66 the folly habitual to his countrymen, of exaggerating the prowess and refining the manners of a barbarous age, says, we must not awake our ancestors from their sleep of death, to strip them of their armour and their coats of frieze, and re-clothe them in courtly velvet, nor in fine broad-cloth, nor in woollens and cottons from English steam-looms.” Oh, the perfidious cottons of England!' To abuse la perfide Albion has long been the mot d'ordre in Peninsular politics of our cordial neighbour: but this 'petty spite' comes with peculiar grace from the historical Atlas of a country which, having pocketed our cash, poisons us with catlap, and stings the hand that alone rescued its soil from the stranger, and still protects its national existence. We are commanded, Senhor Herculano would say, to forgive our enemies, but not our friends. This gentleman's historical romance is, however, a farce compared to the historical dramas which are enacted at the royal theatre at Lisbon, to the rapturous applause of overflowing audiences: one scene only as a sample : Our English friends were much amused with the new tragedy, or melodrame, right merry and tragical, of The Twelve of England, in which twelve English ladies, who have been slandered by twelve English knights, are championed by twelve Portuguese knights, none of their own countrymen daring to fight for them. The twelve Englishmen, so dreaded, when arrayed in the lists, shrank at the first onset, and stood in a row with their heads down, to be stuck in the back by the valiant Portuguese, the Lusos valerosos, and were all killed in a moment. The enthusiasm of the audience was tremendously funny; and when they called for the author, the poor man presented himself on the stage, pale as a tallow-chandler with the triumph of genius.'-vol. i. p. 76. From Oporto our heroine proceeds to Lisbon; sees the lions, the queen, and the rest of the royal family: her majesty is fat, good-natured, fond of her husband, pinched for money sadly, and distracted with charters. The king-consort, a prince of Saxe-Coburg, is said to be no friend of England: his adviser, a German, is in the French interest; and his Portuguese creatures, some of them mouthy and red-hot patriots, as they call themselves, literary, philosophical, and political, are downright Afrancesados in their paltry rancour against Great Britain.' To a pretty pass, verily, has the organic incapacity to understand the Peninsula which dictated the Quadruple Alliance, backed by the knavish tricks' of the cunning neighbour, reduced unhappy Portugal and Spain. There bankruptcy and dissensions thrive on the ruin of the legitimate throne; but the policy-the pensée immuable-of Bourbon and Buonaparte is to beat down the Pyrenees, and all real power beyond them. It is adding insult to injury when the forms of free men are made use of to to cloak the ends of cool and calculating despotism. Names, whatever ingenious foreigners may think, are not things, and the best Benthamite constitucion' may be a cheat, and the neatest paragraphed charte a lie-springes to catch woodcocks. Can it be wondered that the masses, sick with crimes committed under the prostituted name of liberty, fly from petty tyrants to the rightful throne; and, indifferent to the changes of the political pantomime, sigh to be permitted to occupy themselves with their private affairs and individual interests, at peace under the shadow of a great rock in a weary land? They have our best wishes: not so the liberal canon' described in these pages, who having beheld specious theories carried into practice, stalls suppressed, sacred vessels melted, tithes commissioned, convents converted into hulks and dens of thieves, now pronounces the blow to be serious, discouraging, and huma reforma barbara! Nay, good friend, your play must be played out, even if such an anomaly as a liberal canon' be, in the jargon of the day, 'absorbed and appropriated.' Of course the charming Journalist excurses to Cintra—' a place to dream over rather than describe:' and, of course, when there she thinks of Southey, Canning, and sweet Cumbria. Then she visits Mafra, and Beckford's fairy palace, now a desolate ruin :'the French soldiers having unroofed the house, and industriously destroyed everything that could be destroyed, out of malice to the English.' She returns to Lisbon in the omnibus'—but even its march-of-intellect rattle fails to disenchant the poetry of her emotions; she had, she says, quitted Cintra for ever, with a heart full of deep thankfulness for having been permitted to see a spot which must be one of the loveliest spots on earth; and if not the very loveliest one, certainly unique in its character of beauty and its strangeness.' Leaving Portugal, she lands at Cadiz, resumes her poetical enthusiasm, steams up to Seville, peeps at the cathedral, delights in Murillo, detests bull-fights, and then hurries to Gibraltar, Malaga, and Granada. We despair doing justice to her Arabian Nights' day visions in the Alhambra, where, as elsewhere, she leans on her guide, philosopher, and friend, Ford,' referring to 'the Handbook' in terms which must touch the tender heart of that preux chevalier, who, in his recent spicy Gatherings, is, we see, disposed for one lady's smile to laugh not only at the beard of the editor of the Oporto Review, but ours. Turning her back on these romantic scenes, where her soul is left, again she flies on the wings of steam from Malaga to Barcelona, not always landing, yet catching glimpses of Spain from the deck with a telescope, and even so distinguishing the emphatic feature, for there be some who perceive more between Hungerford Stairs and Blackwall than than others who circumnavigate the globe. That is the reason why we have bestowed a score of our pages on this unpretending Journal. It is small in bulk and in manner slight-but we recognise the eye and the feeling of genius wherever Nature is to be depicted; and the fresh, lively, unaffected gracefulness of thought and language is a great relief from the fantastical wrought-up Annualism so prevalent among our lady travellers. As a postscript, and to explain the magpie which figures on the titlepage, we may spare a few lines more for a remarkable diningroom at Cintra, in which more than four-and-twenty blackbirds are set before the king: 'John I.,' we are told, had risen early to hunt at some distance from Cintra. In passing through this chamber he chanced to meet one of the maids of honour, and presented a rose to her, at the same time saluting her on the cheek. The gallantry was not unwitnessed, for the queen was entering the room by a side door. In the confusion of detection, the king could only say, "Por bem, por bem;" meaning that he had meant no harm, only taken an innocent liberty. The queen made no remark; but her revenge showed that she was not implacably offended. On the king's return, after a few days, he found the roof of his dining-room painted all over with magpies, each bird holding a rosebranch in its claws, and a label in its beak, on which label were painted the words, "Por bem, por bem." The king was pleased to be rebuked so playfully, and adopted the Por bem for his motto. This was our guide's version of the tale, and much the prettiest of the three traditions that are current. A second tells us that the king himself caused the ceiling of the room to be painted in that manner, in attestation of the innocence of the proceeding in which he had been detected, and that he now applied, in the sense of our "Honi soit qui mal y pense," the motto "Por bem," which he had previously adopted as a declaration of his disposition to do good to his people. The third interpretation is, that the adventure was whispered from mouth to mouth among the ladies, to the scandal and great disturbance of the poor maid of honour, and that the king, to punish the palace gossips, caused their malicious garrulity to be thus typified.'-vol. ii. p. 49. At all events it is historically certain that this gracious queen was of good English breed, being the grand-daughter of Edward III., whose delicate chivalry rescued the fair fame of Lady Salisbury's garter. It must, however, be added that the situ ation of maid of honour at the courts of Lisbon and Madrid is understood to be attended with considerable difficulties. ART. ART. IV.-1. Political Caricatures. By HB. 2. Sartor Resartus. A new Edition. TURNING over, a few days ago, some newspapers of 1846, we stumbled upon a sketch of the will of the late Lady Holland, and among other special bequests we found the following: To the Hon. W. Cowper my collection of the caricatures of HB.' We were struck by the significance of this legacy: it was not a mere collection of drawings, designed for the amusement of ladies during an hour or two of désœuvrement: it was not even a collection of portraits of her contemporaries which was thus bequeathed by the widow of the Whig Maecenas: but it was the political history of England, expressed in allegorical hieroglyphics, which fixed and gave a durable existence to the fleeting impressions of the public mind, taking them as it were fresh from the mint of thought. On the whole, it was the history of those events which formed a principal part of many a conversation at Holland House; perhaps in many cases it has preserved, in a pictorial form, the most piquant remarks of the political coterie assembled there. The most laborious study of multitudinous files of newspapers will not be more suggestive of lively impressions respecting the politics of this generation, to those of our grandchildren who are willing to undertake for us the filial office which Lord Mahon has so well performed for our grandfathers. A Musée de la Caricature is assuredly among the most instructive records of the past it does not cloak either facts or feelings in the dignified decencies of historical phraseology; it tells us what people have dared to think, with a naggnoia which even the libel laws cannot touch. The scowls and the groans of contemporaries may perpetuate themselves in harsh enactments, and the various forms of rough handling for which language has found names; but we owe it to the caricaturist, if we know anything about the laughter, merry or bitter, which often precedes, and sometimes causes, the storms of public indignation: if we are enabled to discover how the little knots, which form the units of political society, thought and talked among themselves before the prevalent feeling substantiated itself in a burst of simultaneous utterance. We never understood so thoroughly the state of feeling which led to the catastrophe of Admiral Byng as we were enabled to do when we had got hold of a bound-up series of caricatures of the years 1756 and 1757. In the great collection of political prints begun by John, Earl of Bute, and till lately visible at Luton, the whole history of the popular mind during the reign of George III. might be read with wonderful clearness : clearness :-how much that will meet no eye in the pages of the Annual Register! Inferior as the French have always been to us in the art of caricature, it will be in vain for any historian of their Revolution to master the thousands of journals and pamphlets connected with it, unless he consults also its contemporary graphic illustrations. How admirably, for instance, the general feeling respecting Calonne and his Assembly of Notables is expressed by the sketch of the rustic who convokes the poultry of his barn-yard to decide upon the best way of serving them up at table; and when an audacious cock ventures to suggest that the fowls have no special wish to be eaten at all, puts him down at once with a cry of Question!' With these views, however, respecting the importance of caricatures, we are not blind to the fact that, as we live in days of writing and printing, and are by no means restricted to a pictorial and hieroglyphic expression of our thoughts, the caricature must have some kind or class of literary composition corresponding to it; and as the caricature is not necessarily or solely political, this must be a branch of literature at least equally wide in its range. The class of writings in question we may call the antistrophe of genuine caricatures-meaning what Aristotle means when he says: ἡ ῥητορική ἐστιν ἀντίστροφος τῇ διαλεκτικῇ,—what Plutarch means when he says: ἀντίστροφος ἡ ποιητικὴ τῇ ζωγραφία,-namely, that there is a real correspondence, an intrinsic analogy between the antistrophic objects. For example, Sir T. Browne's figurative declaration (Religio Medici, § 19, p. 42) that the Devil played at chess with him, and by yielding a pawn thought to gain a queen,' is an antistrophic anticipation of the well-known drawing by Retsch-die Schachspieler-in which the metaphor is converted into a scene; and the allegorical pictures of the punishments inflicted on the deadly sins on the spandrels of the arches of the nave in Catfield Church, Norfolk, are a similar antistrophe to the Divina Commedia of Dante. The class of writings to which we refer may be termed, for want of a better name, Pantagruelistic. The etymology of his hero's name is given by Rabelais himself, and as the term, like the Aristotelean EVTEλéxiα, is not taken from the current coin of language, but forged for the nonce, we may as well dissect the hybrid monster with the help of its parent. Rabelais tells us (1. ii., c. ii.) that one Friday, when people were all at their prayers, great drops of water exuded from the ground like drops of sweat. When, however, they collected and drank this marvellous dew they found it nought but brine, worse and salter than sea-water. Now as it came to pass that Panta gruel |