Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 45 CHAPTER III. THE ENGLISH CARICATURISTS, AND KING CRUIKSHANK. If I wanted an excuse for being tedious, I could not have a better title than The Origin of Caricature
to head my paper. A fanciful friend of mine, who once challenged a Heidelberg student who had struck him at a beer commerce?a grand AlschiecC’s commerce, in fact?was the next morning visited by a deputation of the Swabian Chor, headed by their captain, who reviewing the quarrel, commenced with the creation of Adam. I will not imitate the Swabian, however, but premise that directly man began to build walls, his children learned to draw caricatures of their seniors upon them. As it is natural to man to draw, so it is equally natural to man, in malice and sport, to exaggerate the infirmities, and detract from the excellences, of his rivals, superiors, and enemies. All nations have their humorists. Aristophanes was but a literary caricaturist when he made a fool of Socrates; and the author of
Reinecke Fuchs
was a good example of a jester in mediaeval drollery, turning a fable into an epic. Our middle-age illuminators, too, caricatured, sometimes wilfully, sometimes accidentally. When they drew thread-paper saints with large heads and splay feet, and good-natured lions gaping at Daniel, and with trumpeting (Buffalmacco) labels issuing from their mouths; David with the genealogical tree springing from his side; and St- Laurence with the gridiron, anxiously ready for his own cooking. But the better known works of. the middle-age caricaturists are those distorted stone heads, which still vomit water from the roofs of cathedral towers or old decorated churches: eye-balls goggling, tongues lolling, levator muscles pulling and twisting with a coarse, homely, downright fun, which would have qualified th…