It is felt that some justification is needed for the writer's temerity in volunteering as a pioneer to conduct the unsophisticated through the devious and eccentric intricacies which characterise the progress of pictorial satire, as demonstrated in the subject of the work now submitted to the public with all due deference.
The neophyte, it is anticipated, will be somewhat startled at the first glance of the surroundings amidst which he will wander; but it is believed that, in the course of his journey through an anomalous past, he will alight on discoveries, more or less interesting in themselves, which provide abundant food for the student of humanity.
The writer deprecates a hasty conclusion, with the assurance that those who have the moderation to reserve their opinions until they have fully acquainted themselves with the materials, may possibly suffer their critical instincts to be modified in the process.
We have taken the liberty of scrutinising somewhat closely--with a view to the portrayal of its salient features--a generation which was marked with a colouring more intensified than those who live in our time are prepared to adopt. Of this age, diversified with much which has been discarded, we accept Rowlandson as the fitting exponent. His works epitomise a state of being comparatively recent in actual fact, but, from the circumstances of change, so distantly removed in appearance, as to constitute a curious experience to the majority.
With every qualification to ensure success, Rowlandson, as his story indicates, deliberately threw away the serious chances of life, to settle down as the delineator of the transitory impressions of the hour. 'There is wisdom in laughter,' says the sage; and--without precisely regarding life as a 'stale jest'--our artist drew mirth from every situation, and illustrated from his own fecund resources that, while nearly every circumstance has its grotesque as well as its sinister aspect, the ludicrous elements of any given event are often more enduring than the serious ones.
Good-natured pleasantry, we may remind the reader, is held to be wholesome. Rowlandson's shafts, so far as our judgment serves, were never pointed with gall: while he possessed the faculty of seizing the weak or ridiculous side of his subject, he seems, unlike Gillray, his best-known contemporary, to have been an utter stranger to acrimonious instigations. A fuller acquaintanceship reveals the Caricaturist--as he was described in his day--'an inexhaustible folio of amusement, every page of which was replete with fun'--perhaps the most genial travelling companion who could be selected in traversing the ways of life led by our ancestors, for the half-century which witnessed the gradual extinction of the quaint, old-fashioned Georgian era, and inaugurated the less picturesque generation to which our immediate predecessors belong.