its depth in thought.

No doubt these be hard words. Then why, it will be asked, pander to so foolish a passion? Shall I confess? Yes, indeed, and glory in the confession that I, too, am of the gentle brotherhood, that I, too, am a subscriber to The Connoisseur (or “The Connoyzer,” as one of my friends at Mr. W. H. Smith’s bookstall used to call that delightful publication), that I, too,—in fine, that I am, by the favour of Fortune, the happy possessor of two proofs of the suppressed etching to the Omar of 1872!

And now just one word with that gentle hunter, Mr. Thomas B. Mosher of Portland, Maine, U.S.A., who did me the honour of transferring a large portion of the above, originally written for The Bookman, to the pages of his beautiful 1902 edition of The Ruba’iyat. Of that I make no complaint, for I think it very probable that he asked and obtained my permission. What I do complain of is that, in a footnote, he falls foul of me for being “ungracious” to Colonel Prideaux in suggesting the date 1871 as the year of publication of the {191} third edition, instead of the year 1872, as Colonel Prideaux has it in his most valuable little “Notes for a Bibliography of Edward FitzGerald” 1901. Mr. Mosher says “no manner of doubt exists as to the date.” Let me tell him that I have it on the authority of one who was on intimate terms both with FitzGerald and Edwin Edwards at the time when this third edition was published that, though the book bore the date 1872 on the title, as a matter of fact it was published in the autumn of 1871 and post-dated. If it be “ungracious” to give Colonel Prideaux a piece of information which he had not the opportunity of obtaining for himself, then I sincerely hope that all who read this volume, and find themselves better informed, as well they may, than I am, will be equally “ungracious” to me. La plupart des hommes n’ont pas le courage de corriger les autres, parcequ’ils n’ont pas le courage de souffrir qu’on les corrige.

CHAPTER X ADAPTED OR PALIMPSEST PLATES

“God bless the King, I mean the faith’s defender, God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender. Who that Pretender is, and who is King— God bless us all!—that’s quite another thing.”

SO sang the old Jacobite John Byrom, and, taking my cue from him, I do not propose to enter here into the vexed question of James Francis Edward Stuart’s claim to this or that title.37 It is merely a happy accident that lends me so picturesque a figure round which to group certain pictorial rarities, germane to our subject, of which little is known, and of which the petit-maître will be therefore grateful for some particulars.

37 It may be mentioned that Jesse, in his Memoirs of the Pretenders, always calls him James Frederick.

The history of the engraved copperplate is full of that kind of romance which peculiarly {193} commends itself to the lover of what is quaint and curious in the byways of art, and perhaps the most romantic phase of its history is that with which I am about to deal. It is the sort of romance which was inseparable from what may be called the pre-machinery days, and is as foreign to the spirit of this age as are the slashed doublets of our forefathers or the starched irrelevances of their wives.

It may be, of course, that the Process block of to-day will be found to be as full of romance to-morrow. Indeed we have already found some indications of this in a former chapter, and it is probably true that romance is as all-pervading in the mental as ether is in the physical world, and that it is only lack of the proper intellectual reagent that makes the discovery of it difficult.

However that may be, one thing is certain, that most of us find it easier to come at the “poetry of circumstance” when centuries or decades have left it behind than when it is at our immediate threshold.

In these days of lightning pictorial satire, when Monday’s political move is on Tuesday served up {194} in genial topsy-turvy by “F. C. G.” in the Westminster or “G. R. H.” in the Pall Mall, and when Punch’s weekly cartoon is voted seven days late by the Man in the Street, it is difficult for us to realise the shifts to which political satire was put when the laborious engraved or etched broadside was the quickest method of getting at the picture-loving masses. Just imagine the agony of impatience of the political satirist who had designed his broadside and had to await the tardy engraving of the copperplate, to be followed by the deliberate hand-printing and hand-painting of the impressions before they could be published, perhaps only to find in the end that the nine-days’ wonder was past, or that events had blunted his most telling points.

So, too, when satirist was employed against satirist, how hopeless it seemed for retaliation to follow swiftly enough upon the occasion to make any retort in kind worth while at all.

Then it was that the wit of man, quickened by necessity, conceived the clever stratagem of the adapted copperplate, of which it is here my purpose to give some remarkable examples. {195}

I fancy I see the victim of some shrewder libel than usual, with which the town has been flooded, pricking off in hot haste to the pictorial satirist in his pay, and demanding the production of a trenchant and immediate reply, so that the retort may be in the printsellers’ windows before the attack has had time to do its deadly work.

The satirist names a month as the earliest possible date. His employer curses him for a blundering slowcoach. Before a month is out the mischief will be done beyond repairing. And he is flinging himself out of the workshop when a happy thought comes with a flash into his head.

How about the copperplate of that broadside which fell so flat a year ago because of its tardiness? It was meant to be a counter-thrust to just such another attack as this, but it was a month too late. Is there no way of fitting a new barb on to the old arrow? Is there no way of adapting the year-old weapon to the present necessity?

And then there follows anxious discussion and careful examination. The head of A. burnished out here can be re-engraved in the similitude of B. {196} C. will stand as he is and do duty, with a new index number and altered footnote, for D. Here an inappropriate object can be replaced by a panel of appropriate verse. The inscriptions on the banderoles issuing from the characters’ mouths must be altered. And, hey presto! in the twinkling of a bedpost we have our answer ready for a not too critical public.

The original lampooner, who counted on a good month’s start, will be confronted with a retort before he has time to turn round. The whole town will be set buzzing about the successful ruse, and the laugh will be turned upon the aggressor.

Of course it would be comparatively rarely that the adapted plate could be wholly apropos, but such capital ingenuity was exercised, once the stratagem had been imagined, that the practice was not so uncommon nor so unsuccessful as might be naturally expected. In this chapter I am only treating of those dealing with one particular episode, but I have in my possession at least thirty of these remarkable productions.

From them we find that it was not always the engraver of a plate who re-adjusted his own {197} handiwork, but piratical hands were sometimes laid upon the work of a master by mere journeymen engravers who did not scruple to leave the original artist’s name for the better selling of the plate, although it had ceased to represent even in the remotest degree his sentiments or intentions.

Indeed, I could tell of at least one remarkable plate originally prepared in honour of a certain great personage, which, being thievishly appropriated by his opponents, was by them so judiciously metamorphosed as to cover him with as much confusion as it had originally panoplied him with honour.38

38 Mozley, in his entertaining Reminiscences, tells the following story of the latter days of the Oxford Movement, which is somewhat parallel: “Isaac Williams published a volume of poetry called The Baptistry, upon a series of curious and very beautiful engravings, by Boetius a Bolswert, in an old Latin work, entitled Via Vitæ Æternæ. In these pictures, besides other things peculiar to the Roman Church, there frequently occurs the figure of the Virgin Mother, crowned and in glory, the object of worship, and distributing the gifts of Heaven. For this figure Williams substituted the Church, and thereby incurred a protest from Newman for adopting a Roman Catholic work just so far as suited his own purpose, without caring for the further responsibilities.”

This is, I believe, the first time that any attempt has been made to bring this fascinating subject before the public. Incidentally it has {198} been touched upon once or twice in publications of my own as it affected other byways in art, and has been alluded to in the Introductions to the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (Satires), prepared under the direction of the late Keeper of the Prints and Drawings, George William Reid, by F. G. Stephens, to which monumental work all students of such subjects are profoundly indebted. But it has never been treated with anything approaching the completeness that it deserves. It is practically an unworked phase of print-collecting—a new craze in which the dilettante may specialise.

As I have said, we are fortunate in having in this place so picturesque a figure as that of the Old Pretender, or the Chevalier de St. George, as some like to call him, round whom to group our first batch of these pictorial palimpsests.

James Francis Edward Stuart was, as all who know their history will remember, the son of James II. by his second wife, Mary of Modena. He was born on June 10, 1688, at St James’s Palace.

James II. was then in his fifty-fifth year. By {199} his cruelties after Monmouth’s rebellion, by his attack on the Universities, by the Trial of the Seven Bishops, by his Court of Commissioners of Ecclesiastical Causes, and by his misuse of the Dispensing Power he had alienated the whole nation, with the exception of a few Roman Catholics and hangers-on of the Court, and his throne was tottering.

The only element of strength in his position was the certainty that sooner or later the crown was bound to pass to one of the Protestant daughters of his first marriage; for though the present Queen had borne him four or five children they had all died young. It was now six years since there had been any hint of a royal birth. What were probably grossly exaggerated accounts of the King’s early irregularities were matter of common gossip, and the Queen’s health was far from robust. Suddenly, at a most opportune moment for the Roman Catholics—so opportune a moment indeed that intrigue at once suggested itself—it was announced to the world that Mary was with child, and a day of thanksgiving was appointed five months before the Queen’s delivery. {200}

Now was the occasion for reviving a report which had been sedulously spread by the enemies of the Court from the very earliest days of the Queen’s marriage—that the King, in order to transmit his dominions and his bigotry to a Roman Catholic heir, had determined to impose a surreptitious offspring on his Protestant subjects.

In due course came her Majesty’s lying-in at St. James’s, and although the King took every precaution, by the solemn depositions of forty-two persons of rank who were present, against questions arising as to the child’s identity, the celebrated “warming-pan” story was hatched, which continued to gain credence for more than half a century. Nor were circumstantial details of the most intimate nature in support of the lie wanting. During the labour, it was maintained, the curtains of the bed were drawn more closely than usual on such occasions; neither the Princess of Orange, the nearest Protestant heir to the throne, nor her immediate adherents were asked to be in attendance; an apartment had been selected for the Queen’s accommodation in which there was a door near the head of the bed which opened on a back {201} staircase. Though the weather was hot, and the room heated by the great crowd of persons present, a warming-pan was introduced into the bed; and finally the pan contained a new-born child, which was immediately afterwards presented to the bystanders as the offspring of the Queen!

The following song, sung by two gentlemen at the Maypole in the Strand, is sufficiently explanatory:

“As I went by St. James’s I heard a bird sing, That the Queen had for certain a boy for a King; But one of the soldiers did laugh and did say, It was born overnight and brought forth the next day. This bantling was heard at St. James’s to squall, Which made the Queen make so much haste from Whitehall.”

The last line referred to the fact that the Queen had played at cards at Whitehall Palace till eleven o’clock on Saturday, June 9, whence she was carried in a chair to St. James’s Palace, and on the Sunday, June 10, between the hours of nine and ten in the morning, “was brought to bed of a prince.”

It is a remarkable fact [says Jesse] that as early as 1682 (six years before this), when the Queen, then Duchess of York, was declared to be pregnant, the same rumours were {202} propagated as on the present occasion—that an imposture was intended to be obtruded upon the nation. Fortunately on that occasion the infant proved to be a female, or doubtless some improbable fiction would have been invented similar to that which obtained credit in 1688.

Undoubtedly the whole thing was a lie, but it did its deadly work.39 The whole nation was prepared to accept the flimsiest evidence, and within six months father, mother, and child had fled to France.

39 Certain imprudent Roman Catholics gave colour to the popular belief by loudly expressing their opinion that a miracle had been wrought. One fanatic had even gone so far as to prophesy that the Queen would give birth to twins, of whom the elder would be King of England and the younger Pope of Rome!

So much for the story that inspired the remarkable broadsides with which it is here our purpose to deal. It will be noticed that these broadsides are all Dutch in their origin, a fact that is not surprising when we remember that they formed part of the propagandum which was soon to land William of Orange, the husband of James’s eldest daughter, on the throne of England.

The first that we reproduce is entitled “L’Europe Alarmée pour le Fils d’un Meunier.”

The artist is that remarkably clever Dutchman, {203} Romeyn de Hooghe, whose delicate and facile handling of the point is well exemplified in the seascape at the back of the picture.

Let us examine in detail the most important features of this elaborate broadside.

The centre of attraction is, of course, the surreptitious infant Prince of Wales, who lies in his cradle to the left of the picture. Those assembled about him are discussing the possibility of the plot having been discovered. On his coverlet are various playthings, amongst which is conspicuous a toy mill, emphasising, of course, the generally accepted belief that he was the son of a miller, for, in their lying, James’s enemies were nothing if not circumstantial. This allusive toy figures in almost all the satiric prints dealing with the Old Pretender.

At the foot of the cradle, which is decorated with an owl, an owlet, and a snake (emblems of evil), is a pap-bowl and spoon, half concealed by the arm of “the first mother”40 (1) {204} who seems to be pointing out to Father Petre (2), the instigator of the plot, that the child has been born too old. The Father, whose intimacy with the lady is suggested by a tender fondling of her right hand with his left, fingers his rosary with the other, and gazes fixedly into her eyes.

40 It is not easy to decide which of the female figures is intended to represent Mary of Modena and which the miller’s wife. At first sight one would expect the Queen to be represented by the central figure 3, but, on the other hand, I have in my possession a very rare mezzotint of the period which represents Father Petre and the Queen in almost identical attitudes as figures 1 and 2 in the present plate. This view of the matter is supported by the following scandalous verse of the day:

Some priests, they say, crept nigh her honour, And sprinkled some good holy water upon her, Which made her conceive of what has undone her.

Edward Petre was one of the best-hated men in the country, and was popularly looked upon as James’s evil genius. The King would have made him Archbishop of York, but the Pope refused his dispensation. In the year preceding the production of this satire he had been made a Privy Councillor.

“L’Europe alarmée pour le Fils d’un Meunier.” (The plate in its first state)

“L’Europe alarmée pour le Fils d’un Meunier.” (The plate in its first state)

The plate in its second state, now entitled “La Cour De Paix solitaire, entre les Roses piquantes et les Lis”

The plate in its second state, now entitled “La Cour De Paix solitaire, entre les Roses piquantes et les Lis”

In the middle of the picture sits the “second mother” (3) in a highly-wrought chair, round the legs of which twine carved serpents. Tears course down her cheeks. With her right hand she points to the cradle as she listens to the counsels of the papal nuncio Count Ferdinand d’Adda (4), who, with armour peeping from under {205} his robes and with his armoured foot treading on his naked weapon, recommends submission of the whole matter to the arbitrament of the sword.

Immediately beyond the Cardinal stands Louis XIV. (5), James’s faithful ally. In one hand he carries a bag of money, referring, doubtless, to his offer of five hundred thousand livres for the equipment of an English fleet to oppose the Prince of Orange’s threatened invasion; with the other he exposes to view a list of his army.

Behind, and to the right of Cardinal d’Adda, Louis’ son, the Dauphin of France, makes as though he would draw his sword, whilst the Pope (Innocent XI.), in shadow at the extreme right of the picture (7, the number is very indistinctly seen on the dark clothing) grasps the keys of St. Peter, and would seem to be sarcastically doubtful of the whole affair. “The Pope,” says Voltaire, “founded very little hopes on the proceedings of James, and constantly refused Petre a cardinal’s hat.”

Beyond the Pope is seen the armoured figure of Leopold I. (8), with the German eagle on his helmet. With his right hand he grasps his {206} sword-hilt; with his left he gesticulates as though reminding the war party that he also has to be reckoned with. No. 9 I cannot identify.

Behind Mary of Modena’s chair stands (13, the figure is on her breast) Catherine of Braganza, the childless wife of Charles II. She is doubtless lamenting that, when residing at Whitehall, she had not herself manufactured a prince on the Modena plan. Next to her (11, the figure is on the pillar) a doctor of the Sorbonne promises them all dispensations—a hit at James’s well-known misuse of the dispensing powers. Next to him, with his right hand convulsively grasping a roll of charters, stands James himself (10). In his left he carries parliamentary and corporation papers. With despairing eyes he gazes at the baby who, so far from giving, as he had fondly hoped, the finishing touch to the Roman Catholic triumph in England, is likely to prove the most damning count in the country’s indictment of his iniquities and treasons. To the left the midwife (12) encourages him to proceed with the imposture. Below her two monks (14 and 15), greatly alarmed, pray aloud at the head of the cradle. {207}

Immediately behind them two heralds, one mounted on an ass, blow on trumpets to call attention to the Dutch fleet, which is seen approaching through the right-hand arch, whilst through the left a fort is seen belching forth smoke and resisting the landing of the longboats.

In the left corner of the picture certain Quakers (17, 18, 19), whose curious friendship with James must not be forgotten, deprecate the priests’ blasphemies, whilst beyond them a crowd of Irish papists is suggested by their waving symbols and a torn flag embroidered with the sacred monogram. Behind the Quakers an oriental-looking person scans the heavens through a telescope.

The colonnade beneath which all this takes place has its pillars surmounted by owls and a demoniacal bat. The arches are inscribed with the words “Het word hier nacht,” and other inscriptions are seen on the walls. On the extreme right of the picture is reared a banner bearing what appear to be the words “In utrumque Turgam,” of which it is difficult to imagine the meaning. “In utramque Furcam,” which would be intelligible, has been suggested to me as an {208} alternative reading, but cannot, I think, be accepted. Another friend hazards “In utrumque (modum) resurgam,” which may be freely translated, “I shall be ‘dormy’ either way,” and would certainly make sense. Farther than that I cannot go with him.

So much for the first state of this elaborate copperplate which did its part in propagating the lie which went far to lose for James II. the crown of England.

After having served this purpose the plate was laid aside for nearly a quarter of a century. During this period the throne of England had been occupied by James II.’s two daughters, Mary and Anne, to the exclusion of their father, who died in exile in 1701, and of the Chevalier de St. George, whose proclamation by Louis of France as James III. of England41 had been followed by the war of the Spanish Succession.

41 In the Stuart Room at Madresfield Court Lord Beauchamp lately showed me a portrait of the Chevalier, labelled “James III.”!

In 1713, just twenty-four years after the plate had been engraved, the Peace of Utrecht, so vitally important as marking the beginning of {209} England’s commercial prosperity, was signed between England and France. Amongst other things it secured the Protestant Succession to the throne of England through the House of Hanover, and the dismissal of the Chevalier from France. The suspension of arms between the English and the French which preceded the signing of the treaty was seized upon as the opportunity for resuscitating the plate and adapting: it to the altered circumstances. Now did some pictorial vandal wrench and twist the figures to new and undreamt-of uses and turn the Council of War of 1688 into the Court of Peace between the Roses and Lilies of 1712! The plate now professes to be published in London, though, from the fact that the publication line runs. “A Londres chez Turner,” and from sundry misspellings, it would appear certain that the alterations on the plate were effected abroad.

In this second state the plate has been reduced at the top as far as the capitals of the pillars, and at the bottom as far as the left foot of the figure which represented Father Petre in the original. The index figures have also been changed. {210}

The explanation of the design as it now stands is contained in eighty-three lines of doggerel French verse. Taking the alterations one by one we find in the first place that the infant and cradle have been bodily removed, and (1) the “Plan de Paix” substituted. It bears the legend “Vrede tussen het Lelien en Roosen hof. Paix entre les Lis et les Roses picantes.”

The central figure (2) of the picture is now changed into an allegorical personage labelled “Pax,” who holds in her left hand a paper inscribed “Juste Protestation des Alliés,” whilst with her right she indicates the “Plan de Paix.” In this way the new artist, with some ingenuity, suggests that the spirit of peace is in sympathy with the dissatisfaction of the Allies at the negotiations which are proceeding between England and France. Her remonstrances are addressed to the figure on her left (3), which formerly represented Cardinal d’Adda, but is now labelled “Pole.” (the Abbé Melchior de Polignac), who tries to allay her forebodings. The difficulty of the Cardinal’s hat, which is of course out of place on an Abbé, is ingeniously got over by the writer of the French {211} libretto, who refers to him as a Cardinal in petto. As a matter of fact the writer proved a good prophet, for, on the conclusion of the peace, for which Polignac was largely responsible, he was, on the nomination of the Chevalier de St. George, created and appointed Cardinal Maître de la Chapelle du Roi. He was at the time of the publication of the altered plate plenipotentiary in Holland for the French. It will be noticed that the pince-nez and moustache have now been dispensed with.

The figure behind Polignac (4), which originally stood for the Dauphin, who, by the way, was but lately dead, is now labelled at the foot “Mont-or” (the Duke of Ormond’s name reversed), and at the head “Tori.” By an ingenious turn of thought, the Dauphin’s warlike action of drawing his sword is now metamorphosed into the Duke’s conciliatory action of sheathing his. This refers, of course, to the instructions which he had received from the English Government, on taking over the command of the troops in the Low Countries from the Duke of Marlborough, to do all in his power to bring about a peaceful issue. {212}

Beyond Polignac the figure (5) which formerly represented Louis XIV. is now put to humbler uses, and merely represents a French herald. The paper in his left hand, which originally enumerated Louis’ forces, now bears the gratifying legend:

Bonne Paix De l’Anglois Me rend guai.

The lady in front of him (6), who formerly stood for Catherine of Braganza, now represents Maria Louisa of Savoy, the first wife of Philip V. of Spain (fortunately for him not such a firebrand as his second wife proved to be). She turns to her handsome young husband (7) (here somewhat libellously represented by the whilom “Old Hatchet Face”) who has just renounced for himself and descendants all claims of succession to the crown of France. His right hand rests on the scroll of “charters” as before, but the document in his left now bears the legend: “Leli afstand onder Conditie” (The lily to surrender under conditions).

Passing almost to the extreme right of the picture, the eagle-helmeted figure (8) which {213} before represented the Emperor Leopold I. now represents his son Charles VI., “Le Seigneur juste de la Cour d’Orient et Occident.” Clutching his huge sword, he expresses the anger of the Imperialists at the project for peace between England and France. In the end he refused to concur in the peace of Utrecht, and continued at war with France until 1714.

On either side of him are two figures numbered alike (9, 9). That on his right, which bears the word “Wigh” engraved on his hat, represents the Duke of Marlborough, the deposed military leader of the Whigs. That on his left is one of the Duke’s followers, who, by his drawn sword, points the allusion of the librettist to the “Pacificateur par le fer.”

To the extreme right of the picture (10) the Pope, now Clement XI. in place of Innocent XI., encourages Polignac in his efforts for peace, and promises him “La Pourpre” as his reward.

Returning to the middle background of the crowd we find (11, 11) two Jesuits. The one who looks over the left shoulder of No. 7 was in the first state of the plate a doctor of the {214} Sorbonne. The index number of this figure is now on his hat. Originally it was on the pillar above him. This the adapter has apparently attempted to turn into a rough ornamentation by the addition of parallel strokes. Becoming dissatisfied, he has crossed out the whole by irregular horizontal lines. To the left of figure 7 is seen (12) the Pretender, the surreptitious infant of the original, now grown to manhood, whispering in Philip of Spain’s ear that though he claims as a Protestant the throne of his father, he is in his heart of the Romish faith. This figure originally represented the midwife, but has been metamorphosed by the addition of a man’s hat, wig, and ruffles.

To the extreme left of the foreground of the picture the erstwhile Father Petre is now transformed (13) into a Jesuit confessor, who amorously converses with (14) “La Courtisane de Bourbon,” Madame de Maintenon. This cruel aspersion on the character of one who was really, though secretly, Louis XIV.’s wife, and whose nobleness of character is now fully established, was characteristic of the times. The Plan de Paix, {215} which was so obnoxious to the author of the satire, would seem to have just fallen from her fingers, and doubtless he is right in recognising that she had a hand in its consummation. Beyond the table sit a monk and friar (15, 15), as formerly, except that the removal of the cradle has necessitated an extension of their figures. In the background, against the left-hand pillar, is (16) the “Harlequin de France.” In front of him the three figures (17, 18, 19), originally Quakers, are now referred to as “Esprits Libres.” The man with the telescope (20) is “The Observer of Foreign Countries.” The other subordinate figures are the same as before, save for the addition, in some cases, of index numbers.

It is interesting to notice that this plate was so successful in its adapted state that it was made the basis of a design engraved for a German broadside of the following year entitled “Der Fridens-Hoffzwischen der Rose und der versöhnten Lilie,” with which it has many points in common.

I have treated of this plate at considerable length because it is the most important of the palimpsest plates of this period. I shall close {216} this chapter by reproducing one other remarkable example designed in its first state to expose the same supposed wicked plot. In the next chapter I shall give another dealing with the birth of the Old Pretender, from which we shall gain some idea of the extent to which this clever stratagem of the adapted copperplate was made use of in the deliberate days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For the present I must pass over two elaborate broadsides engraved by Jean Bollard, and entitled respectively “Aan den Experten Hollandschen Hoofd-Smith” (To the Expert Dutch Head-Smith), and “Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper” (To the Master Tongue-Grinder). These, as we shall see later, after doing their work against James II. and the Old Pretender, were seized upon many years afterwards by the piratical publisher of a remarkable Jansenist tract, called “Roma Perturbata, Ofte’t Beroerde Romen, etc.,” and adapted to the uses of the anti-Jesuit propagandum, in the same way as “L’Europe Alarmée pour le Fils d’un Meunier,” described above, was adapted after twenty-five years of idleness as a satire upon the Peace of Utrecht. {217}

It was this same piratical tractarian who seized upon the elaborate plate which I am here reproducing, divorced it from its letterpress, cut the plate down to the size of his tract, and appropriated it in its second state to the purposes of “Roma Perturba ta.”

In its first state, which I give here, together with its accompanying letterpress, the line of publication runs: “Gisling, Geneve, exc.” and the title:

Het beest van Babel is aan’t vluesten Die Godsdienst heeft niet méer te duckten.

(The beast of Babel is flying, Religion has nothing more to fear.)

Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its first state.)

Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its first state.)

Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its second state.)

Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its second state.)

The design is very elaborate and crowded with figures, those in the foreground being executed with considerable spirit. The Dutch Lion (1) carries a sword in its right front claws, as does that on the Persian flag of to-day. On its back rides William of Orange (7) with lance in rest and bearing a shield upon which St. Michael is represented combating sin in the shape of a dragon. William is supported by mounted soldiers, one of whom bears a flag inscribed with {218} the words “Prot religion and libe”—(For religion and liberty). Over his head flies a winged Revenge (3) carrying a shield in one hand and the lightnings of God’s wrath in the other. Before him flies the seven-headed Beast of Babel (2), shorn of two of his heads, which lie bleeding on the ground beneath the lion. The monster, which “utters horrible shrieks,” bears upon its back between its wings Father Petre (6), who holds on his lap the infant Pretender (5), to whom his “brains have so infamously given birth.” The too-old infant carries in his hand the ever-present toy windmill. Blood pours from the decapitated necks of the Beast as he plunges with his accompanying rabble into the “pool of horrors.” Priests and other Romish officials, some mounted on goats, asses, and wolves, flee (4) or are trampled under foot (8).

In the mid background William of Orange (9), by a poetic licence able to be in two places at once, a fairly common convention even in serious pictures of that and an earlier date,42 is being {221} greeted by the English nobles as their saviour. To the left, through an archway, James II. (10) is seen fleeing by boat with his wife and infant, though, as a matter of fact, he remained in England some months after the latter were safely abroad. To the right, through another arch, Louis XIV. (11) is seen “embracing the child and taking pity on his mother,” and putting two of the curious, hearse-like carriages of the period at their disposal. Here we not only find Mary of Modena duplicated, but the infant Pretender triplicated in the same picture! So much for the plate in its first state.

42 See, for example, Tintoret’s great picture of “Adam and Eve” in the Accademia at Venice.

In its second and adapted state it takes its place in the armoury of the anti-Jesuits. The Jansenist controversy was at its height in the year of grace 1705, and Jansenism, although nominally subject to Rome, was regarded favourably by the Protestant Dutch as being a reforming movement within the Roman Catholic Church against the theological casuistry of the Jesuits.

This is not the place to go into the anti-Jansenist polemics of the Jesuits since the publication of the “Augustinus” of 1640, though the {222} interest of the matter is sufficiently tempting. We must content ourselves with remembering that now at the beginning of a new century a supreme effort was being made by the Jesuits in France to destroy completely the pious community of Port Royal; that within four years they were to succeed in dispersing the nuns; within another year the cloister itself was to be pulled down; that in 1711 the very bodies of the departed members of the community were destined to be disinterred from the burial ground with the greatest brutalities and indecencies; and in 1713 the church itself demolished.

But, though Port Royal itself was doomed, Jansenism was finding freedom under the Protestant Government of Holland.

In 1689 Archbishop Codde had been appointed by the Pope Vicar Apostolic in Holland. Soon, however, it was discovered by the Jesuits that he favoured the Jansenists.

By the machinations of the Jesuits he was therefore invited to Rome, and treacherously detained there for three years, in defiance of all canonical regulations. In the meantime the Pope {223} appointed Theodore de Cock in his place, with the intention of crushing the Jansenists in Holland. Codde thereupon made his escape from Rome, and the well-known struggle of the Jansenists of Utrecht and Haarlem for a legitimate episcopal succession began.

This was the juncture at which our copperplate was to do duty a second time, and for such different ends.

It has been divorced from its letterpress, altered in certain details and slightly cut away at the top and bottom. Like those dealing with the Head Smith and Tongue Sharpener, as will be seen in the next chapter, it has been appropriated to the uses of “Roma Perturbata.” It is now entitled on the panel which has been inserted at the spring of the arches “Door Munnike-Jagt, Word Babel Verkracht” (By chasing monks, Babel is assailed), and the piratical publisher has made many ingenious alterations. The possibly punning publication line runs: “Benedictus Antisolitarius excudit Rom.” Above this appears the chronograph: “HOS HEROS MONACHOS APPRENDE BATAVE REBELLES.” {224}

The Lion (1) still represents Holland and hunts the Beast of Babel (2) assisted by the winged Revenge (3), whose lightnings have now been increased to seven to represent the heraldic arrows of the Seven United Provinces. This device also now appears on the shield of Holland’s Knight (7) in place of that of St. Michael and the Dragon. The banner of his followers is now inscribed “Pro Secularibus.” As champion of the Jansenists the Knight puts to rout “all the bald heads (4, 4, 4, 4), together with ‘their protector Kok’” (6), who “in disguise” rides between the wings of the Beast with an illegitimate child (5) on his lap, from whose right hand the toy windmill of the infant Pretender has been removed. In the background to the left, others, in the quaint words of the Dutch letterpress (10), “escape quickly from the town by water, while they are clothed like gentlemen in order not to be known as monks.” In the background to the right, others flee “like great gentlemen in carriages,” a fairly ingenious adaptation of James II.’s flight and Louis’ welcome of the fugitives. {225}

The group in the middle background is now made to represent Codde (8.B), who has escaped from Rome and is being welcomed back by the representatives of the State (9, 9).

CHAPTER XI ADAPTED OR PALIMPSEST PLATES (continued).

IN the last chapter I claim to have introduced the reader to a phase of print-collecting which has in it a sporting element of a peculiarly enticing character. The pursuit of what I have called palimpsest copperplates offers entertainment of the very best to one who would make it a speciality, and, perhaps, the most alluring thing about this curious quarry is that the hunter will never be satisfied after running it to earth until he has secured and coupled it in his portfolio with its necessary and enchanting fellow.

I propose in this chapter to give a few more specimens of these curious adapted plates.

Many examples of reheaded statues and adapted portraits lie around us. Mr. Augustus Hare tells of a representation of Lady Georgina Fane in Brympton Church, which consists of the head of {227} that ready-witted lady “added to the body of an ancestress who was headless,” whilst any visitor to Yarmouth Church, Isle of Wight, may see the imposing marble effigy of Admiral Sir Robert Holmes, which consists of the head of that gallant sailor surmounting the body of Louis XIV. It appears that Sir Robert, having captured the vessel in which the Italian-made torso of the Grand Monarque was being conveyed to France for the modelling of the head, retained the unfinished work and crowned it with his own august features—a good example of the resourcefulness of the English character.

Again, Macaulay, enlarging upon the popularity of Frederick the Great in England, tells how at one time enthusiasm reached such a height that the sign-painters were everywhere employed in touching up the portraits of Admiral Vernon, which hung outside innumerable public-houses, into the likeness of the King of Prussia, a curious commentary, by the way, on the family motto, “Ver non semper virit.”43 Further, it is on record {228} that after Trafalgar such was Nelson’s popularity, that Daniel Orme, engraver to George III., bought a plate of Napoleon at the sale of a Ludgate Hill printseller’s effects, and altered it into a portrait of our national hero.

43 The following extract from a recent newspaper shows that the practice has not yet altogether died out:—

“In the action of Tussaud v. Stiff, heard in the Chancery Division by Mr. Justice Buckley yesterday, the plaintiff, Mr. Louis Tussaud, sought to restrain defendant by injunction from carrying on his business of exhibiting models in such a way as to induce the public to believe that the models he showed were the work of the plaintiff. It was stated by the plaintiff’s counsel that, in consequence of an injunction granted some years ago, it became necessary for the plaintiff to carry on his exhibition as Louis Tussaud’s New Exhibition in Regent Street. It was afterwards turned into a limited liability company, and removed to the Alexandra Palace. Some of the models were sold to the defendant, but no goodwill of the business was sold. The defendant had since opened several exhibitions of waxworks, other models had been added to those sold by the plaintiff, and the models of the plaintiff had been split into a considerable number of pieces, while models made by other persons than the plaintiff were exhibited as Louis Tussaud’s waxworks. Counsel informed the Court that in one case the head of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been put on the body of Charles Peace, and in another instance Napoleon was represented as taking part in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. The defendant’s present exhibition was a penny show in the Edgware Road. In another instance the head of Mr. Ritchie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was put upon a dying soldier.”

The Mr. Louis Tussaud here mentioned must not be confused with Mr. John Tussaud of the Marylebone Road Exhibition.

Examples such as these might be multiplied, but here are enough for our purpose. They show that the systematic practice of copperplate adaptation has its counterpart in other departments of art.

Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper. (The plate in its first state)

Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper. (The plate in its first state)

Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper. As adapted by the Anti-Jesuits

Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper. As adapted by the Anti-Jesuits

We will now consider a curious broadside {230} published about the year 1688, the copperplate heading of which was destined to be seized upon and adapted to other purposes nearly twenty years later by the piratical publisher referred to in the last chapter.

As will be seen from our reproduction, its letterpress is addressed, “Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper” (“To the Master Tongue Grinder”). The engraver’s name does not appear, but the work is easily distinguished as that of Jean Bollard, by comparing it with other signed engravings of the same series of pictorial satires.

Two men at a grindstone sharpen a tongue, Another tongue lies on the anvil. Two labourers empty a large hamper of tongues into a basket, which is steadied by a woman. Point is given to the picture by the gossiping groups seen through the door and window, and especially by the two Xantippes who, with arms akimbo, are slanging each other in good earnest.

The doggerel letterpress refers to the birth of the Old Pretender, and the mendacious tongues of the conspirators are being delivered to the smith to be coerced into speaking the truth. {231}

Here is a free translation of the passage, beginning “Heden zyn my over London”:—

“To-day I received from London a cargo of those goods which you have to take in hand; I have some of the biggest size, The Admiral of the First Flag, which has been used so much and has become black from lying, and which, after all appearances, seems to have had his end bitten off; scrape thoroughly his thick skin or he will be up to anything; swearing oaths, breaking bonds, falsely protecting the Church is his daily work.”

And so on, until it ends with the moral:—

“Nothing more useful than whetting the tongue When its aim is to speak the truth. But when it is given to lying, It must be pierced, flayed, and scraped.”

So much for the plate in its first state. In its second we find it published seventeen years later, and somewhat ingeniously adapted to the new exigencies. It now takes its place in the armoury of the anti-Jesuits, and is published without any acknowledgment in the pamphlet, entitled Roma Pertubata Ofte’t Beroerde Romen, etc., etc., referred to in the last chapter. This pamphlet, which is a very warren of palimpsest plates (it has at least four, and possibly there are others), may {232} be seen in the print-room of the British Museum. It may, too, as I have myself proved, be discovered at rare intervals in the shops of the old printsellers in Holland. Mine is in a parti-coloured paper wrapper, whether as issued or added later I cannot say. It consists of title-page, table of contents, and eleven full-page copperplate engravings of extraordinary interest. Curiously enough, the table of contents makes no reference to the eleventh and last. Our palimpsest is number 9.44

44 Grateful acknowledgments are here due to the splendid Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 5 vols., which should be in the library of every collector of satirical prints.

In its new surroundings it has (vide reproduction) been divorced from its letterpress, and been cut away at the bottom. A descriptive panel has been engraved over the doorway, and other lettering added here and there. The publication line, “tot Tongeren by J: la Langue,” apparently a bogus one, playing on the words of the original, “à Langres chez Tongelel,” now appears within the border of the design.

The tongue which lies on the anvil is now pierced by the seven heraldic arrows of the Dutch Provinces, and words are engraved below to the {233} effect that “There is no worse evil than that a Pope’s tongue dares slander the State,” and on the base of the anvil, “He has given way to slander. You must forge him before you grind him.”

Below the quarrelling women are the words: “These maids are quarrelling for de Kok,” referring to scandals which were afloat concerning the morality of the Pope’s vicar-general, and a Latin chronograph appears at the feet of the chief smith.

The inscription over the door gives directions to “The Romish Dutch Grinder of Tongues,” and, amongst other things, says of the tongue on the anvil, “That is de Kok’s tongue, wounded by seven arrows, because he has slandered the State by his speech,” which statement hardly tallies with the inscription on the anvil, unless the vicar-general may be regarded as the very mouthpiece of the Pope.

This is no place, as I have said, to enlarge upon the Jansenist propagandum, but it will well repay the enthusiastic historian to follow out the above allusions to their original source.

So much for our adapted broadside.

The Stature of a Great Man, or the English Colossus

The Stature of a Great Man, or the English Colossus

[English Colossus, detail for epub/mobi editions]

The Stature of a Great Man, or the Scotch Colossus

The Stature of a Great Man, or the Scotch Colossus

I would ask you now to look at the two prints entitled respectively “The Stature of a Great Man, or the English Colossus,” and “The Stature of a Great Man, or the SCOTCH Colossus.”

{236}

The first, dated 1740, represents Sir Robert Walpole, then in the plenitude of his power. He stands on two woolpacks. Between his legs is seen the British fleet lying inactive. He is flanked by Marines on the left crying “Let us fight,” and sailors with drawn swords on the right declaring their readiness to die “Pro Patriâ.” The plate teems with allusions to his reluctance to go to war, by which he was subjecting his country to the insults and aggressions of Spain and France.

Twenty-two years later the plate was resurrected and altered to its second state, in which it is made to represent Lord Bute. The lower part of the plate, bearing the quotation from Shakespeare and the “Description,” has been now cut away, and “Scotch” inserted in the place of “English” in the title. The chief alterations are the reduction of the full-bottomed wig and the addition of a wig-tie of black ribbon, the addition {237} of a star on the breast, and a new and abusive inscription on the right-hand document. In this case the adapter has shown but little ingenuity.

Queen Anne presiding over the House of Lords. (The plate in its first state)

Queen Anne presiding over the House of Lords. (The plate in its first state)

The plate in its second state, now representing George I. presiding over the House of Lords

The plate in its second state, now representing George I. presiding over the House of Lords

We will now turn to a far more elaborate example, which, in its first state, as will be seen in the reproduction, represents Queen Anne presiding in state over the House of Lords. The plate is etched by Romeyn de Hooghe.

At the top of the picture, between female figures representing Plenty and War, is suspended a cloth, on which the Queen is shown presiding over the House of Commons. At her side sits Prince George of Denmark. The whole is surmounted by the words, “Het Hoog en Lager Huys van Engeland.” Left and right of the cloth are scrolls bearing the legends, “Hinc gloria regni” and “Hinc felicitas publica.”

At the base of the plate are two small self-contained etchings. That on the left shows the heralds proclaiming the Queen; that on the right shows Her Majesty sitting in Council. Between these are inscribed the following words:—

“Annæ D. G.

Magnæ Britanniæ Reginæ,” etc., etc.

The main design is crowded with details and figures of the utmost interest, any description of which is forbidden by the space at my disposal. The artist’s signature is to be seen on the floor of the Hall.

Thirteen years were now to elapse before it was transformed into the glorification of George I. The King now takes the place of the late Queen in the House of Lords. The throne in the House of Commons is vacant. The inscription on the cloth has been re-engraved, and “Engeland” changed to “Engelandt.” The title and the panels at the bottom of the plate have been cut away, and the index numbers on the main design and the index letters on the cloth have been altered. The designer’s name has been removed from the floor of the House, and engraved on the right-hand corner of the plate.

These are the main differences. The curious reader may occupy himself in discovering others.

The next example here reproduced I give because of the peculiarly drastic changes which have been made by the pirate into whose hands the plate has fallen. {239}

“The Races of the Europeans, with their Keys.” (The plate in its first state)

“The Races of the Europeans, with their Keys.” (The plate in its first state)

“A Skit on Britain.” (The plate in its second state)

“A Skit on Britain.” (The plate in its second state)

In its original state it bears the punning title, “The Races of the Europeans with their Keys.” The line of publication runs:—“Geo. Bickham, junr., invt. et sculp. According to the late Act, 1740. Price 1s. Sold at ye Black Moors Head against Surry Street in ye Strand.” The composite design is made up of variorum copies of four separate prints recently published. These are enclosed in the four quarters of an elaborate design, surmounted by a crouching wolf. At the point where the four corners meet is a grotesque horned head. At the foot are a mask and a poniard. Each panel is differently dated, and surmounts its own set of explanatory notes. The allusions to contemporary politics are most ingeniously conceived, but are so numerous that space forbids even their barest description.

In its second state the plate is entitled “A Skit on Britain.” The line of publication runs the same as before, saving the name of the artist, which has been changed into “Ged Bilchham.” A line of script has also been added on this copy, which states that “This plate is upon the same copper as ‘The Races of the Europeans,’ much of the {240} allusions not having been obliterated,” which seems considerably to understate the case. The enclosing design is certainly much the same as before, though in this there are many alterations in detail, but of the four engravings by far the greater portion has been removed. The aerial parts are practically untouched, but of the crowds of figures only a few unimportant groups remain. All the tables of reference have been burnished out, and are replaced by doggerel verses. The dates have been removed from the four compartments, and in the places of three of them appear “Porto Bello, Nov. 1739,” “Cartagena,” and “The Havana,” while the fourth is left blank. The main part of the satire is directed against the policy of Sir Robert Walpole, but is of too elaborate a nature to be entered upon here.

The Headless Horseman. (The plate with the head burnished out.)

Before concluding this account of palimpsest plates I shall reproduce three very curious prints in which the substitution of one head for another is more than usually outrageous.45 The original {241} engraving was by Pierre Lombart after a made-up portrait of Charles I., on horseback, professing to be by Vandyck.

45 The earliest example of the artist as Headsman that I have come across is a very rare portrait of Queen Elizabeth, full length, seated on a throne, dressed in a robe of state, holding globe and sceptre, engraved about 1590. The Queen’s figure was subsequently burnished out, and that of James I. substituted. This, unfortunately, I do not possess.

The plate was executed before the execution (save the mark!) of the Martyr King. After his death the head of Cromwell was substituted, no doubt for commercial purposes. Finally, Charles the First’s head was restored (again save the mark!) after the Restoration. Our reproductions are from what would seem to be the second, third, and fourth states of the plate though a first state is not known. It will be observed that, in the earliest—namely, that in which the head has been removed altogether—the scarf is brought across the left shoulder, and tied under the right arm, whilst the page-boy has bands and frills to his breeches. In the next, or third state, in which Cromwell’s head has been inserted, the scarf has been removed from the shoulder, and is tied round the waist, whilst the bands and frills have been removed from the page-boy’s nether garments. In the next, or fourth stage of the plate, in which {242} Charles’s head has been re-inserted, there are, besides the substitution of one head for the other, a few minor alterations, such as the addition of the Cavalier moustache to the face of the page-boy, the restoration of the frills to his breeches, the alteration of the pattern of the rider’s collar, the addition of the order of St. George to the rider’s breast, and the substitution of the royal coat of arms for those of the Protector at the bottom of the engraving. There are also other known states of the plate, reproductions of which may be seen in Mr. Alfred Whitman’s Print-Collector’s Handbook. These were unknown to me when I wrote the above description.46

46 Since writing this I paid a visit to the Hall of the Middle Temple, when the very intelligent custodian told me that Cromwell ordered the great Vandyck, which hangs over the high table, to be taken down, and his own somewhat repellent countenance painted in in the place of that of Charles I. Fortunately for posterity this outrageous order was not carried out. The whole affair reminds one of the unconsciously grim entry in a certain bookseller’s catalogue which ran, “Memoirs of Charles the First with a head capitally executed.”

The plate with Cromwell’s head

The plate with Charles I.’s head

So much for historical instances of putting new heads on old shoulders. But, if I am not mistaken, the very modern restoration of the west front of one of our great cathedrals shows a late Dean’s head surmounting the body of a saint or king, {243} which had been mutilated by Cromwell. It would be cruel, perhaps, to be more specific, as vanity is not the most pleasing of the Christian virtues.

Again, there was lately a good deal of laughter caused by one of the whims of the German Emperor. It appears that his artistic eye had been offended by the incompleteness of a fine headless torso which was brought to the fatherland some years since. Everything, he was aware, could be made in Germany, so what more natural than to offer a prize for the best completion of the work of a Phidias or a Praxiteles? Finis coronat opus, and the sculptors of Germany were called upon to compete. None of the results, however, satisfied His Imperial Majesty, and two of the artists have been commissioned to try again. Would it be lese-majestie to suggest that there is only one head in Germany that would prove quite acceptable? I present the idea to the competitors.

Enough has been written to show that the pursuit of the palimpsest plate is sport of the very finest for the collector, for it is a sport which does not cease with the running of the quarry to earth. {244}

I have reproduced, without comment, opposite pages 244 and 246, and on pages 245, 247, and 249, a few more of these adapted copperplates for the sake of any one who may be fortunate enough to possess either the original or the palimpsest. He will find it no bad sport to go hunting for its fellow.

Undescribed palimpsest plate. (First state)

Undescribed palimpsest plate.
(Second state.)

Aan den Experten Hollandichen Hoofd-Smith.
(The plate in its first state)

Aan den Experten Hollandichen Hoofd-Smith.
(As adapted by the Anti-Jesuits)

First state

Second state

Undescribed palimpsest plate.

{247}

An adapted Copperplate. First state

An adapted Copperplate. Second state

A History of the New Plot. First state

A History of the New Plot. First state

A History of the New Plot. Second state

A History of the New Plot. Second state

INDEX

“Aan den Experten Hollandschen Hoofd-Smith,” 216, 243

“Aan der Meester Tonge-Slyper,” 216, 230–233

ADAPTED COPPER PLATES, 192–247

Ainsworth, Harrison, 3

Alken, Henry, 157–160

Allen, Archdeacon, 10

American Notes, 2

Anne, Queen, 237, 238

Antiquities of Westminster, 150–153

A Pop-Gun fired off by George Cruikshank, 79

“A Skit on Britain,” 239, 240

“A Trifling Mistake,” 70–73

Ballad of Beau Brocade, The, 3

“Becky Sharp,” 10

Bentley’s Miscellany, 43–52

Bewick’s Birds, 68

Book of Snobs, 9

“Breeches” Bible, Barker’s, 2

Brougham, Lord, 62

Browne, H. K., 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 54–56

Bruton, Mr. H. W. 48, 49, 69, 75, 81

Buffon, M., 5

Bunn, Alfred, 10

Burlington, Earl of, 98–107

“Burlington Gate,” 108

Burns, Robert, 2

Buss, Miss F. M., 34

Buss, R. W., 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34

Bute, Lord, 235, 236

Calcraft, Captain Granby, 9

Capel, Monsignor, 2

“Captain Granby Tiptoff,” 9

“Captain Shindy,” 9

Carteret, Lord, 112 et seq.

Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 92 et passim, 198 et passim

Chandos, Duke of, 101

Chapman and Hall, Messrs., 33, 55

Charles I., 241–242

Charles Dickens, The Story of his Life, 27

Churchill, Charles, 107–111

Clarissa Harlowe, 5

Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, 175–178

Cochrane, Lord, 65

Coningsby, 12, 13, 20

Cowell, Professor, 184–186

Crawhall, Joseph, 135–138

“Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism: a Medley,” 88 et seq.

Croker, J. W., 12

Cromek, R. H., 5

Cromwell, Oliver, 241, 242

Cruikshank, George, 42, 45–54, 59–81, 161

Cruikshank’s Portraits of Himself, 80

Cumberland, Duke of, 60–69

Cumberland, Princess Olive of, 62

“Danaë in the Brazen Chamber,” 140–148

Death in London, 154–158

Dexter, Mr. J. P., 41

D’Horsay; or the Follies of the Day, by a Man of Fashion, 13

Dickens and his Illustrators, 40, 41

Dickens, Charles, 2, 26 et seq. his American Notes, 2 his suppressed portrait, 27, 28

Dickens Memento, 47

Dictionary of National Biography, 61, 62

Dighton, Richard, 25

Disraeli, Benjamin, 2, 10, 12, 131–134

Dobson, Mr. Austin, 3, 82 et passim, 174

Don Quixote, 113 et seq.

“Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves,” 118, 122

“Don Quixote seizes the Barber’s Basin,” 118, 120

“Drop it!”, 78

Du Maurier, George, 162–173

Edwards, Edwin, 179–191

Elizabeth, Queen, 240

“Enthusiasm Delineated,” 83 et seq.

Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank, 77

Fane, Lady Georgina, 226

Fanus i Khiyal, 185–191

Figaro in London, 63, 64

“Financial Survey of Cumberland or the Beggar’s Petition,” 60

FitzGerald, Edward, 40, 179–191

Frederick the Great, 227

Garrick Club, The, 8, 9

George I., 238

George IV., 11

“George Garbage,” 9

Gray, J. M., 148

Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 42

“Harry Foker,” 9

Hertford, Marchioness of, 75

Hertford, Marquis of, 10 et seq.

History of Pickwick, 29

Hobhouse, John Cam, 70–73

Hogarth Illustrated, 84

Hogarth, William, 82 et seq.

Holmes, Sir Robert, 227

Hook, Theodore, 9, 10

Ireland, John, 84 et seq., 113 et seq.

Irving, Washington, 2

Italian Tales, 74

Italy, 3

James I., 241

Jansenists, the, 221 et seq.

Jesuits, The, 221 et seq.

“Joe Sibley,” 163–173

Jones, W. N., 68

Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, 158

Keene, Charles, 127–139

Kitton, F. G., 40

“Lady Kew,” 10, 22

Langford, Lady, 10

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 19

Leech, John, 33, 36–38, 40, 41

“L’Europe alarmée pour le Fils d’un Meunier,” 202–216

Life of Dickens, 37, 46

Lippincott’s Magazine, 10

“Lord Walham,” 23

Lothair, 2

“Marquis of Hereford,” 14

Martin Chuzzlewit, 26, 53

“Monsignor Catesby,” 2

“Mr. Dolphin,” 10

“Mr. John Jorrocks,” 158–161

“Mr. Pickwick at the Review,” 33

“Mr.” Pitt Crawley, 15

Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Yates, and the Garrick Club, 8

“Mr. Wardle and his Friends under the Influence of the Salmon,” 33

“Mr. Winkle’s First Shot,” 33

Napoleon, Emperor, 228

Nelson, Lord, 228

Oliver Twist, 26, 43–52

Once a Week, 127, 140–148

Orange, William of, 217 et seq.

Pailthorpe, Mr. F. W., 56

Pall Mall Gazette, 166–169

Palmer, Samuel, 56

Pendennis, 9

Penelope’s English Experiences, 38

Phillimore, Mr. F., 47

“Philoprogenitiveness,” 77, 78

Pickwick, 26, 28 et seq., 43

Pictures from Italy, 56

Pine’s Horace, 54

Poems, Burns’s, 2

Pope, Alexander, 98–107

Price, Stephen, 9

Prideaux, Colonel, 190–191

Punch, 127 et seq.

Queensberry, Duke of, 23

Reid’s Catalogue of George Cruikshank’s Works, 45, 62, 69

Ritchie, Mrs., 10

Robertson, J. C., 154–158

Rogers, Samuel, 3

“Roma Perturbata, Ofte’t Beroerde Romen, etc.,” 216 et seq.

“Rose Maylie and Oliver at Agnes’s Tomb,” 45 et seq.

Roxborough, Duke of, 2

“Royal Hobbys of the Hertfordshire Cock Horse,” 75

Ruskin, John, 3, 4

Sala, G. A., 30, 40

Sandys, Frederick, 127, 139–148

Scott, Sir Walter, 2

Seymour, Robert, 29, 31

“Sholto Percy,” 154–158

Sketch Book, Washington Irving’s, 2

Sketches by Boz, 55, 57, 58

Smith, J. T., 150

Smith, Wyndham, 9

Spielmann, Mr. M. H., 128 et passim

Sporting Snobs, 9

Stanislaus Hoax, 10

Stephens, F. G., 88

Stothard, T., 5

Stuart, James Francis Edward, 198 et seq.

SUPPRESSED PLATES, 1–191

Surtees, R., 158

Swain, Mr. Joseph, 140–148

Talpa, 78

Tenniel, Sir John, 133

Thackeray, W. M., 7 et seq.

The Artist, 145

The Battle of Life, 26, 34–40

The Battle of London Life; or Boz and his Secretary, 39

“The Bruiser,” 110, 111

The Builder, 107

The Chimes, 36, 41

The Christmas Carol, 36

“The Cricket Match,” 29, 32

“The Curate and the Barber,” 121, 125

“The Dead Rider,” 74

“The Fireside Scene,” 26, 44 et seq.

“The First Interview,” 121, 123

“The Free and Easy,” 57

“The Funeral of Chrysostom,” 116

The History of Punch, 128 et seq.

The Hobby Horse, 144

“The Innkeeper,” 114

“The Innkeeper’s Wife and Daughter,” 118

“The Last Song,” 42

“The Man of Taste,” 98–107

“The Marquis of Steyne,” 7 et seq.

The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, 41, 42

The Newcomes, 22

“The Painted Chamber,” 150–153

“The Races of the Europeans with their Keys,” 239

The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, 179–191

The Speaker, 21

“The Stature of a Great Man, or The English Colossus,” 236

“The Stature of a Great Man, or The Scotch Colossus,” 236

The Strange Gentleman, 54, 55

“The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii,” 56

The Times, 109

The Tower of London, 3

“The Two Apprentices,” 163–173

The Two Paths, 3

The Vicar of Wakefield, 171–175

The Virginians, 9

“The Worship of Wealth,” 53, 54

Thomson, Mr. Hugh, 3, 171–178

Thornhill, Sir James, 111, 112

“Tom Smart and the Chair,” 33

Town Talk, 8, 9

Trilby, 162–173

Tristram, Mr. Outram, 175

Truman, Edwin, 69

“Tupman and Rachel,” 29, 32

Van der Banck, Johan, 112, 113

Vanity Fair, 7 et seq.

Vernon, Admiral, 227

Vivian Grey, 10

Wallace, Sir Richard, 20, 22

Walpole, Horace, 25

Walpole, Sir Robert, 234, 236

Westminster Review, 78

Whistler, James M’N., 163–173

Wilde, Oscar, 168

Wilkes, John, 109–111

Yates, Edmund, 8, 9

THE END

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.

KATE GREENAWAY
BY
M. H. SPIELMANN AND G. S. LAYARD.

Containing upwards of 80 full-page illustrations (53 in colour, reproduced from original water-colour drawings by Kate Greenaway.) Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top, with Kate Greenaway end-papers, price 20s. net.

SOME PRESS OPINIONS

“This delightful volume, with its scores of illustrated letters, and sketches and charming pictures, will be very widely welcomed. No one could wish for a more satisfactory memorial of the artist and her work.”—Daily Graphic.

“Whether as regards its subject, its letterpress, or its illustrations, this is one of the most delightful, as it is likely to become one of the most popular volumes of the series to which it belongs.”—Aberdeen Journal.

“Certainly one of the most beautiful monuments that could be erected to the memory of a modest artist.”—Daily Mail.

“By reason of its sympathetic treatment of an intensely interesting subject, of the charm, the quality, and the profusion of its illustrations, and of the faultless taste of its get-up, should rank among the favourite gift-books of the approaching Christmas season.”—Observer.

“A book which will delight young and old by its engaging charm.”—Jewish World.

“The volume, magnificent to behold, is a deeply interesting one to read, and should be peculiarly attractive to our readers.”—Gentlewoman.

“This delightful book should prove a capital present to give to young folks at Christmas time. The pictures in it are very beautiful, while the story of Kate Greenaway’s fight for fame is sympathetically told.”—Scottish Review.

“The book is admirably done, thorough, sympathetic, and accurate.”—Outlook.

BIRKET FOSTER

By H. M. CUNDALL, F.S.A.

Containing 91 full-page illustrations (73 in colour) and numerous thumbnail sketches in the text. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top, price 20s. net.

It may safely be asserted, without fear of contradiction, that the dainty water-colour drawings executed by Birket Foster appeal to the majority of the British public more than the works of any other artist. He produced scenes from nature with such exactness and minuteness of detail that the most uninitiated in art are able to understand and appreciate them, but the chief features in his paintings are the poetic feeling with which he endued them, and the care with which his compositions were selected. He revelled in sunny landscapes with roaming sheep and with rustic children playing in the foreground, and in the peaceful red-bricked cottages with thatched roofs; it is, perhaps, by these scenes of rural England that Birket Foster is best known. He, however, was an indefatigable painter, and produced works selected from all parts of England, Wales, and Scotland; he travelled frequently on the Continent; Venice, as well as the Rhine, had its charms for him, and the picturesque scenery of Brittany has also been portrayed by his brush.

The collection of Birket Foster’s drawings reproduced in this volume is thoroughly representative, and is sufficiently extensive to include all phases of his work. The accompanying biographical text by Mr. H. M. Cundall will be found to be most sympathetic, intimate, and interesting.

A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

GEORGE MORLAND

By Sir WALTER GILBEY, Bart.

AUTHOR OF “THE LIFE OF GEORGE STUBBS, R.A.”

Containing 60 full-page reproductions in colour of the artist’s best work. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top, price 20s. net.

There will also be an Édition de Luxe, with letterpress printed on handmade paper, containing the earliest impressions of the illustrations, and limited to 250 signed and numbered copies, price £2: 2s. net.

There is plenty of room for another Morland book, especially when written by the greatest living authority upon the works of the artist, and where the illustrations are reproduced, with most excellent results, from masterpieces loaned from private collections hitherto mostly unknown to the artistic public, and of which only a few have either been engraved or gravured—at all events, not before reproduced in colour.

George Morland’s work is characterised by its great strength and beauty of colouring. To reproduce so many of his choicest pictures, and bring the book into this series, is no easy matter, but to ensure success the publishers have spared no efforts to make their reproductions worthy of the artist’s work and entirely satisfying to the collector and student.

The collection of pictures reproduced in this volume is thoroughly representative, and each illustration is a gem; they show the several phases of Morland’s charming scenes of English life in the renowned Academician’s time.

The student and all collectors and admirers of Morland will also rejoice to have the appreciative text by Sir Walter Gilbey.

A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Original spelling and grammar have been generally retained, with some exceptions noted below. Original printed page numbers are shown like this: {52}. Footnotes have been relabeled 1–46, and moved from within paragraphs to nearby locations between paragraphs. The transcriber produced the cover image and hereby assigns it to the public domain. Original page images are available from archive.org—search for “suppressedplates00laya”.

The List of Illustrations contains two divisions, those that were printed upon numbered pages, and those that were printed on unnumbered pages. Most illustrations originally printed inside paragraphs of text have been moved to nearby locations between paragraphs, and the corresponding page numbers have been removed as necessary to maintain proper order of the remaining page numbers. Captions of Illustrations were sometimes altered to conform more closely—in substance or in typography—to the titles in the List of Illustrations (LOI). In such cases, the original captions (if any) are nevertheless retained as part of the image. On page 172, a caption was inserted where none had been printed, to match the LOI.

The illustrations all appeared to the transcriber to have been grayscale when initially published, but had naturally aged to a yellowed antique white background. Illustrations have been edited with primary intent to preserve the original image, but changed to grayscale, with secondary motives to improve brightness and contrast, and to improve readability of small or faint text. The illustrations in the epub and mobi editions must be severely restricted in size. Some of the illustrations in this book are so large and detailed that the size restrictions significantly degrade the quality of the images. Therefore some, for example two illustrations originally between pages 88 and 89, have been divided into two or three fragments for the epub/mobi editions. Each fragment was (perhaps) individually edited for brightness and contrast to improve the readability of any text. The illustrations originally on pages 71 and 234 regretfully remain quite poor in quality in the epub/mobi editions. Separate detail images showing much of the text portions of these two illustrations at better quality have been provided for the epub/mobi editions. Several of the illustrations have been rotated to achieve better quality in the epub/mobi editions while adhering to the image size restrictions.

Page 10. “protoype” to “prototype”.

Page 212. “fireband” to “firebrand”.

Page 254. “Whistler, James M‘N” to “Whistler, James M’N”.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPPRESSED PLATES, WOOD-ENGRAVINGS, &C. ***

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Table of Contents

- SUPPRESSED PLATES

- CONTENTS

- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

- Printed Separately

- Printed in the Text

- CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY

- CHAPTER II “THE MARQUIS OF STEYNE”

- CHAPTER III THE SUPPRESSED PORTRAIT OF DICKENS, “PICKWICK,” “THE BATTLE OF LIFE,” AND GRIMALDI

- CHAPTER IV DICKENS CANCELLED PLATES: “OLIVER TWIST,” “MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT,” “THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN,” “PICTURES FROM ITALY,” AND “SKETCHES BY BOZ.”

- CHAPTER V ON SOME FURTHER SUPPRESSED PLATES, ETCHINGS, AND WOOD ENGRAVINGS BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK

- CHAPTER VI HOGARTH’S “ENTHUSIASM DELINEATED,” “THE MAN OF TASTE,” AND “DON QUIXOTE”

- CHAPTER VII CANCELLED DESIGNS FOR PUNCH AND ONCE A WEEK

- CHAPTER VIII MISCELLANEOUS

- CHAPTER IX THE SUPPRESSED OMAR KHAYYAM ETCHING

- CHAPTER X ADAPTED OR PALIMPSEST PLATES

- CHAPTER XI ADAPTED OR PALIMPSEST PLATES (continued).

- INDEX
- ADVERTISEMENTS
- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE