way of actual artistic pursuit. Among his early caricatures we may mention a rough and coarsely coloured affair engraved by him after the design of an amateur, published by Fores on the 28th of April, 1816, entitled, The Mother's Girl Plucking a Crow, or German Flesh and English Spirit. The Princess Charlotte, as we have seen, had an undoubted will of her own, and could, as we have also seen, assert it when occasion demanded. Here she is presented to us at the moment when a hideous German duenna, catching her in the act of writing to her mother abroad, orders her at once to desist. The princess, however, in plain terms, enforced with a clenched fist, gives her clearly to understand that she fully intends to have her own way. Another caricature, published by T. Sidebotham, in 1817, bearing the title of The Horse Marine and his Trumpeter in a Squall, is dedicated to the United Service Club.
Strange French FashionsSubjects for the pencil of a clever graphic satirist were not wanting sixty years ago. France in those days set the fashion both in male and female attire, and the strangest eccentricities had marked the emancipation of that country from the thraldom of the Terror. There were the incroyables, a set of young dandies who affected royalist sympathies, and paraded the streets of Paris when young Napoleon was yet a general in the service of the Directory. They wore short-waisted coats with tails of preposterous length, cocked hats of ponderous dimensions, green cravats, powdered hair plaited and turned up with a comb, while on each side of the face hung down two long curls called dogs' ears (oreilles de chien). These charming fellows carried twisted sticks of enormous size, as weapons of offence and defence, and spoke in a peculiarly affected manner.[1] Some fourteen or fifteen years later on, when we had driven Joseph Bonaparte and his brother's legions out of Spain, the fashions had
- ↑ Further particulars of them will be found in the "Memoirs of the Duchess d'Abrantes" (Madame Junot). The fashions of the years which immediately preceded the Revolution appear to have been almost as funny. I have somewhere seen a French semi-caricature depicting fashionables of the Palais Royal in 1786, and the people who had their heads cut off in '93 were almost as queer as the dandies of the Directory and the Consulate.
