No More Learning

Here, Cambridge can show
a long line of masters whom she has trained, from Prior and
Praed to Thackeray, Calverley and J. K. Stephen. Oxford, more
in touch with the world, has been more serious and more prolific


## p. 206 (#236) ############################################

206 University Journalism [CH.
in prophets, but can claim a first-rate professor of the sportive
mood in Andrew Lang. Calverley, however, is the leading master
and his inimitable short line has had many disciples :
The wit of smooth delicious Matthew Prior,
The rhythmic grace which Hookham Frere displayed,
The summer lightning wreathing Byron's lyre,
The neat inevitable turns of Praed,
Rhymes to which Hudibras could scarce aspire,
Such metrio pranks as Gilbert oft has played,
All these good gifts and others far sublimer
Are found in thee, beloved Cambridge rhymer1
Among many excellent composers of parody in verse, A. C.
Hilton is pre-eminent. The two numbers of The Light Green,
which are mainly his work, were produced just before and after
he took his degree at Cambridge (1872), and are still sold in
reprints. They represent a solitary flowering of wit and crafts-
manship, for he died young. The Light Green ridiculed The
Dark Blue, a magazine now forgotten, which was published in
London, but was understood to represent the life and thought of
young Oxford? Hilton's supreme achievement is a parody of
Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee. The Heathen Pass-ee secretes
about his person tips for examination purposes instead of the
cards of his prototype:
On the cuff of his shirt
He had managed to get
What we hoped had been dirt,
But which proved, I regret,
To be notes on the rise of the Drama,
A question invariably set.
In the crown of his cap
Were the Furies and Fates,
And a delicate map
of the Dorian States,
And we found in his palms which were hollow,
What are frequent in palms,-that is dates.
The last two lines are perfect in point, expression and likeness
to the original. Almost equally famous are The Vulture and
the Husbandman, after Lewis Carroll, and The Octopus, after
Swinburne.
Special brilliance is certainly needed to make university
6
1 J. K. S. , Lapsus Calami, •To C. S. C. ' See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. vi.
? Russell, G. W. E. , Collections and Recollections, chap. XXVIII.


## p. 207 (#237) ############################################

y] The Cambridge Review
207
magazines live; their humour is limited in scope, and refers to
persons who do not survive in the public memory; jests pass with
many repetitions from Oxford to Cambridge and back again, and
even to America, where an old story of Whewell is now current
concerning a new professor of encyclopaedic range. Hence, a
great number of university magazines are forgotten, and a study
of them at large does not suggest that they deserved to be more
than ephemeral. The Shotover Papers, or Echoes of Oxford
(1874—5) may serve as a typical example of parodies and com-
ments which, praised in their day, have now lost their savour. In
such magazines, the social history and atmosphere of the univer-
sity are fairly recorded for the future historian; but the Promethean
touch which lifts the local to the permanent is wanting. Great
men, however, will always attract great attention even by their
immature efforts. Thus, The Snob and The Gownsman are still
remembered because they contained the work of Thackeray; but
they were not brilliant periodicals; and comic treatments, by com-
paratively unknown persons, of subjects set for prize poems are
quite as good as Thackeray's Timbuctoo.
The credit of having been the first lasting university organ be-
longs to The Cambridge Review, which was started in 1879, and has
been published weekly in term time ever since. The first number
expresses the idea that university men are too busy to have much
time for journalism; but the purpose of the Review-to give a
representation of the life and thought of the university-has been
well maintained. It has a semi-official claim, too, on serious
readers, in publishing weekly the university sermon. Perpetual
discussions of university topics which, to the outsider, seem of
small moment is characteristic of all universities; learned and
sedentary persons are prone to controversy; and, perhaps, for this
reason, the Review has not paid so much attention to belles lettres
as some of its light-hearted predecessors. It has, however, had
its humours, as the selections in The Book of the Cambridge
Review (1898) show, and, for many years, it has excelled every
February in valentines, ingenious quotations and perversions
of quotations, addressed to men of note both in and outside
Cambridge.
In the nineties, The Granta started as a light and bright com-
mentator on Cambridge affairs, and absorbed some of the humour
which would otherwise have found a place in the Review. The
wayward genius of J. K. Stephen, already an accomplished rimer
in his Eton days, shone in both periodicals. His verse is the more


## p. 208 (#238) ############################################

208 University Journalism [CH.
astonishing inasmuch as it was casually and rapidly produced.
His best known lines (The Cambridge Review, 1891),
When the Rudyards cease from kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more! ,
have become so familiar that their author is often forgotten.
Of other Cambridge periodicals, the best are The Cambridge
University Magazine, which came out under the title The
Symposium in 1840, and contained some good work by George
Brimley, and The Tatler in Cambridge (1871—2) which was
illumined by the wit of A. W. Verrall. The Cambridge Observer
was started in 1892 by a small group including G. W. Steevens,
an Oxford man then in Cambridge, S. V. Makower and others.
Largely ignoring the ancient classics, it set out épater le bourgeois,
and was defiantly propagandist concerning foreign authors. It
contested the claim of contemporary critics, and discovered
the best of all art in the New English Art club. Such a paper
could not last, but did something, in spite of its extravagancies, to
enlarge the average mind of the university.
The Oxford Magazine, which was started in 1883, has lasted
till today, and secured a recognised position as a commentator on
university affairs. Resembling The Cambridge Review in general,
it differs in being the organ of the don. The talent for writing
English is more widely valued at Oxford than at Cambridge;
essays figure largely in examinations; and the Oxford paper is
more elaborately written than its contemporary. It is, in fact, ,
almost too well written, and loses, sometimes, in irony and para-
phrase what it would have gained by naturalness. It has that
excessive use of negative forms of expression which is character-
istic of Jane Austen and it has maintained an excellent standard
of serious verse. The pieces in Echoes from the Oxford Magazine:
being reprints of Seven Years (1890) form a collection unrivalled
for brilliancy. R. W. Raper is supreme in his parody of Whitman.
The volume is also strong in that humour which comes from
imitating in English the style and manner of an ancient author.
* L'Envoy,' concerning the purpose of The Magazine, is a good
specimen of Oxford prose.
As The Cambridge Review was supplemented by The Granta,
The Isis was started in 1892 as a light-hearted and flippant variant
on the sobriety of The Oxford Mayazine. A prominent feature
in the paper is the series of 'Isis Idols' with illustrations.
Of other Oxford magazines of the nineteenth century, The
1 J. K. S. , Lapsus Calami, • To R. K. ' See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. vi.


## p. 209 (#239) ############################################

v] Scots University Periodicals 209
Oxford Critic and University Magazine (1857), conducted chiefly by
undergraduates, was the first to shake off the lumbering verbosity
which came from Johnson and survived longer in the universities
than elsewhere. Its criticism was occasionally smart, but its verse
lacked distinction. The Oxford Spectator of Copleston and Nolan
(1868), in shape and size like Addison's famous periodical, is still
remembered as a deserved success. It was humorous on esoteric
subjects like Oxford philosophy, but, also, was capable of seizing
the charm of Oxford in such a passage as this :
When I look back to my own experience, I find one scene, of all Oxford,
most deeply engraved upon the mindful tablets of my soul. ' And yet not
a scene, but a fairy compound of smell and sound, and sight and thought.
The wonderful scent of the meadow air just above Ifley, on a hot May
evening, and the gay colours of twenty boats along the shore, the poles all
stretched out from the bank to set the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of
'ten seconds more,' all down from the green barge to the lasher. And yet
that unrivalled moment is only typical of all the term; the various elements
of beauty and pleasur
sure are concentrated there.
The conditions of academic life in Scotland differ considerably
from those prevailing in Oxford and Cambridge, and the resultant
journalism does not make so general an appeal as the best of the
English writing of the sort. The Scots tongue, in spite of its
unqualified successes with most English readers, is not known or
liked by all, and the same may be said of Scots humour, which is
apt to be grim, and of Scots metaphysics. Apart from these
differences of language, the Scots student has not the full advan-
tage of the corporate life from which it is difficult for the Oxford
or Cambridge undergraduate to differentiate himself. The first
magazine proper of Aberdeen, The King's College Miscellany
(1846), printed mathematical and physical problems with solutions,
and translations from Greek and Latin authors. Alma Mater,
also of Aberdeen, is the oldest of the existing Scots university
periodicals, starting in 1883. It is thus six years senior to The
St Andrews College Echoes, and The Glasgow University Magazine
of 1889, and four to the Edinburgh Student. During the first
half of the century, Aberdeen was a desert so far as literature is
concerned, and it was the vivid interest of Minto that suggested
to his students the idea of Alma Mater. It has done much to
bring together the diverse elements of the university, and, from
time to time, has had excellent plates. It has also done much in
the way of academic history and reminiscence, which, previously,
had been less cultivated here than in England. St Andrews claims
a light poet and parodist of distinction in A. W. Murray, the
14
E. L. XIV.
CH, V.


## p. 210 (#240) ############################################

210
[CH.
University Journalism
author of The Scarlet Gown (1891). Andrew Lang, indeed, might
have been one of the glories of St Andrews journalism; but the
n
weekly magazine which he helped to found never reached the
dignity of print.
The University Maga is the happiest of early efforts in
Edinburgh academic journalism. It ran for twenty-four weekly
numbers in 1835 and 1837—8. Edward Forbes was mainly respon-
sible for it, and contributed some good verses and a number of
excellent caricatures and sketches. It was altogether a lively
production, and reflects the spirit of the times better than its
fellows. It was not until 1887 that it was possible to establish
a university journal with a reasonable chance of permanence, and
this can be easily understood in an intensely independent and
individualistic society with no common meeting-place and prac-
tically no sport. The students' representative council improved
matters, and The Student was started in 1887 as a private venture
with the idea that the council would, in time, assume the respon-
sibility of financing it. This happened in 1889, and, since then,
The Student has appeared weekly, and become a recognised
university institution.
The university of Edinburgh includes among its academic
writers R. L. Stevenson. The essay entitled 'A College Magazine
in Memories and Portraits describes the brief fortunes of The
Edinburgh University Magazine (the fourth of the name), which,
with three collaborators, he edited, and which perished after four
numbers.
The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which was the best part of it,
for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed obscurity,
and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us with
prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and
me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been a solemn question who
it was that edited the fourth.
As a matter of fact, the literary standard of the magazine was
high, and lord Neaves made some excellent contributions to it.
The paper by Stevenson reprinted in Memories and Portraits,
"An Old Scotch Gardener,' even after allowance for mature cor-
rection, must be regarded as an excellent character-study. But
the people of Edinburgh, academic or unacademic, could hardly be
credited with sufficient self-detachment to see special points in a
type of character long familiar in Scots life. And character-
studies are mature work, needing a mature audience, not the
faulty judgment of the young college man who worships only


## p. 211 (#241) ############################################

v]
Kottabos
2 II
success and brains. Stevenson speaks, in the former essay, of
'young gentlemen from the universities' who are encouraged, at
so much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate
private individuals. It is a great merit of academic journalism
that these things are not done in the universities themselves. To
calumniate is dangerous in view of the law of libel; but the
increasing zeal for personal gossip, trivial when it is not un-
pleasant, has taken little hold on university journalism. The free
use of slang, preferably of American origin, and excessive atten-
tion to public entertainers are, further, not characteristic of such
periodicals, and, in this respect, universities may do well in
being behind the general movement of the press.
Irishmen have a way of being brilliant, and Trinity college,
Dublin, has had a galaxy of talent for its academic ventures in
journalism. The Dublin University Review, which started in
1885, was really good during its short career. Collectors now
give high prices for single copies of this Magazine of Literature,
Art and University Intelligence. The magazine had a wider scope
than English periodicals of the sort, finding room for the strongly
divergent views of Irish politicians. It was a pioneer, too, in
including poetry in the original Irish (probably the first specimens
of Irish type seen in a modern review).
The oddly named Kottabos is, however, perhaps the cream of
Irish academic wit and scholarship. It appeared three times
a year and was started by R. Y. Tyrrell in 1868, running for
thirteen years. Its fortunes and revival after an interval from
1888 to 1895 are recorded in Echoes from Kottabos(1906).
Tyrrell was a brilliant classical scholar with an extraordinary
memory and an incisive wit, and his magazine excelled in light
verse, translations and imitations (reverent and burlesque) of
poets ancient and modern, from Aeschylus to Kipling. The con-
tributors included Edward Dowden, John Todhunter, Oscar Wilde
and Standish O'Grady. Kottabos is more definitely classical than
most magazines of the sort, and some of its exercises passed into
Dublin Translations into Greek and Latin Verse, a form of
journalism, perhaps, too learned to gain general recognition. Still,
it may be remembered that, without distinction in Latin verse
translation, Addison might never have had the chance to establish
the periodical essay, or Prior the school of light verse which is
the chief distinction of university writing.
1 KOTTaßos, a game in vogue at Athens depending on the skilful throwing of wine
from a cup.
14-2


## p. 212 (#242) ############################################

CHAPTER VI
CARICATURE AND THE LITERATURE OF SPORT
PUNCH
The literature to be described in this chapter owes so much,
in origin and in development, to pictorial art, that the subject
demands a brief preliminary account of the growth of engraving,
a
and especially of caricature, in England. Caricature, in the sense
of pictorial comment on contemporary political or social conditions,
was not unknown in the reign of James II. William III brought
with him from Holland Dutch artists, among them de Hooghe,
who produced work of this nature; and their presence spurred on
native artists. In the reign of Anne, caricature was frequent.
A print of 1710 shows Sacheverell taking counsel of the devil
and a Roman catholic priest; and Sacheverell often appeared
in political plates. The famous pamphlet ascribed by Swift to
Arbuthnot, Law is a Bottomless Pit or The History of John
Bull (1712), was a fertile source of figures for draughtsmen.
If this pamphlet did not originate the impersonation of England
as 'John Bull,' it made it popular; while the appearance of
Louis XIV as 'Lewis Baboon,' of Holland as 'Nick Frog,' of
Charles of Spain as “The Lord Strutt,' of the English parliament
as 'Mrs Bull,' and so forth, provided political draughtsmen
with ideas of the kind that they needed. Now, as later, tories
freely used this weapon against whigs. The South Sea Bubble,
in the year 1720, gave a strong impetus to English caricature.
Pine, Bickham and Picart were among the many artists who
produced plates on the subject; but more important than any
was the work of Hogarth. After the time of the South Sea
Bubble, caricatures became more and more popular; to some
extent, they took the place of the political pamphlets which had
been common in the previous century? . Gravelot, in 1727, made
an engraving which appears to have been the first attack of this
kind on the prevalent corruption at parliamentary elections;
1 See, ante, vol. VII, chap. xvi.


## p. 213 (#243) ############################################

CH. VI]
Hogarth
213
and he was one of many caricaturists who found a fruitful
subject in Walpole and his whig government. The caricatures
of the day were not all political. Social conditions were freely
criticised; many of the plates being grossly improper and many
very ill-drawn. The designing of these pictorial jests or attacks
became something like fashionable : amateurs indulged in it, such
as the countess of Burlington and George Townshend. Pope was
a favourite subject, and lord Bute was frequently attacked for his
patronage of the Scots; while one of the best known prints is
the caricature of Handel as a pig playing the organ, by Goupy,
drawing-master to George III.
Setting aside his artistic greatness, the service which Hogarth
rendered to caricature was twofold. On the one hand, he showed
that both political and social subjects could be treated forcibly
without deliberate grossness. To modern taste, a good deal of
Hogarth appears coarse: comparison of his work at its coarsest with
plates by the common run of unknown or little known artists of
the early part of the eighteenth century will show him by contrast
refined. The social satirist must needs handle foul matter; but
Hogarth never, like some of his contemporaries, indulges in gross-
ness for its own sake, nor appears to enjoy it. Henry Fielding's
tribute to Hogarth's work in the introduction to Joseph Andrews
raised the estimation of caricature to a higher position than it had
yet occupied ; and if, later in their treatment, for instance, of
lady Hamilton and Nelson), English caricaturists forgot what they
had learned from Hogarth, his influence was never wholly lost.
Pictorial art, following the example of literature from Defoe,
through The Spectator, to Fielding, turned with interest to the
common life around itself. Hogarth found a various and strong-
featured world to his hand. The life of fashionable people,
Heidegger's masquerades, the Italian opera, Rich and his panto-
mimes, plays representing 'low life'-in the two famous Pro-
gresses and in many other plates these subjects are recorded
for us without the grotesque exaggeration which was frequent
among caricaturists of his day. In Gin Lane, Beer Street, The
Enraged Musician and other plates we have the London life
that was under the artist's eyes preserved for our own; and in
such plates as England, France and Calais Gate may be found
that feeling of 'John Bull’ towards the Frenchman which was
apparent in Smollett's Travels through France and Italy, and
was to become a prominent element of the literature and life of
England till long after the fall of Napoleon. To Hogarth's choice


## p. 214 (#244) ############################################

214
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
of subject and to his treatment of what subjects he chose, English
literature owed a considerable debt.
The second benefit which Hogarth conferred upon pictorial
illustration and caricature lay on the commercial side of the
artist's work. With George Vertue and others, he was instru-
mental in obtaining from parliament an act to vest in the designer
the exclusive copyright in his own works. This bill received the
royal assent in 1735, just before the publication of The Rake's
Progress, and was destined to have important effects upon the
commerce of engraving a few years later. Meanwhile, among
those who were to benefit immediately were the caricaturists of the
middle period of the eighteenth century: John Collett, S. H. Grimm,
Bickham, Bamfylde, captain Minshull and captain Topham (two
half-amateur artists whose designs were usually engraved by
others), besides certain French artists working in London. About
this time, too, the political magazine found its way to favour, and
a number of artists supplied these magazines with caricatures,
which were usually signed with pseudonyms. Eminent names
in the latter half of the eighteenth century were Sayer and
Darley. Sayer was a poor draughtsman, but an efficient carica-
turist. In the pay of Pitt, he attacked the governments of
Rockingham, of Shelburne and of the coalition ; of Sheridan, he
frequently made caricatures, dwelling especially on his relations
with the prince regent; and the caricature, A Nightmare, which
appeared in The Anti-Jacobin in 1799, is one of the most im-
pressive ever drawn. Founded on a picture by Fuseli, it shows
Fox hag-ridden and otherwise tortured in sleep by phantoms of
the French revolution. Sayer was also, to some degree, a poet:
he wrote satires, and also the poem on the death of Pitt, ‘Elijah's
Mantle,' which was ascribed to Canning. George Darley is chiefly
known as the pictorial satirist of maccaronis, as the travelled and
effeminate fops of the period were called. Between 1780 and
1785, the supremacy of Sayer was challenged and overthrown by
a Scottish caricaturist, James Gillray. Gillray's first caricature
was an engraving of lord North, published anonymously in 1769.
Till 1780, he was chiefly engaged on social subjects ; after 1782,
his work was almost exclusively political.
He published in that
year a series of designs concerning Rodney's victory over De
Grasse off Dominica. By 1811, when he became imbecile, he
,
had executed some 1500 caricatures, and won an unique position
in his art. The lesson that Hogarth had taught, Gillray mainly
neglected. His work is savage and brutal; he can be as bitter as


## p. 215 (#245) ############################################

vi]
John Boydell
215
Swift and as crossgrained and coarse as Smollett. But his vigour
was great and his invention fertile; and he demands mention in this
chapter because he passed on the lamp to his young friend Thomas
Rowlandson. But, before considering Rowlandson and another of
his friends, Bunbury, it is necessary to go back and pick up another
thread of the story.
Hogarth and his fellows had won for the artist copyright in
his own engravings; but the market remained for some years
restricted to England. Duties on prints entering France were
so high as to close the French market to English artists ; mean-
while, French prints found their way in large quantities to
London. The removal of this disability of English engravers
was chiefly due to the artist and print-seller, John Boydell.
Boydell began his successful career by engraving small landscapes,
which, because print-shops were few, he exhibited in the windows
of toy-shops. From small landscapes he went on to large views
of London, Oxford and Cambridge and other places; and, in
1751, having done well with a volume of views in England and
Wales, he set up as a print-seller. Ardent in his encouragement
of British talent, and aided in the early years of the reign of
George III by a bounty allowed to English prints for sale in
France, Boydell succeeded in turning the print-trade with that
country from an import trade to an export trade with an annual
revenue of £200,000. The impulse given to English engraving was,
naturally, very strong; and it lasted after the outbreak of the
French revolution had destroyed the trade with France. Boydell's
illustrated edition of Shakespeare was published in 1802; but he
had begun to collect materials for it so early as 1786. His object
was to encourage English painting, as he had encouraged English
engraving; and he employed the most eminent artists of his day.
With Boydell, the print-seller first developed into the patron
and employer, and the development was to have an important, if
indirect, influence upon the relations of pictorial art to literature.
The large number of capable artists whom the new conditions
had brought into being gave pictorial art the power, as it were, of
dictating to literature. These artists were accustomed (amid the
barrenness and mock-antique solemnity of the academic art of the
day) to deal freely and naturally with the common scenes, whether
topographical or human, of the world about them. They worked
for the people, not for connoisseurs; and, in time, they came to
find the need of a literature that should form a vehicle for their
productions. This movement was greatly advanced by Rudolph


## p. 216 (#246) ############################################

216 Caricature and Sport [CH.
Ackermann, a German by origin, who, in 1795, opened a print-
shop in the Strand. Among Ackermann's achievements was the
establishment in England of lithography as a fine art. He used
the process largely in his monthly publication, The Repository
of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, which ran from
1809 to 1828. More important to the present subject is the
fact that he turned to caricaturists for the provision of illus-
trated books; and among the earliest that he published was
Bunbury's work, Academy for Grown Horsemen . . . . by Geoffry
Gambado, Esq. William Henry Bunbury, sportsman, caricaturist
and writer, was already known for his admirable chalk-drawings
of scenes in real life, most of which were engraved for him by
other artists—Ryland, Gillray, Rowlandson, Watson, Bartolozzi,
Bretherton the print-seller and Dickinson. Never treating politi-
cal matters, he had done good work in social subjects, such as
the seven plates entitled The propagation of a lie, burlesque
designs for Tristram Shandy, the plate named A Chop House,
which contains one of the many caricature portraits of Samuel
Johnson, and A Long Minuet (as danced at Bath). Boydell
had employed him to make designs for Shakespeare's comedies.
To Ackermann, he brought a series of comic plates of horse-
manship (a subject that he well understood), accompanied by
a descriptive letterpress that is still of a fresh and ingenious
humour. Geoffry Gambado, the supposed author, is described as
‘Master of the Horse, Riding Master, and Grand Equerry to the
Doge of Venice,' and he is presented as having been drowned at
sea while on his way to teach horsemanship to the English. The
frontispiece shows him as exceedingly corpulent. The advice
given by this worthy Venetian, and the letters supposed to be
addressed to him by horsemen anxious for his advice, make up a
small and constantly entertaining volume, which is important
from several points of view. It is an early example of the litera-
ture of sport, in which the succeeding half century was to be rich;
it was read and enjoyed by Apperley, Surtees, Smedley and other
authors of novels of sport; and it was the first of the illustrated
humorous books for which Ackermann's publishing house became
famous. Bunbury was far more draughtsman than writer; and,
though both letterpress and illustrations were his work, this book
must be regarded as an early instance of pictorial art calling
literature into being. A few years later, caricature was to
prove, through Ackermann again, more markedly the patron of
literature in the domain of comedy. Among the artists working


## p. 217 (#247) ############################################

vi]
Rowlandson and Combe
217
in London was a young man, Thomas Rowlandson, who, after
studying, to the great advantage of his art, in Paris, had given up
portrait-painting for caricature, or genre-painting, in oils, and for
brilliant comic sketches, which he tossed off in great quantity.
Dissipated and improvident, he was incapable of managing his
own affairs, and was all the better for attaching himself to a
taskmaster of Ackermann's good sense and acumen. His carica-
ture was occasionally brutal; but he lived in a 'hard-hitting,
hard-riding, hard-drinking age,' and he portrayed it faithfully.
His friend, John Bannister, the actor, is said to have suggested to
him a series of plates representing a country curate travelling
about England. Travels were popular at the time. Much of Acker-
mann's success was won from his series of picturesque tours, to
which further reference will be made later; and, whether the idea
were Bannister's, or Rowlandson's, or another's, there can be little
doubt that it was inspired by the very popular books of travel in
England written and illustrated between 1782 and 1809 by William
Gilpin. On approving of the idea, Ackermann entrusted the writing
of the letterpress to William Combe.
William Combe had begun bis literary career with The Dia-
boliad (1776), a savage satire in verse on a nobleman (said to
have been Simon, lord Irnham), whose, cast-off mistress he had
married on a promise of money, that was not paid. Its successors,
The Diabo-lady and The Anti-Diabo-lady, are equally spirited.
Combe, as a satirist, is still readable for the vigour and rapidity of
his verse; but he had not the temperament nor the talent to
achieve greatness. In life and letters alike he was unprincipled ;
and among his deceptions are the spurious Letters of the late
Lord Lyttelton, and the spurious Letters of Sterne to Eliza, in
writing which, no doubt, he drew upon the acquaintance with
Sterne which he had formed in Italy. As a hack-writer for
a publisher he was valuable, and never more so than when he
wrote for Ackermann the verses that were to accompany
Rowlandson's drawings of the adventures of Dr Syntax, as the
travelling clergyman was named. The work was done, by both
artist and author, under extraordinary conditions. A certain
quantity had to be supplied monthly for publication in Ackermann's
Poetical Magazine. One drawing at a time only was sent to
Combe, then a man of sixty and confined for debt in the King's
Bench prison. Combe, thereupon, wrote, or dictated, the requisite
number of lines (the printer, as the story goes, waiting in Combe's
presence for his 'copy' lest the dilatory author should postpone


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218
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
his task). In this disjointed fashion, these two very unsystematic
workers produced a poem of nearly ten thousand lines, illustrated
by thirty plates and a pictorial frontispiece. It would be juster
to say that they produced thirty plates and a pictorial frontis-
piece illustrated by nearly ten thousand lines. The ideas were
Rowlandson’s ; Combe, the writer, played the part usually played
by the illustrator ; and the combination provides a capital early
instance of an imaginative work written to fit pictures already
drawn. The practice continued. This was the genesis of The
Pickwick Papers; and the modern writer of serial stories for
illustrated magazines suffers (if he may be said to suffer) in good
company.
Under the title The Tour of Dr Syntax in search of the
Picturesque, the joint work of Rowlandson and Combe was
published in The Poetical Magazine in 1809 and onwards, and
first appeared as a separate volume in 1812. Its popularity was
immediate and very great. The figure of the lean curate and
schoolmaster in his scratch wig and his rusty black suit, with his
long nose and chin, caught the public fancy; and, doubtless, the
device of representing him as a man of learning and of some
dignity added to the fun of the ridiculous mishaps into which he
fell. In the character of Syntax, Combe attempted to combine Don
Quixote with parson Adams; and, though the attempt revealed
his shortcomings in imagination and humour, he so far succeeded
that Syntax remains good company to this day. Feeling the pinch
of poverty, the reverend doctor announces to his busy and
shrewish wife that, while his pupils are at home for the summer
holidays, he intends to make a tour.
“I'll make a TOUR—and then I'll WRITE IT.
You well know what my pen can do,
And I'll employ my pencil too:-
I'll ride and write, and sketch and print,
And thus create a real mint;
I'll prose it here, I'll verse it there,
And picturesque it ev'ry where.
I'll do what all have done before;
I think I shall-and somewhat more.
So off he sets on his old mare, Grizzle. He falls among robbers;
he is pursued by a bull; he mistakes a gentleman's house for an
he falls, more than once, into mud or water; he is robbed at
a race-meeting ; he is carried by Grizzle at full gallop among the
cavalry at a review ; and he suffers other amusing troubles. But,
also, he shows on many occasions learning and good sense beneath
inn;


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>
vi]
Dr Syntax
219
his simplicity. A great eater, a great smoker and a great talker,
he is loved for his companionable spirit. He makes powerful
friends, and at the close has won not only a handsome price for
his book but ecclesiastical preferment which will make him easy
for life. Combe's verse ambles along with the very paces of
the doctor's Grizzle. It is (like most dictated work) frequently
flaccid; and it moralises at too great length and with too little
force for modern taste. But it seldom goes for long without wit
and sense.
It is the verse of an able journalist, as might be said
today, who knows what people in the world are talking about.
Take, for instance, Syntax's soliloquy on the picturesque. He
will paint the cottage, the coppice and the elm-trees; but he will
omit the pigs.
For, to say truth, I don't inherit
This self-same picturesquish spirit,
That looks to nought but what is rough,
And ne'er thinks Nature coarse enough.
Their system does my genius shock,
Who see such graces in a dock;
Whose eye the picturesque admires
In straggling brambles, and in briers;
Nay, can a real beauty see
In a decay'd and rotten tree.
People were talking in those days about the picturesque, the
'trim' of art and so forth; and Combe knew what would interest
his readers.
So successful a work was sure to find imitators. Among them
were The Tour of Dr Syntax through London, Dr Syntax in
Paris and The Adventures of Dr Comicus, a parody of Combe's
verses, illustrated by burlesques of Rowlandson's engravings.
Ackermann, finding the collaboration profitable, set the same
pair to work upon other productions. Rowlandson drew a series
of designs of The Dance of Death, with the View of applying
it exclusively to the Manners, Customs, and Character of this
Country'; and, as before, Combe 'accompanied with Metrical
Illustrations' the drawings as they were delivered to him. Issued
originally in successive numbers, The English Dance of Death was
published in two volumes in 1815—16. Describing the death-scenes
of a number of different characters, the verse shows Combe in his
most serious mood; but it lacks both impressiveness and variety,
while, on the other hand, the plates by Rowlandson are various,
impressive and full of the peculiar beauty of this artist's best
work. In 1816 came, also, The Dance of Life, by Rowlandson and
6


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220
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Caricature and Sport
Combe. The poem and the plates recount the life of a young man
of position. Since part of the story concerns a period of dissipa-
tion in London, it touches a kind of work to which reference will
be made later, and, by comparison, shows Combe, who could be
coarse upon occasion, as a writer of some taste and reticence.
The two fellow-workers had, by this time, made each other's
acquaintance ; and Combe implies, in his advertisement prefixed
to the poem, that he had suggested to Rowlandson some of the
ideas, though, in the main, they had followed their old plan of
working. He makes the claim more strongly in the introduction
to a second tale of Dr Syntax, to whom they returned in 1819–20.
Issued, as a book, in 1820, The Second Tour of Dr Syntax in
Search of Consolation narrates how the reverend doctor, having
lost his vulgar but valued wife, is persuaded by his friends to seek
relief in another tour. In the Lakes, Bath, London and else-
where, Syntax visits scenes and people of interest; and, of such
humour as there is, beyond the lively and homely circumstances
of Mrs Syntax's death, much is supplied by the Irish manservant
who accompanies his master. But Combe was now nearly eighty.
A well-read man, he makes free use of his knowledge, but dilutes
his originals excessively. His verse is garrulous and spiritless,
compared with that of the first tour, and Rowlandson's invention
was either flagging or too closely bounded by the scenes that he
thought fit to introduce. The work is dull, and was not so popular
as its predecessor. In The Third Tour of Dr Syntax in Search
of a Wife, however, published, as a book, in 1821, both artist and
verse-maker revived; the studies of various kinds of women are
full of character and give no little information about the feminine
types of the day. Finally, in 1822, Rowlandson and Combe
produced Johnny Quae Genus, the Foundling of the late Dr
Syntax, which is the feeblest, and was the least popular, of the
series.
Two other series of drawings, which Rowlandson made in
lighter vein, may be mentioned here. In 1815, he drew a set of
plates for The Military Adventures of Johnny Newcome, the
letterpress for which was written, probably, by colonel David
Roberts, who became a writer after a wound, received in the
Peninsular war, had incapacitated him for military service. In
1818 appeared The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the
Navy, in which Rowlandson's sixteen plates were accompanied
by a poem in four cantos by 'Alfred Burton,' a pseudonym of
John Mitford, author of The Poems of a British Sailor and
#
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yı]
Gilpin
221
a contributor to The Scourge, the journal for which George
Cruikshank, also, worked. Mitford, who had served in the navy,
was worthy of collaborating with Rowlandson in such a book
as this. Verses and drawings alike are full of hearty humour, and
there is dramatic quality in their exposition of the troubles of
a new hand, of 'larks’ at sea and on shore and of the tyranny
and brutality that marked the naval service in those days.
Comic drawings, the development of his caricature, were not
the only work that Rowlandson did for Ackermann and other
publishers. This was an age in which illustrated books of travel
became popular; and Dr Syntax, as we have seen, satirised
a general taste. The fashion owed much to the books of
William Gilpin, a clergyman, who, in 1782, published his Obser-
vations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales,
where the picturesque was easily found. Gilpin, who, in his
views on education and on poor-law reform, was in advance of
his time, was in advance of it, also, in his drawings, which have
been described as studies for landscape rather than portraits of
particular places. With the pen, like Dr Syntax, he 'prosed it
here and versed it there,' his descriptions erring, as Combe
thought, in excess of poetical diction, but being enriched with
many ingenious reflections. This handsome work was followed
by others of the same kind from his pen and pencil. Volumes
on Cumberland and Westmorland, on Hampshire, Sussex and
Kent, and on Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, were
published during his life or posthumously; in 1790, he issued
Remarks on Forest Scenery and other Woodland Views (relat-
ing chiefly to picturesque beauty), illustrated in the scenes of
the New Forest, with plates by his nephew, William Sawrey
Gilpin, who was the first president of the Royal Society of
Painters in Water-Colours, or the 'Old Society'; and, in 1798,
Picturesque Remarks on the Western Parts of England and
the Isle of Wight. Gilpin, in fact, was the apostle of the
picturesque ; and the illustrated tour (which brought Dr Syntax
a handsome sum of money) was a fashion of the day. Boydell
had followed up his volume of views in England and Wales with
two volumes (1794 and 1796) on the Thames, in which the letter-
press was written by William Combe; and illustrated books of
travel were among the most successful publications of Ackermann,
who issued a series of 'picturesque tours' on the Rhine, the Seine,
the Thames, in the English Lakes, in India and other works. For
his great publication of 1821—6, The World in Miniature, the


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Caricature and Sport
earlier of the 637 plates were the work of Rowlandson, and
the others of William Henry Pyne. To Pyne, who was both
painter and writer, Ackermann owed at least the idea of his
Picturesque Sketches of Rustic Scenery, and his Views of Cottages
and Farm Houses in England and Wales ; Pyne himself wrote
the text of Royal Residences, which Ackermann issued in 1829
with 100 coloured engravings, and, under the pseudonym Ephraim
Hardcastle, was the author of Wine and Walnuts, an anecdotal
book published in 1823. In antiquarian works, again, literature
owed much to the needs of engraving. Pyne and Combe to-
gether wrote the text of Ackermann's important publications,
the histories of Westminster Abbey, of The University of
Oxford and of The University of Cambridge. Rowlandson and
Combe were, again, together connected with one of Ackermann's
most interesting and valuable works, The Microcosm of London,
which was issued, in and after 1808, in three volumes. In the
many coloured plates that illustrate, or constitute, this work, the
figures were drawn by Rowlandson, and the architecture by
Augustus Charles Pugin, while the text was written by William
Combe. The work is concerned not only with the antiquities of
London, but with its contemporary life. It takes in Astley's
and the Royal Cockpit, as well as the Charterhouse and West-
minster abbey, and to this day remains full of information and
interest.
The Microcosm of London was dedicated to the prince of
Wales, afterwards George IV. So, also, in the year after his
accession to the throne, was a less august work, which still, in
its way, reflects the interest in London and the interest in
ordinary life, both of which had been fostered by the influence of
caricature and the increasing popularity of illustrated books. The
book referred to was Pierce Egan's Life in London; or, The Day
and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his elegant friend
Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, The Oxonian, in
their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, a work
which was issued in and after July 1821, in shilling numbers.
Of Pierce Egan, the author of this work, more will be said in
connection with books on sport. A journalist, and a wellknown
character in his day, he wrote nothing so popular as this Life
in London. Indeed, the taste for it amounted to a craze. For
his illustrations, Egan went to two brothers, Isaac Robert and
George Cruikshank, sons of a Scottish artist who had settled in
London. George Cruikshank, the younger and abler brother, had


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a
vi]
Life in London
223
already maintained the succession from Gillray and Rowlandson as
a political caricaturist. His designs in The Scourge and The
Meteor; his plates in William Combe’s ‘hudibrastic poem'
The Life of Napoleon (1814–15); his coloured etchings in The
Humourist, a collection of comic tales published in 1819–21, and
his many caricatures of Napoleon, of the prince regent and his
wife, of Frenchmen and of the excesses of English fashion, had
laid the foundations of a fame which was greatly increased by his
work for Life in London. Each of the coloured plates is stated
to be by I. R. and G. Cruikshank; but, later in his life, George
Cruikshank, by then a reformed character and an ardent teetotaller,
declared that his doubts about the morality of Egan's work had
caused bim to leave two-thirds of the illustration to be done by his
brother Robert. Be that as it may, the success of the work was
so great that the artists could not colour the engravings fast enough
for the demand. It suited the taste of the time, when a 'fast' life
had become a sophisticated and conscious aim. Life in London
is a guide to a fast life. Egan was a 'sporting' man who did not
sport. Except for a jejunely described run with hounds, a state-
ment that Corinthian Tom had a set-to with John Jackson, the
ex-champion pugilist of England, at his rooms in Bond street,
and some praise from Tom's friends for his 'superior style' and
'coolness and skill’in a fencing-bout with O'Shaunessy, there is
not a word of true sport in the book. The remainder is mainly
drinking, gambling, rioting, cock-fighting and other branches of
debauchery, either practised or contemplated by the friends. It
is significant that, of the three adventurers, the name of Corinthian
Tom appears in the largest type upon the title-page. Tom, indeed,
is the hero of the tale. He is the ideal ‘man about town'; and,
however lavishly the author may praise his elegance and ac-
complishment, he remains the type of the polished blackguard,
unworthy to associate with his country cousin, Jerry Hawthorn,
the cheery fool to whom he shows the pleasures of the town,
and only a shade more tolerable than the bestial creature, Bob
Logic, who is intended for a model of good-humour and wit. In
his first chapter, or 'invocation, Egan appeals to Fielding,
'
Goldsmith, Smollett and Sterne ('Come, then,' he characteristi-
cally writes, 'thou shades of departed talent'). His book, with its
leer and wink of knowing vice, its sickly affectation of warning
young men from the haunts and pursuits that it lusciously
describes, would have disgusted even Sterne in the moments
when his physical weakness was most perverting his facile
>


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Caricature and Sport
imagination. The candid rogues of great picaresque fiction would
be ashamed to own Tom or Logic for their kin. Thackeray,
indulging in sentimental reminiscences in days when the literary
contents of the book' had passed sheer away from his memory,
declared that, in the days when the work appeared,
we firmly believed the three heroes above named to be types of the most
elegant, fashionable young fellows the town afforded, and thought their
occupations and amusements were those of all high-bred English gentlemen,
Twenty years later, when he had read 'the literary contents of the
book' again, he said:
But the style of the writing, I own, was not pleasing to me; I even
thought it a little vulgar . . . and as a description of the sports and amuse-
ments of London in the ancient times, more curious than amusing.
6
Thackeray, therefore, nowhere has a good word to say for anything
about Life in London except the pictures. “More curious than
amusing' is a just criticism. The work is curious, partly for the
details that it furnishes of London life in a period when manners
were very pompous or very vulgar; and partly for its wealth in
the slang of the time. Egan was a master of the 'flash' and the
flashy; and Life in London contains as many slang phrases as he
could put into it. Two years later, he was to furnish the slang
phrases to Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1823); and one of his two illustrators, George Cruikshank, had
already drawn a plate for Andrewes's Dictionary of the Slang
and Cant Languages (1809).
Part of the success enjoyed by the work was due, no doubt,
to its readers' belief that they could name the originals of the
fictitious characters. Imitations came swift and frequent. In the
summer of 1822 plays founded upon the story were being acted at
no less than ten theatres in and about London ; and among the
adapters were Charles Dibdin, whose version was played at the
Olympic, and W. T. Moncrieff, whose play ran for more than 300
nights at the Adelphi theatre. It was Moncrieff who, in answer
to the accusation that Egan and he had made their age the age of
flash, replied in the wellknown but inconclusive saying, 'Any age
is better than the age of cant'-cant implying, of course, the pro-
,
tests of certain portions of the press and of some religious bodies.
Egan himself produced, in 1822, a dramatic version of the story,
which was played without success (save for a pony-race round the
theatre) at Astley's. The book was, also, translated into French.
Out of the sixty-five imitations of it which Egan stated that he had


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vi]
The English Spy
225
reckoned, the most important was Real Life in London, or, the
Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq. and his cousin,
the Hon. Tom Dashall, through the Metropolis ; exhibiting a
living picture of fashionable characters, manners, and amuse-
ments in high and low life, which was published in sixpenny
numbers in 1821, with excellent illustrations by Heath, Alken,
Dighton, Rowlandson and others. Real Life in London is a
pleasanter book than its prototype. Some have held that Egan
wrote it; but the author had a purer style, a cleaner mind
and a wider knowledge of London than Egan. The book shows
many more sides of London life than his; though the formal
descriptions of wellknown scenes or buildings, here and there
inserted amid matter of a very different character, recall very
forcibly Mr Bouncer's letters to his aunt in Verdant Green.
Another imitation was Life in Paris: The Rambles of Dick
Wildfire (1821), written, it is suspected, by David Carey, and
illustrated by George Cruikshank, who had never been to Paris,
but was accustomed to drawing his own idea of French people in
his caricatures, and took his scenes from the drawings and paintings
of other artists. An offshoot of Life in London was The
English Spy: An Original Work, Characteristic, Satirical, and
Humorous, illustrated with many coloured plates, of which the
greater number are by ‘Robert Transit' (i. e. Robert Cruikshank),
at least one (not in his pleasantest vein) by Rowlandson and a
few by other hands, and written by 'Bernard Blackmantle,' a
pseudonym for Charles Molloy Westmacott. Westmacott, whose
Points of Misery (1823) was illustrated by George Cruikshank,
appears to have been a blackmailer ; but he was a spirited and
amusing writer, and, though The English Spy, both in text and
in illustrations, is sometimes as coarse as ever was Smollett in
word or Gillray in drawing, it contains many lively representations
of life, high and low, gives much curious information about the
customs and manners of the day and about real people still
recognisable under their fictitious names, and preserves many tales
of a past age. It attempts to do for many places in England
what Life in London and Real Life in London had done for
the metropolis. Eton and Westminster schools, the university
of Oxford, Brighton, Bath and Cheltenham, London and the
suburbs of London, Cowes, Portsmouth and Doncaster races, all
find a place in Westmacott's racy pages; and Robert Cruikshank's
plates are as full of vigour and variety as the author's prose and
In or about 1823, a young artist, named Theodore Lane,
15
6
verse.
E. L. XIV.
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brought to Pierce Egan a series of original and effective designs
representing the life of an actor from his stage-struck days to his
triumph; and round them Egan wrote The Life of an Actor,
which was published in 1824. Though it suffers from all the
faults of Egan's flashy style, the book is well designed and inte-
resting, while the footnotes are full of theatrical stories of various
merit.