The Second Pretender's rebellion was fruitful
in caricatures, of which the most famous is
Hogarth's March of the Guards to Finchley, on
their way to the north. The city trained bands
were at this period made the subject of much
disrespectful joking; indeed they had a hard
time of it during the whole of the century,
down to the days when Cowper had his
fling at them in Johnny Gilpin. After the
suppression of the formidable rising in Scotland,
the caricaturists seem for a long while
to have divided their attention between the
politics of the hour, and the eccentricities of
fashion, or other social topics: giving quite as
much attention to the latter as to the former.
This was the epoch of Hogarth's great productions,
in which comic art was raised to the highest
level. But, though Hogarth had no equal, he
had contemporaries of considerable ability as
fugitive caricaturists. We see much of their
work in Mr. Wright's volume, and it gives us
no mean idea of their readiness and skill.
It is curious to observe how long the feeling of
antagonism to the House of Hanover, as
something foreign and degrading, lasted with a
large proportion of the people. In several of
these caricatures the British Lion is represented
in various ignominious positions relatively to
the Hanoverian White Horse. Politics, however,
as in most times, frequently gave place to
social matters. The rivalries of Garrick and
other eminent actors; the quackery and
insolence of Dr. Hill, a surgeon and journalist, who
made some little name, about the middle of the
century, by his scurrility and assurance; the
egregious hoax of the Bottle Conjuror at the
Haymarket Theatre; the earthquake of 1750,
the apprehension of which threw all London
into spasms of terror, but which, when it came,
proved to be so gentle that, as Horace
Walpole said, "you might have stroked it;" the
Betty Canning Mystery; the Cock-lane Ghost;
the rage for Handel and other foreign
musicians; the extravagance of the rich, and the
exaggerations of fashion; these were favourite
subjects with the caricaturists of the time of
George the Second and of the early years of
George the Third. Towards the conclusion of
the former reign, and for some time after,
great complaints were made of the profligacy
of manners, and of the evils introduced into
the country by the importation of French
modes and tastes. It cannot be questioned
that the grievance was a serious one, and
that our national morals were never more
depraved, shameless, and impudently coarse, than
at the period in question. Young men of
fashion, having made the grand tour— often in
company with tutors who were proficients in
every species of debauchery—returned to
England worse than they left it, and propagated
at home the vices they had learnt abroad.
Even though we may not accept as a true
picture, in any general sense, the terrible account
given by Churchill, in his poem called The Times,
we must yet allow that society in the middle of
the eighteenth century was deplorably corrupt.
The Hell-fire Club, and other associations of a
similar character, maintained a standard of
villany which every young rake did his utmost
to reach; the ladies were often as bad as the
gentlemen; masked balls and open-air
entertainments at Vauxhall and Ranelagh,
contributed to the general laxity of morals; and the
style of female dress reflected the spirit of the
epoch. The hoops, which had been large enough
in the days of George the First, became much
more outrageous in the next reign; and a
contemporary caricature represents a lady being let
down with a crane and pulley into her sedan
chair by three assistants, who carefully lower
her through the open roof. The head-dresses
were equally absurd. They were piled up to an
enormous height by the aid of false hair,
cushions, pins, pomatum, feathers, ribbons, and
artificial flowers; and very singular are the
pictures we here find of the fantastic forms
they were made to assume. The men soon
rivalled the women in eccentricity of dress. For
a year or two subsequent to 1770, the Macaronis,
as the young beaux for awhile delighted
to call themselves, were the talk of the town, the
rage of the moment, and the subjects of wits
and caricaturists.

Going back a few years, we find Hogarth,
towards the conclusion of his life, involved in a
bitter quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill, the
mortification resulting from which is thought
to have hastened his death. The painter had
received a pension from Lord Bute, who, on
rising to power shortly after the accession of
George the Third, made a great show of
patronising literature and art, though doubtless
with no other object than to procure support
for his ministry, of which it stood greatly in
need. In the fervour of his new-born political
zeal, Hogarth attacked his old friend Wilkes in
Number One of the prints called The Times.
Wilkes retaliated in the North Briton; Churchill
assisted on the same side, in his Epistle to
William Hogarth; and a great many caricatures
were published, representing the painter
performing ignominious services for the minister,
or receiving his pay. Lord Bute is frequently
typified by the comic artists of the time in
the form of a large jack-boot, by way of a
pun upon his title. Smollett, as a paid
advocate of the Scotch favourite, and himself a
Scotchman, was severely ridiculed about this
time; for all our Northern fellow-subjects were
then regarded as Jacobites, or as a set of
hungry adventurers who came to England to
pick up what they could get. The unpopularity
of Lord Bute has hardly ever been equalled; but
it was shared by his fellow ministers, especially
Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, whose
name lent itself very readily to the caricaturists.
On the other hand, Wilkes and Pitt were the
idols of the populace, until Pitt accepted a
place in the Upper House, under the title of
Lord Chatham, when he was looked upon as a
tool of the court party, which was still ruled
in secret by Bute, though that nobleman had
been compelled to retire from the ministry. In
a caricature published about 1770, Wilkes is
pictured as a patriot worried by two dogs, one