George Somes Layard

“ Just imagine the agony of impatience of the political satirist who had designed his broadside and had to await the tardy engraving of the copperplate, to be followed by the deliberate hand-printing and hand-painting of the impressions before they could be published, perhaps only to find in the end that the nine-days’ wonder was past, or that events had blunted his most telling points.
So, too, when satirist was employed against satirist, how hopeless it seemed for retaliation to follow swiftly enough upon the occasion to make any retort in kind worth while at all. ”

“ It may not be out of place here, whilst on the subject of foxing, to warn the collector that every plate in a book should be carefully examined before any extravagant price is given for what is called a fine copy. No doubt we are much indebted to the clever “doctors” of prints who punch the fatal spots out and pulp them in, who fill up the worm-holes and vamp up the cleaned prints with green-wood smoke and coffee infusions to a respectable appearance of age. ”

“ On the space so covered the reckless George, unmindful of the fate of Henry White, had etched the scantily clothed figure of the unhappy valet Sellis, with bleeding throat, crying aloud, “Is this a razor that I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it.”
18 This use of lamp-black has its parallel in the case of one of the tailpieces to Bewick’s Birds, in the first edition of which an apprentice was employed to veil certain indelicacies with a coat of ink. Unfortunately, from want of density, the colouring rather serves to accentuate than hide the offending details. ”

“ As a matter of fact, I had been drawing for Punch twenty years before the invention of Postlethwaite. However, that was Mr. Whistler’s little joke, and one would have thought that if he made jokes about me, he might have expected me to play the same game upon him without anticipating that I should hurt his feelings. Then Mr. Whistler implies that I am a foul friend, stating that I have thought a foul friend a finer fellow than an open enemy. I am neither his friend nor his enemy. ”

“ I am therefore inclined to think that from the first Hogarth, from one cause or another, made up his mind to change the direction of his satire, and at once beat out all the figures on the plate save one. That the arrangement of the new design should coincide generally with that of the first is, I think, no more than one would naturally expect, and does not in any way weaken the argument. ”

“ The days and months have grown to years, And I have dried my childish tears, And half forgotten why they ever ran; My soul is plighted to the sky, And we,—my wrinkled nurse and I,— What matter if we see no more of man? ”

“ Indeed, in this partially suppressed cartoon we find him upon the very verge of recklessness and only drawing back from danger just in the nick of time.
I have spoken of the partial sup­pres­sion of this broadside, and in this partial cancellation it is differentiated from all others with which we have hitherto dealt. Brutal enough as is the satire as we see it, there is a brutality curiously hidden within, which, unsuspected by the uninitiated, proves to what astounding lengths satire of that period was sometimes ready to go. ”

“ George Morland’s work is characterised by its great strength and beauty of colouring. To reproduce so many of his choicest pictures, and bring the book into this series, is no easy matter, but to ensure success the publishers have spared no efforts to make their re­pro­duc­tions worthy of the artist’s work and entirely satisfying to the collector and student.
The collection of pictures reproduced in this volume is thoroughly rep­re­sen­ta­tive, and each illus­tra­tion is a gem; they show the several phases of Morland’s charming scenes of English life in the renowned Academician’s time. ”

“ Whether such appetite represents the very proper ambition to have at his elbow the earliest states of beautiful or interesting books, of which the subsequently suppressed plate or wood engraving is in general a sort of guarantee, or the less defensible desire to possess what our neighbour does not, must be settled by the conscience of each. ”

“ That his prototype was a Marquis of Hertford is axiomatic with all those who have ever taken any interest in the subject; but when we come to inquire which marquis we find that opinions are astonishingly at variance. It would seem almost as though any Marquis of Hertford would serve, whereas in point of fact the portrait would be the grossest libel upon each of that noble line save one ”

“ It is, however, on his work as an etcher that his reputation must chiefly rest, and it would be more than unjust to allow the artist who produced such a tour de force as the great etching of “London from the Greenwich Observatory,” to mention only one of his three hundred and seventy-one works in this medium, to be advertised by an etching, finely conceived it is true, but unsatisfactorily carried to an issue.
Not that these facts will in any way affect the thoroughgoing rarity-hunter in his estimate of the suppressed plate here described. ”

“ There are, of course, ridiculous1 people who value such books as the first issue of the first edition of Dickens’s American Notes just because there is a mistake in the pagination; or a first edition of Disraeli’s Lothair because the prototype of “Monsignor Catesby” is divulged by misprinting the name “Capel”; or Poems by Robert Burns, first Edinburgh Edition, because in the list of subscribers “The Duke of Roxborough” appears as “The Duke of Boxborough”; or Barker’s “Breeches” Bible of 1594, because on the title-page of the New Testament the figures are transposed to 1495 ”

“ IN the last chapter I claim to have introduced the reader to a phase of print-collecting which has in it a sporting element of a peculiarly enticing character. The pursuit of what I have called palimpsest copperplates offers entertainment of the very best to one who would make it a speciality, and, perhaps, the most alluring thing about this curious quarry is that the hunter will never be satisfied after running it to earth until he has secured and coupled it in his portfolio with its necessary and enchanting fellow. ”

“ Turning now to the clerk’s desk, which in Plate I. has the inscription “Cherubim and Seraph [ — ] do cry,” and in Plate II. “Continually do cry,” we find a hideous and brutal-looking clerk singing lustily from a book which he half supports in his claw-like fingers. Supporting him are two winged cherubs, the ridiculous nothingness of whose bodies (so envied by Thackeray in his days of pupilage) is accentuated by the significant addition of ducks’ feet. Their pitiful faces accord with the punning inscription on the edge of the desk. ”

“ There is plenty of room for another Morland book, especially when written by the greatest living authority upon the works of the artist, and where the illus­tra­tions are reproduced, with most excellent results, from masterpieces loaned from private collections hitherto mostly unknown to the artistic public, and of which only a few have either been engraved or gravured—at all events, not before reproduced in colour. ”

“ So much for the episode of the suppressed Trilby illus­tra­tion, which, as we have seen, was complicated by personal con­sid­er­ations.
Let us now turn our attention for a moment to a charming little tailpiece which has fallen a victim, not to the susceptibilities of an individual, but to an undue con­sid­er­ation for the feelings of that most living of Tom Morton’s creations, Mrs. Grundy. It is to be found in the first edition of the immortal Vicar of Wakefield as pictured by Mr. Hugh Thomson. ”

“ Of course, had it been in these days of hurried pub­li­ca­tion, Dickens would hardly have given the matter a second thought. The average illustrator of to-day is curiously superior to the requirements of his author. He either does not read the episodes that he is called upon to il­lus­trate, or, if he reads them, he does not grasp their meaning, or, if he grasps their meaning, the meaning does not meet with his approval. At any rate, he constantly makes a hash of the whole thing. ”

“ The author, at all hazards, must be humoured. His will was paramount, and when he insisted upon Buss’s supersession by H. K. Browne, there was practically an end of the matter. Happily Buss’s labour was not all lost, and it was with much pleasure that I seized the opportunity offered me by the editor of the {32} Magazine of Art in June 1902, to point out in that pub­li­ca­tion how perverse has been the fate which has made the name of an artist of no mean order more familiar by his few failures than by his many successes. ”

“ We will now pass on to another broadside which was not only suppressed in full, but of which the copies that had already been sold were assiduously bought up.
The cir­cum­stances surrounding this plate are by no means so dramatic as those with which we have last dealt. At the same time, by means of it we obtain one of those sharp contrasts in political {70} moods and tenses which pleasurably tickle the imagination. We learn how little is absolute in life, how much is relative. We realise how the reactionary of to-day may have been the reformer of yesterday. ”

“ Let us pause for a moment, then, to recall the particulars of this remarkable co-operation. Early in the ’seventies, Keene, who was often gravelled for humorous subjects on which to exercise his pencil, was by good fortune introduced to the author of Border Notes and Mixty-Maxty, and many other droll books of a like character. This gentleman, always a lover of things quaint, grotesque and jocular, had been for years in the habit of jotting down any telling incident that came in his way, illustrating it at leisure for his {136} own amusement. He was no great artist ”

“ Less unmannerly in some respects doubtless we tend to become, and that perhaps is the very reason (paradoxical though it may sound) why we do not have to search in vain for “modern instances.” For now that Mrs. Grundy is sharper-eyed than she was (not­with­stand­ing her age) , and the libel laws are more closely knit by precedents, slips which would have been treated as passing peccadilloes by our less squeamish forebears rise to the dignity of “copy” for the pressman, and form staple conversation for the insatiate tea-table. ”

“ That every Dickens collector desires to possess one of the seven hundred copies of the first issue of the first edition which contain the Buss plates, is a matter of course, and enough has been said to make clear the reason of such desire. ”

“ It will be enough for him to know that not more than a quarter of a hundred of his rivals can own a proof of the etching to make him ready to sell his last shirt for its acquisition. He will continue to value a print for its rarity rather than for its beauty, {190} a book for its height in millimetres rather than for its depth in thought. ”