texts, suspicious strangers would call at the abode of comic artists to spy out the land—to do a bit of plumbing, look at the gasmeter, measure for clothes and boots, tune the piano, beg on behalf of a charity. The caricaturist was never for a moment secure, sleeping or waking; until he trembled at the opening of a door or the ringing of a bell. It was a terrible state of things, not unlike the great plague.
Then caricatures began to appear in The Retaliator of their relations—their mothers, and aunts, and cousins. Several caricaturists emigrated, some sank under it, some became hopelessly imbecile and had to retire to asylums. The page for the cartoon in the comic paper appeared as a blank sheet week after week, no new spirit being found bold enough to take up the pencil dropped from the old hand. At last the only caricatures which appeared were those in The Retaliator. It was, indeed, tragic.
"Mr. G's collars actually increased daily in size."
Then there came about a result which all observant thinkers had foreseen: untrammelled by the salutary check of wholesome satire, freed from the beneficent curb of pictorial criticism, fearing no longer the reflection of that mirror of humorous delineation which, by magnifying, more effectually emphasises faults and weaknesses of style and deportment, our public men began to embrace those extravagances against whose graphic delineations they had formerly murmured. Mr. G—'s collars actually increased daily in size, and his eyes became daily more like black dots in very perverse ecstasy of triumphant defiance; while he ventured, on one occasion, to actually appear in his place in the House, armed with an enormous axe; Sir W——— H———, in the arrogant joy of unflagellated licence, added daily to his chins and his luxurious prodigality of perimetry; Mr. B— revelled ever increasingly in a wanton extravagance of irresponsible tenuity and length which threatened to surpass the wildest efforts of the suppressed caricaturist; the weight of the Marquis of S——— increased to tons; Mr. Ch——— habitually wore the lens of a railway lamp for an eyeglass, and covered himself completely with orchids; and Lord R——— C——— attained a reckless and over-weening diminutiveness, bordering on invisibility, and wholly incompatible with a wealth of moustache absolutely preposterous in its prodigality.
Public affairs were coming to a standstill, as the mania of physical hyperbole wholly absorbed the minds of our statesmen; nor was the epidemic confined to political circles—bishops, actors, judges, all those whose vocation or opportunities presented them more or less before the public, suffered from the removal of the moderating hand of beneficent caricature.
As for the judges, they became all wig, nose, and spectacles, to the entire disappearance of the judge; thin public men attained to an arrogance of attenuation as unreasonable as it was repellent; fat ones became spherical in the unrestrained jubilation of the new-found licence.
This state of things could not go on long. It simply meant ruin—effacement—chaos: one by one those public men began to vaguely feel that this was so. I called at H———tf———ld (the princely residence of the Marquis of S—) one evening, and found them holding high revel—a sort of masque, a pandemonium. At the end of a great hall sat Lord S———, holding aloft a huge stage-goblet, while at his feet crouched his comic artist, in cap and bells, enter-
