Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/405

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"CONFESSION OR CREMORNE?"
311

be recorded. The opposite picture, A Discussion Forum (!) as it is in Reality, shows us a number of foolish, ignorant, harmless youths, smoking pipes, drinking brandy and water, and discussing politics (so far as they are capable of understanding them) in a tavern club-room. Returning once more to his attacks on what he justly deemed the Romanizing tendency of the practices of certain members of the English Church, he gives us the cartoon of Religion à la Mode, in which a handsome woman is about to "confess" to a truculent and knavish looking ritualist. In the distance appears John Bull with his horsewhip, "No, no, Mr. Jack Priest," says he; "after all I have gone through, I am not such a fool as to stand any of this disgusting nonsense." Some sensation was created this year by a private fête which was given by a member of the aristocracy at Cremorne Gardens. It occasioned considerable talk at the time, and as Ritualism was then in the ascendant amongst certain female leaders of fashion, Leech gives us (in vol. xxxv.) a powerful picture, entitled Aristocratic Amusements, in which John Thomas asks his mistress (a magnificent specimen of the artist's handsome women) as he puts up the steps of her carriage, whither she would wish to be driven,—"Confession or Cremorne, my lady?"

Misfortune, the proverb tells us, makes us acquainted with strange associates. The Emperor Louis, during his early exile, had picked up certain undesirable acquaintances, who were in the habit in after life of forcing themselves on his notice after a peculiarly disagreeable and dangerous fashion. His unfaithfulness to the principles of the brotherhood of which he and they had been members, had seriously exercised the minds of certain of these quondam acquaintances, who had given forcible expression to their feelings by attempting his assassination. The pear-shaped hand grenades of Orsini and his fellow-conspirator were the fruit of Louis's early connection with the secret societies of the Carbonari. They indicate the forces which controlled the policy of the Third Napoleon; and obliged him constantly to pick quarrels with his neighbours for the double purpose of employing his army and of keeping the attention of his restless subjects and quondam acquaintances distracted from