CHAPTER XI.PRECEDING HOGARTH.

French Caricature of Corpulent General Galas, who defeated a French Convoy, 1635.

From the accession of William and Mary we notice a change in the subjects treated by caricaturists. If religion continued for a time to be the principal theme, there was more variety in its treatment. Sects became more distinct; the Quakers arose; the divergence between the doctrines of Luther and Calvin was more marked, and gave rise to much discussion; High Church and Low Church renewed their endless contest; the Baptists became an important denomination; deism began to be the whispered, and became soon the vaunted faith of men of the world; even the voice of the Jew was occasionally heard, timidly asking for a small share of his natural rights. It is interesting to note in the popular broadsheets and satirical pictures how quickly the human mind began to exert its powers when an overshadowing and immediate fear of pope and king in league against liberty had been removed by the flight of James II. and the happy accession of William III.

Political caricature rapidly assumed prominence, though, as long as Louis XIV. remained on the throne of France, the chief aim of politics was to create safeguards against the possible return of the Catholic Stuarts. The accession of Queen Anne, the career of Bolingbroke and Harley, the splendid exploits of Marlborough, the early conflicts of Whig and Tory, the attempts of the Pretenders, the peaceful accession of George I.—all these are exhibited in broadsheets and satirical prints still preserved in more than one collection.Louis XIV., his pomps and his vanities, his misfortunes and his mistresses, furnished subjects for hundreds of caricatures both in England and Holland. It was on a Dutch caricature of 1695 that the famous retort occurs of the Duc de Luxembourg to an exclamation of the Prince of Orange. The prince impatiently said, after a defeat, "Shall I, then, never be able to beat that hunchback?" Luxembourg replied to the person reporting this, "How does he know that my back is hunched? He has never seen it." Interspersed with political satires, we observe an increasing number upon social and literary subjects. The transactions of learned societies were now important enough to be caricatured, and the public was entertained with burlesque discourses, illustrated, upon "The Invention of Samplers," "The Migration of Cuckoos," "The Eunuch's Child," "A New Method of teaching Learned Men how to write Unintelligibly." There was an essay, also, "proving by arguments philosophical that Millers, though falsely so reputed, yet in reality are not thieves, with an intervening argument that Taylors likewise are not so."

A Quaker Meeting, 1710—Aminidel exhorting Friends to support Sacheverell.

A strange episode in the conflict between Whig and Tory was the career of Sacheverell, a clergyman who preached such extreme doctrines concerningroyal and ecclesiastical prerogative that he was formally censured by a Whig Parliament, and thus lifted into a preposterous importance. During his triumphal tour, which Dr. Johnson remembered as one of the events of his earliest childhood, he was escorted by voluntary guards that numbered from one thousand to four thousand mounted men, wearing the Tory badges of white knots edged with gold, and in their hats three leaves of gilt laurel. The picture of the Quaker meeting reflects upon the alliance alleged to have existed between the high Tories and the Quakers, both having an interest in the removal of disabilities, and hence making common cause. A curious relic of this brief delirium is a paragraph in theGrub Street Journalof 1736, which records the death of Dame Box, a woman so zealous for the Church that when Sacheverell was relieved of censure she clothed herself in white, kept the clothes all her life, and was buried in them. As long as Dr. Sacheverell lived she went to London once a year, and carried a present of a dozen larks to that "high-flying priest."

The flight of the Huguenots from France, in 1685 and 1686, enriched Holland, England, and the American colonies with theéliteof the French people. Holland being nearest to France, and honored above all lands for nearly a century as the refuge of people persecuted for opinions' sake, received at first the greatest number, especially of the class who could live by intellectual pursuits. The rarest of all rarities in the way of caricature, "the diamond of the pictorial library," is a series of burlesque portraits, produced in Holland in 1686, of the twenty-four persons most guilty of procuring the revocation of the wise edict of Henry IV., which secured to French Protestants the right to practice their religion. The work was entitled "La Procession Monacale conduite par Louis XIV. pour la Conversion des Protestans de son Royaume." The king, accordingly, leads the way, his face a sun in a monk's cowl, in allusion to his adoption of the sun as a device. Madame De Maintenon, his married mistress, hideously caricatured, follows. Père la Chaise, and all the ecclesiastics near the court who were reputed to have urged on the ignorant old king to this superlative folly, had their place in the procession. Several of the faces are executed with a freedom and power not common in any age, but at that period only possible to a French hand. Two specimens are given on the following page.

Louis XIV., as the caricature collections alone would suffice to show, was the conspicuous man of that painful period. The caricaturists avenged human nature. No man of the time called forth so many efforts of the satiric pencil, nor was there ever a person better adapted to the satirist's purpose, for he furnished precisely those contrasts which satire can exhibit most effectively. He stood five feet four in his stockings, but his shoe-maker put four inches of leather under his heels, and his wig-maker six inches of other people's hair upon his head, which gave him an imposing altitude. The beginning of his reign was prosperous enough to give some slight excuse for the most richlydeveloped arrogance seen in the world since Xerxes lashed the Hellespont, but the last third of his reign was a collapse that could easily be made to seem ludicrous. There were very obvious contrasts in those years between the splendors of his barbaric court and the disgraceful defeats of his armies, between the opinion he cherished of himself and the contempt in which he was held abroad, between the adulations of his courtiers and the execrations of France, between the mass-attending and the morals of the court.

Archbishop of Paris—A Better Friend to Ladies than to the Pope.(Holland, 1686. By an Exiled Huguenot.)

Archbishop of Rheims—Mitred Ass.(Holland, 1686. After the Expulsion of the Huguenots.)

The caricaturists made the most of these points. Every town that he lost, every victory that Marlborough won, gave them an opportunity which they improved. We have him as a huge yellow sun, each ray of which bears an inscription referring to some defeat, folly, or shame. We have him as a jay, covered with stolen plumage, which his enemies are plucking from him, each feather inscribed with the name of alostcity or fortress. We have him as the Crier of Versailles, crying the ships lost in the battle of La Hogue, and offering rewards for their recovery. He figures as the Gallic cock flying before that wise victorious fox of England, William III., and as a pompous drummer leading his army, and attended by his ladies and courtiers. He is an old French Apollo driving the sun, in wig and spectacles. He is a tiger on trial before the other beasts for his cruel depredations. He is shorn and fooled by Maintenon; he is bridled by Queen Anne. He is shown drinking a goblet of human blood. We see him in the stocks with his confederate, the Pope, and the devil standing behind, knocking their heads together. He is a sick man vomiting up towns. He is a sawyer, who, with the help of the King of Spain, saws the globe in two, Maintenon sitting aloft assisting the severance. As long as he lived the caricaturists continued to assail him; and when he died, in 1715, he left behind him a France so demoralized and impoverished that he still kept the satirists busy.

Caricature of Louis XIV., by Thackeray.

Even in our own time Louis XIV. has suggested one of the best caricatures ever drawn, and it is accompanied by an explanatory essay almost unique among prose satires for bitter wit and blasting truth. The same hand wielded both the pen and the pencil, and it was the wonderful hand of Thackeray. "You see at once," he says, in explanation of the picture, "that majesty is made out of the wig, the high-heeled shoes, and cloak, allfleurs-de-lisbespangled.... Thus do barbers and cobblers make the gods that we worship."

It was the bubble mania of 1719 and 1720, brought upon Europe by John Law, which completed the "secularization" of caricature. Art, as well as literature, learning, and science, was subservient to religion during the Middle Ages, and drew its chief nourishment from Mother Church. Since the Reformation they have all been obliged to pass through a painful process of weaning, and each in turn to try for an independent existence. The bubble frenzy, besides giving an impulse to the caricaturist's art it had not before received, withdrew attention from ecclesiastical subjects, and supplied abundant material drawn from sources purely mundane.

"Shares! Shares! Shares!"The Night Share-crier and his Magic Lantern. A Caricature of John Law and his Bubble Schemes. (Amsterdam, 1720.)

"Shares! Shares! Shares!"

The Night Share-crier and his Magic Lantern. A Caricature of John Law and his Bubble Schemes. (Amsterdam, 1720.)

Above all, the pictures which that mania called forth assisted to form the great satiric artist of his time and country, William Hogarth. He was a London apprentice carving coats of arms on silver plate when the early symptoms of the mania appeared; and he was still a very young man, an engraver, feeling his way to the career that awaited him, when the broadsheets satirizing John Law began to be "adapted" from Dutch originals, and shown in the shop-windows of London. Doubtless he inspected the picture of the "NightShare-crier," opposite, and noticed the cock's feather in his hat (indicating the French origin of the delusion), and the windmill upon the top of his staff. The Dutch pictures were full of that detail and by-play of which Hogarth was such a master in later years.

Visitors to New York who saw tumultuous Wall Street during the worst of our inflation period, and, following the crowd up-town, entered the Gold-room, where the wild speculation of the day was continued till midnight, may have flattered themselves that they were looking upon scenes never before exhibited in this world. What a strange intensity of excitement there was in those surging masses of young men! What fierce outcries! What a melancholy waste of youthful energies, so much needed elsewhere! But there was nothing new in all this, except that we passed the crisis withlessloss andlessdemoralization than any community ever before experienced in circumstances at all similar.

When Louis XIV. died in 1715, after his reign of seventy-two years, he left the finances of France in a condition of inconceivable disorder. For fourteen years there had been an average annual deficit of more than fourteen millions of francs, to meet which the king had raised money by every paper device that had then been discovered. Having previously sold all the offices for which any pretext could be invented, he next sold annuities of all kinds, for one life, for two lives, for three lives, and in perpetuity. Then he issued all known varieties of promises to pay, fromrentes perpétuellesto treasury-notes of a few francs, payable on demand. But there was one thing he did not do—reduce the expenditure of his enormous and extravagant court. In the midst of that deficit, when his ministers were at their wits' end to carry on the government from day to day, and half the lackeys of Paris held the depreciated royal paper, the old king ordered one more of those magnificent fêtes at Fontainebleau which had, as he thought, shed such lustre on his reign. The fête would cost four millions, the treasury was empty, and treasury-notes had fallen to thirty-five. While an anxious minister was meditating the situation, he chanced to see in his inner office two valets slyly scanning the papers on his desk, for the purpose, as he instantly conjectured, of getting news for the speculators. He conceived an idea. The next time those enterprising valets found themselves alone in the same cabinet, they were so happy as to discover on the desk the outlines of a royal lottery scheme for the purpose of paying off a certain class of treasury-notes. The news was soon felt in the street. Those notes mysteriously rose in a few days from thirty-five to eighty-five; and while they were at that point the minister, anticipating the Fiskian era, slipped upon the market thirty millions of the same notes. The king had his fête; and when next he borrowed money of his subjects, for every twenty-five francs of coin he was obliged to give a hundred-franc note.[18]

Two years after, the foolish old king died, leaving, besides a consolidated debt of bewildering magnitude, a floating debt, then due and overdue, of seven hundred and eighty-nine millions, equivalent, as M. Cochut computes, to about twice the amount in money of to-day. Coin had vanished; the royal paper was at twenty-five; the treasury was void; prices were distressingly high; some provinces refused to pay taxes; trade languished; there were vast numbers of workmen unemployed; and during the winter after the king's death a considerable number of persons died in Paris of cold and hunger. The only prosperous people were Government contractors, farmers of the revenue, brokers, and speculators in the king's paper; and these classes mocked the misery of their fellow-citizens by an ostentatious and tasteless profusion.

Island of Madhead."Picture of the very famous Island of Madhead. Situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by a multitude of all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders." (Amsterdam, 1720.)

Island of Madhead.

"Picture of the very famous Island of Madhead. Situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by a multitude of all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders." (Amsterdam, 1720.)

The natural successor of a king bigoted is a prince dissolute. The regent, who had to face this state of things on behalf of his nephew, Louis XV., a child of five, had at least the virtue and good sense to reject with indignant scorn the proposition made in his council by one member to declare France bankrupt and begin a new reign by opening a clean set of books. We, too, had our single repudiator, who fared no better than his French predecessor. But the regent's next measures were worthy of a prodigal. He called in the various kinds of public paper, and offered in exchange a new variety, calledbillets d'état, bearing interest at four per cent. But the public not responding to the call, the new bills fell to forty in twenty-four hours, and drew downall other public paper, until in a few days the royal promise to pay one hundred francs was worth twenty francs. The regent's coffers did not fill. That scarred veterans could not get their pensions paid was an evil which could be borne; but the regent had mistresses to appease!

Then he tried a system ofsqueezingthe rich contractors and others of the vermin class who batten on a sick body-politic. As informers were to have half the product of the squeeze, an offended lackey had only to denounce his master, to get him tried on a charge of having made too much money. Woe to the plebeian who was convicted of this crime! Besides being despoiled of his property, Paris saw him, naked to the shirt, a rope round his neck, a penitential candle in his handcuffed hands, tied to a dirty cart and dragged to the pillory, carrying on his back a large label, "Plunderer of the People." The French pillory was a revolving platform, so that all the crowd had an equal chance to hurl mud and execration at the fixed and pallid face. Judge if there was not a making haste to compound with a government capable of such squeezing! There was also a mounting in hot haste to get out of such a France. One lucky merchant crossed the frontier, dressed as a peasant, driving a cart-load of straw, under which was a chest of gold. A train of fourteen carts loaded with barrels of wine was stopped, and in each barrel a keg of gold was found, which was emptied into the royal treasury.

The universal consternation and the utter paralysis of business which resulted from these violent spoliations may be imagined. Six thousand persons were tried, who confessed to the possession of twelve hundred millions of francs. The number of the condemned was four thousand four hundred and ten, and the sum extorted from them was, nominally, nearly four hundred millions, of which, however, less than one hundred millions reached the treasury. It was easy for a rich man to compound. A person condemned to disgorge twelve hundred thousand francs was visited by a "great lord." "Give me three hundred thousand francs," said the great lord, "and you won't be troubled for the rest." To which the merchant replied, "Really, my lord, you come too late, for I have already made a bargain with madame, your wife, for a hundred and fifty thousand." Thus the business of busy and frugal France was brought to a stand without relieving the Government. The royal coffers would not fill; the deficit widened; the royal paper still declined; the poor were hungry; and, oh, horror! the regent's mistresses pouted. The Government debased the coin. But that, too, proved an aggravation of the evil.

Such was thatancien régimewhich still has its admirers; such are the consequences of placing a great nation under the rule of the greatest fool in it; and such were the circumstances which gave the Scotch adventurer, John Law, his opportunity to madden and despoil France, so often a prey to the alien.

Two hundred years ago, when John Law, a rich goldsmith's son, was a boy in Edinburgh, goldsmiths were dealers in coin as well as in plate, and hence were bankers and brokers as well as manufacturers. They borrowed, lent, exchanged,and assayed money, and therefore possessed whatever knowledge of finance there was current in the world. It was in his father's counting-room that John Law acquired that taste for financial theories and combinations which distinguished him even in his youth. But the sagacious and practical goldsmith died when his son was fourteen, and left him a large inheritance in land and money. The example of Louis XIV. and Charles II. having brought the low vices into high fashion throughout Europe, it is not surprising that Law's first notoriety should have been owing to a duel about a mistress. A man of fashion in Europe in Louis XIV.'s time was a creature gorgeously attired in lace and velvet, and hung about with ringlets made of horse-hair, who passed his days in showing the world how much there was in him of the goat, the monkey, and the pig. Law had the impudence to establish his mistress in a respectable lodging-house, which led to his being challenged by a gentleman who had a sister living there. Law killed his man on the field—"not fairly," as John Evelyn records—and he was convicted of murder. The king pardoned, but detained him in prison, from which he escaped, went to the Continent, and resumed his career, being at once a man of fashion, a gambler, and a connoisseur in finance. He used to attend card-parties, followed by a footman carrying two bags, each containing two thousand louis-d'ors, and once during the life-time of the old king he was ordered out of Paris on the ground that he "understood the games he had introduced into the capitaltoo well."

Twenty years elapsed from the time of his flight from a London prison. He was forty-four years of age, possessed nearly a million and three-quarters of francs in cash, producible on the green cloth at a day's notice, and was the most plausible talker on finance in Europe. This last was a bad symptom, indeed, for it is well known that men who remain victors in finance, who really do extricate estates and countries from financial difficulties, are not apt to talk very effectively on the subject. Successful finance is little more than paying your debts and living within your income, neither of which affords material for striking rhetoric. Alexander Hamilton, for example, talked finance in a taking manner; but it was Albert Gallatin who quietly reduced the country's debt. Fifteen days after the death of the old king, Law was in Paris with all that he possessed, and in a few months he was deep in the confidence of the regent. His fine person, his winning manners, his great wealth, his constant good fortune, his fluent and plausible tongue, his popular vices, might not have sufficed to give him ascendency if he had not added to these the peculiar force that is derived from sincerity. That he believed in his own "system" is shown by his risking his whole fortune in it. And it is to his credit that the first use he made of his influence was to show that the spoliations, the debasing of the coin, and all measures that inspired terror, and thus tightened unduly the clutch upon capital, could not but aggravate financial distress.

His "system" was delightfully simple. Bear in mind that almost every one in Paris who had any property at all held the king's paper, worth one-quarteror one-fifth of its nominal value. Whatever project Law set on foot, whether a royal bank, a scheme for settling and trading with Louisiana, for commerce with the East Indies, or farming the revenues, any one could buy shares in it on terms like these: one-quarter of the price in coin, and three-quarters in paper at its nominal value.

The system was not immediately successful, and it was only in the teeth of powerful opposition that he could get his first venture, the bank, so much as authorized. Mark how clearly one of the council, the Duc de Saint-Simon, comprehended the weakness of a despotism to which he owed his personal importance. "An establishment," said he, "of the kind proposed may be in itself good; but it is so only in a republic, or in such a monarchy as England, wherethe finances are controlled absolutely by those who furnish the money, and who furnish only as much of it as they choose, and in the way they choose. But in a light and changing government like that of France, solidity would be necessarily wanting, since a king or, in his name, a mistress, a minister, favorites, and, still more, an extreme necessity, could overturn the bank, which would present a temptation at once too great and too easy." Law, therefore, was obliged to alter his plan, and give his bank at first a board of directors not connected with the Government.

Gradually the "system" made its way. The royal paper beginning to rise in value, the holders were in good humor, and disposed to buy into other projects on similar terms. The Louisiana scheme may serve as an example of Law's method. Six years before, a great merchant of Paris, Antoine Crozat, had bought from the old king the exclusive right to trade with a vast unknown region in North America called Louisiana; but after five years of effort and loss he became discouraged, and offered to sell his right to the creator of the bank. Law, accepting the offer, speedily launched a magnificent scheme: capital one hundred millions of francs, in shares of five hundred francs, purchasablewhollyin those new treasury-notes bearing four per cent. interest, then at a discount of seventy per cent. Maps of this illimitable virgin land were published. Pictures were exhibited, in which crowds of interesting naked savages, male and female, were seen running up to welcome arriving Frenchmen; and under the engraving a gaping Paris crowd could read, "In this land are seen mountains filled with gold, silver, copper, lead, quicksilver; and the savages, not knowing their value, gladly exchange pieces of gold and silver for knives, iron pots, a small looking-glass, or even a little brandy." One picture was addressed to pious souls; for even at that early day, as at present, there was occasionally observed a curious alliance between persons engaged in the promotion of piety and those employed in the pushing of shares. This work exhibited a group of Indians kneeling before some reverend fathers of the Society of Jesus. Under it was written, "Indian Idolaters imploring Baptism."

Speculative Map of Louisiana.

The excitement, once kindled, was stimulated by lying announcements ofthe sailing of great fleets for Louisiana laden with merchandise and colonists; of the arrival of vessels with freights worth "millions;" of the establishment of a silk-factory, wherein twelve thousand women of the Natchez tribe were employed; of the bringing of Louisiana ingots to the Mint to be assayed; of the discovery in Arkansas of a great rock of emerald, and the dispatch of Captain Laharpe with a file of twenty-two men to take possession of the same. In 1718 Law sent engineers to Louisiana, who did something toward laying out its future capital, which he named New Orleans, in honor of his patron, the regent.

The royal paper rose rapidly under this new demand. Other schemes followed, until John Law, through his various companies, seemed about to "run" the kingdom of France by contract, farming all its revenues, transacting all its commerce, and, best of all, paying all its debts! Madness, ruled the hour. The depreciated paper rose, rose, and still rose; reached par; went beyond par, until gold and silver were at a discount of ten per cent. The street named Quincampoix, the centre and vortex of this whirl of business, a mere lane twenty feet wide and a quarter of a mile long, was crowded with excited people from morning till night, and far into the night, so that the inhabitants of thequarter sent to the police a formal complaint that they could get no sleep. Nobles, lackeys, bishops, monks, merchants, soldiers, women, pickpockets, foreigners, all resorted toLa Rue, "panting, yelling, operating, snatching papers, counting crowns," making up a scene of noisy confusion unexampled. One man hired all the vacant houses in the street, and made a fortune by subletting offices and desk-room, even placing sentry-boxes on some of the roofs, and letting them at a good price. The excitement spread over France, reached Holland, and drew to Paris, as was estimated at the time, five hundred thousand strangers, places in the public vehicles being engaged "two months in advance," and commanding a high premium.

There were the most extraordinary acquisitions of fortune. People suddenly enriched were calledMississippiens, and they behaved as the victims of sudden wealth, unearned, usually do. Men who were lackeys one week kept lackeys the next. Agarçonof a wine-shop gained twenty millions. A cobbler, who had a stall in the Rue Quincampoix made of four planks, cleared away his traps and let his boards to ladies as seats, and sold pens, paper, and ink to operators, making two hundred francs a day by both trades. Men gained money by hiring out their backs as writing-desks, bending over while operators wrote out their contracts and calculations. One little hunchback made a hundred and fifty thousand francs by thus serving as apupitre ambulant(strolling desk), and a broad-shouldered soldier gained money enough in the same way to buy his discharge and retire to the country upon a pretty farm. The general trade of the city was stimulated to such a degree that for a while the novel spectacle was presented of a community almost every member of which was prosperous beyond his hopes; for even in the Rue Quincampoix itself, although some men gained more money than others, no one appeared to lose any thing. And all this seemed the work of one man, the great, the incomparable "Jean Lass," as he was then called in Paris. It was a social distinction to be able to say, "I have seen him!" His carriage could with difficulty force its way through the rapturous, admiring crowd. Princes and nobles thronged his antechamber, a duchess publicly kissed his hand, and the regent made him controller-general of the finances.

This madness lasted eight months. No one needs to be told what followed it—how a chill first came over the feverish street, a vague apprehension, not confessed, but inspiring a certain wish to "realize." Dread word,REALIZE! The tendency to realize was adroitly checked by Law, aided by operators who desired to "unload;" but the unloading, once suspected, converted the realizing tendency into a wild, ungovernable rush, which speedily brought ruin to thousands, and long prostration upon France. John Law, who in December, 1719, was the idol of Paris, ready to perish of his celebrity, escaped with difficulty from the kingdom in December, 1720, hated, despised, impoverished, to resume his career as elegant gambler in the drawing-rooms of Germany and Italy.

As the "system" collapsed in France, it acquired vogue in England, where,also, it originated in the desire to get rid of the public debt by brilliant finance instead of the homely and troublesome method of paying it. In London, besides the original South Sea Company which began the frenzy, there were started in the course of a few months about two hundred joint-stock schemes, many of which, as given in Anderson's "History of Commerce," are of almost incredible absurdity. The sum called for by these projects was three hundred millions of pounds sterling, which was more than the value of all the land in Great Britain. Shares in Sir Richard Steele's "fish-pool for bringing fresh fish to London" brought one hundred and sixty pounds a share! Men paid seventy pounds each for "permits," which gave them merely theprivilegeof subscribing to a sail-cloth manufacturing company not yet formed. There was, indeed, a great trade in "permits" to subscribe to companies only planned. Here are a few of the schemes: for raising hemp in Pennsylvania; "Puckle's machine gun;" settling the Bahamas; "wrecks to be fished for on the Irish coast;" horse and cattle insurance; "insurance and improvement of children's fortunes;" "insurance of losses by servants;" "insurance against theft and robbery;" insuring remittances; "to make salt-water fresh;" importing walnut-trees from Virginia; improving the breed of horses; purchasing forfeited estates; making oil from sunflowers; planting mulberry-trees and raising silk-worms; extracting silver from lead; making quicksilver malleable; capturing pirates; "for importing a number of large jackasses from Spain in order to propagate a larger kind of mules;" trading in human hair; "for fatting of hogs;" "for the encouragement of the industrious;" perpetual motion; making pasteboard; furnishing funerals.

There was even a company formed and shares sold for carrying out an "undertaking which shall in due time be revealed." The word "puts," now so familiar in Wall Street, appears in these transactions of 1720. "Puts and refusals" were sold in vast amounts. The prices paid for shares during the half year of this mania were as remarkable as the schemes themselves. South Sea shares of a hundred pounds par value reached a thousand pounds. It was a poor share that did not sell at five times its original price. As in France, so in England, the long heads, like Sir Robert Walpole and Alexander Pope, began to think of "realizing" when they had gained a thousand per cent. or so upon their ventures; and, in a very few days, realizing, in its turn, became a mania; and all those paper fortunes shrunk and crumpled into nothingness.

So many caricatures of these events appeared in Amsterdam and London during the year 1720 that the collection in the British Museum, after the lapse of a hundred and fifty-five years, contains more than a hundred specimens. I have myself eighty, several of which include from six to twenty-four distinct designs. Like most of the caricatures of that period, they are of great size, and crowded with figures, each bearing its label of words, with a long explanation in verse or prose at the bottom of the sheet. As a rule, they are destitute of the point that can make a satirical picture interesting after the occasion ispast. In one we see the interior of an Exchange filled with merchants running wildly about, each uttering words appropriate to the situation: "To-day I have gained ten thousand!" "Who has money to lend at two per cent.?" "A strait-jacket is what I shall want;" "Damned is this wind business." This picture, which originated in Amsterdam, is called "The Wind-buyers paid in Wind," and it contains at the bottom three columns of explanatory verse in Dutch, of which the following is the purport:

John Law, Wind Monopolist.(Amsterdam, 1720.)"Law loquitur.The wind is my treasure, cushion, and foundation. Master of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly becomes straightway the object of idolatry. Less rapidly turn the sails of the windmill on my head than the price of shares in my foolish enterprises."

John Law, Wind Monopolist.(Amsterdam, 1720.)

"Law loquitur.The wind is my treasure, cushion, and foundation. Master of the wind, I am master of life, and my wind monopoly becomes straightway the object of idolatry. Less rapidly turn the sails of the windmill on my head than the price of shares in my foolish enterprises."

"Come, gentlemen, weavers, peasants, tailors! Whoever has relied on wind for his profit can find his picture here. They rave like madmen. See the French, the English, the Hebrew, and Jack of Bremen! Hear what a scream the absurd Dutch are making on the exchange of Europe! There is Fortune throwing down some charming wishes to silly mortals, while virtue, art, and intellect are despised and impoverished in the land; shops and counting-houses are empty; trade is ruined. All this isQuincampoix!"

The Dutch caricaturists recurred very often to thewindycharacter of theshare business. In several of their works we see a puffy wind-god blowing up pockets to a great size, inflating share-bags, and wafting swiftly along vehicles with spacious sails. The bellows play a conspicuous and not always decorous part. Jean Law is exhibited as a "wind monopolist." In one picture he appears assisting Atlas and others to bear up great globes of wind. Kites are flying and windmills revolving in several pictures. Pigeons fly away with shares in their bills. The hunchback who served as a walking desk is repeated many times. The Tower of Babel, the mad-house, the hospital, the whirligig, a garden maze, the lottery wheel, the drum, the magic lantern, the soap-bubble, the bladder, dice, the swing—whatever typifies pretense, uncertainty, or confusion was brought into the service. One Dutch broadsheet (sixteen inches by twenty), now before me, contains fifty-four finely executed designs, each of which burlesques a scene in Law's career, or a device of his finance, the whole making a pack of "wind cards for playing a game of wind."

Most of the Dutch pictures were "adapted" into English, and the adapters added verses which, in some instances, were better than the caricatures. A few of the shorter specimens may be worth the space they occupy, and give the reader a feeling of the situation not otherwise attainable. Of the pictures scarcely one would either bear or reward reduction, so large are they, so crowded with objects, and their style uninterestingly obsolete or boorishly indecent.

On Puckle's Machine Gun:

"A rare invention to destroy the crowdOf fools at home instead of foes abroad.Fear not, my friends, this terrible machine—They're only wounded that have shares therein."

On the Saltpetre Company (two and sixpence a share):

"Buy petre stock, let me be your adviser;'Twill make you, though not richer, much the wiser."

On the German Timber Company:

"You that are rich and hasty to be poor,Buy timber export from the German shore;For gallowses built up of foreign wood,If rightly used, will do Change Alley good."

On the Pennsylvania Company:

"Come all ye saints that would for little buyGreat tracts of land, and care not where they lie;Deal with your Quaking Friends; they're men of light;Their spirit hates deceit and scorns to bite."

On the Ship-building Company:

"To raise fresh barks must surely be amusing,When hundreds rot in docks for want of using."

On Settling the Bahamas:

"Rare, fruitful isles, where not an ass can findA verdant tuft or thistle to his mind.How, then, must those poor silly asses fareThat leave their native land to settle there?"

On a South Sea Speculator imploring Alms through his Prison Bars:

"Behold a poor dejected wretch,Who kept a S—— Sea coach of late,But now is glad to humbly catchA penny at the prison grate."What ruined numbers daily mournTheir groundless hopes and follies past,Yet see not how the tables turn,Or where their money flies at last!"Fools lost when the directors won,But now the poor directors lose;And where the S—— Sea stock will run,Old Nick, the first projector, knows."

"Behold a poor dejected wretch,Who kept a S—— Sea coach of late,But now is glad to humbly catchA penny at the prison grate.

"What ruined numbers daily mournTheir groundless hopes and follies past,Yet see not how the tables turn,Or where their money flies at last!

"Fools lost when the directors won,But now the poor directors lose;And where the S—— Sea stock will run,Old Nick, the first projector, knows."

On a Picture of Change Alley:

"Five hundred millions, notes and bonds,Our stocks are worth in value;But neither lie in goods, or lands,Or money, let me tell ye.Yet though our foreign trade is lost,Of mighty wealth we vapor,When all the riches that we boastConsist in scraps of paper."

On a "Permit:"

"You that have money and have lost your wits,If you'd be poor, buy National Permits;Their stock's in fish, the fish are still in water,And for your coin you may go fish hereafter."

On a Roomful of Ladies buying Stocks of a Jew and a Gentile:

"With Jews and Gentiles, undismayed,Young tender virgins mix;Of whiskers nor of beards afraid,Nor all their cozening tricks."Bright jewels, polished once to deckThe fair one's rising breast,Or sparkle round her ivory neck,Lie pawned in iron chest."The gentle passions of the mindHow avarice controls!E'en love does now no longer findA place in female souls."

"With Jews and Gentiles, undismayed,Young tender virgins mix;Of whiskers nor of beards afraid,Nor all their cozening tricks.

"Bright jewels, polished once to deckThe fair one's rising breast,Or sparkle round her ivory neck,Lie pawned in iron chest.

"The gentle passions of the mindHow avarice controls!E'en love does now no longer findA place in female souls."

On a Picture of a Man laughing at an Ass browsing:

"A wise man laughed to see an assEat thistles and neglect good grass.But had the sage beheld the follyOf late transacted in Change Alley,He might have seen worse asses thereGive solid gold for empty air,And sell estates in hopes to doubleTheir fortunes by some worthless bubble,Till of a sudden all was lostThat had so many millions cost.Yet ruined fools are highly pleasedTo see the knaves that bit 'em squeezed,Forgetting where the money fliesThat cost so many tears and sighs."

On the Silk Stocking Company:

"Deal not in stocking shares, because, I doubt,Those that buy most will ere long go without."

These Dutch-English pictures William Hogarth, we may be sure, often inspected as they successively courted public notice in the shops of London, as we see in his early works a character evidently derived from them. During the bubble period of 1720, he was an ambitious young engraver and sign-painter (at least willing to paint signs if a job offered),[19]much given to penciling likenesses and strange attitudes upon his thumb-nail, to be transferred, on reaching home, to paper, and stored away for future use. He was one of those quick draughtsmen who will sketch you upon the spot a rough caricature of any odd person, group, or event that may have excited the mirth of the company; a young fellow somewhat undersized, with an alert, vigorous frame, a bright, speaking eye, a too quick tongue and temper, self-confident, but honest, sturdy, and downright in all his words and ways. "But I was a good paymaster eventhen" he once said, with just pride, after speaking of the days when he sometimes walked London streets without a shilling in his pocket.

Hogherdwas the original name of the family, which was first humanized into Hogert and Hogart, and then softened into its present form. In Westmoreland, where Hogarth's grandfather cultivated a farm—small, but his own—the first syllable of the name was pronounced like that of the domestic animals which his remote ancestors may have herded. There was a vein of talent in the family, an uncle of Hogarth's having been the song-writer and satirist of his village, and his own father emerging from remote and most rustic Westmoreland to settle in London as a poor school-master and laborious, ill-requited compiler of school-books and proof-reader. A Latin dictionary of his making existed in manuscript after the death of the artist, and a Latin letter written by him is one of the curiosities in the British Museum. But he remained always a poor man, and could apprentice his boy only to an engraver of the lowest grade known to the art. But this sufficed for a lad who could scarcely touch paper with a pencil without betraying his gift, who drew capital burlesques upon his nail when he was fifteen, and entertained Addison's coffee-house with a caricature of its landlord when he was twenty-two.

The Sleeping Congregation.(Hogarth.)

The earliest work by this greatest English artist of his century, which hasbeen preserved in the British Museum (1720), shows the bent of his genius as plainly as the first sketch by Boz betrays the quality of Dickens. It is called "Design for a Shop-bill," and was probably Hogarth's own shop-bill, his advertisement to the public that he was able and willing to paint signs. In those days, the school-master not having yet gone "abroad," signs were usually pictorial, and sometimes consisted of the popular representation of the saint having special charge of the business to be recommended. In Hogarth's shop-bill we see a tall man holding up a newly painted sign of St. Luke with his ox and book, at which a group of persons are looking, while Hogarth himself appears to be showing the sign to them as possible customers. Along the bottom of the sign is engravedW. Hogarth, Painter. In the background is seen an artist painting at an easel and a boy grinding colors. He could not even inthis first homely essay avoid giving his work something of a narrative character. He must exhibit a story with humorous details. So in his caricature of Daniel Button, drawn to ridicule the Tory frequenters of Button's coffee-house, he relates an incident as well as burlesques individuals. There stands Master Button in his professional apron, with powdered wig and frilled shirt; and opposite to him a tall, seedy, stooping scholar or poet is storming at the landlord with clinched fists, because he will not let him have a cup of coffee without the money. There is also the truly Hogarthian incident of a dog smelling suspiciously the poet's coat tail. Standing about the room are persons whom tradition reports to have been intended as portraits of Pope, Steele, Addison, Arbuthnot, and others of Button's famous customers. This drawing, executed with a brush, is also preserved in the British Museum. Daniel Button, as Dr. Johnson reports, had once been a servant in the family of the Countess of Warwick, and was placed in the coffee-house by Addison. A writer in theSpectatoralludes to this haunt of the Tories: "I was a Tory at Button's and a Whig at Child's."

The South Sea delusion drew from Hogarth his first engraved caricature. Among the Dutch engravings of 1720, called forth by the schemes of John Law, there was one in which the victims were represented in a merry-go-round, riding in revolving cars or upon wooden horses, the whole kept in motion by a horse ridden by the devil. The picture presents also the usual multitude of confusing details, such as the Dutch mad-house in the distance, with a long train of vehicles going toward it. In availing himself of this device the young Londoner showed much of that skill in the arrangement of groups, and that fertility in the invention of details, which marked his later works. His whirligig revolves higher in the air than in the Dutch picture, enabling him to show his figures clear of the crowd below, and instead of the devil on horseback giving the motion, he assigns that work more justly to the directors of the South Sea Company. Thus he has room and opportunity to impart a distinct character to most of his figures. We see perched aloft on the wooden horses about to be whirled around, a nobleman with his broad ribbon, a shoe-black, an old woman, a wigged clergyman, and a woman of the town. With his usual uncompromising humor, Hogarth places these last two characters next to one another, and while the clergyman ogles the woman, she chucks him under the chin. There is a world of accessories: a devil exhaling fire, standing behind a counter and cutting pieces of flesh from the body of Fortune and casting them to a hustling crowd of Catholic, Puritan, and Jew; Self-Interest breaking Honesty upon a wheel; a crowd of women rushing pell-mell into an edifice gabled with horns, and bearing the words, "Raffling for Husbands with Lottery Fortunes in here;" Honor in the pillory flogged by Villainy; an ape wearing a sword and cap. The scene chosen by the artist for these remarkable events is the open space in which the monument stands, then fresh and new, which commemorates the Great Fire; but he slylychanges the inscription thus: "This Monument was erected in Memory of the Destruction of this City by the South Sea in 1720."

Hogarth, engraver and sign-painter though he may have been, was all himself in this amusing and effective piece. If the Dutch picture and Hogarth's could be placed here side by side, the reader would have before him an interesting example of the honest plagiarism of genius, which does not borrow gold and merely alter the stamp, but converts a piece of crude ore into a Toledo blade. Unfortunately, both pictures are too large and crowded to admit of effective reduction.

In this, his first published work, the audacious artist availed himself of an expedient which heightened the effect of most of his later pictures. He introduced portraits of living persons. Conspicuous in the foreground of the South Sea caricature, among other personages now unknown, is the diminutive figure of Alexander Pope, who was one of the few lucky speculators of the year 1720. At least, he withdrew in time to save half the sum which he once thought he had made. The gloating rake in the first picture of the "Harlot's Progress" is that typical reprobate of eighteenth-century romances, Colonel Francis Charteris, upon whom Arbuthnot wrote the celebrated epitaph, which, it is to be hoped, is itself a caricature:

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