The Sun.
London, England, 1855-06-25 00:00:00

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Price Of TWA ~. ...“ , 894 94 , 894 60 504 6d 64 6d 534 9;

1855.

Price of Y. C

"

LITEBATURE.

RICHARD DOYLE.
Thz Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown; Jones, and
Robinson. By Richard Doyle. Bradbury and

Evans.

It has so happened that Mr. Punch has wilfully
deprived himself within the last few years of two
among his most distinguished contributors—the
one pictorial, the other literary—one withdrawing
in consequence of his (Mr. P.'s) reltious into-
lerance, the other in consequence of his implacable
persistence in certain perverse political vitupera-
tions. Everybody respected the conscientious
scruples which compelled Mr. Doyle, in 1850, to
throw up a popular and lucrative pcsition on the
establishment of the gentleman with the "little dor-
sal irregularity," the fractious infant, the shrewish
wife, and the uproarious neighbour. None of us
could fail to recognise, of course, its obvious and
complete disinterestedness. There was something
manifestly chivalric, moreover, in the incident,
transpiring as it did in the midst of a very formi-
dable display of national infuriation., It was felt
by the majority of impartial observers to be but
reasonable that our artist should have some scruple
in continuing to associate his name with a periodi-
cal whose principal endeavour at the time appeared
to be, not so much that of reprobating the Papal
revival of an obsolete Hierarchy,. as that of ridi-
culing the root-dogmas or fundamental principles
of Roman Catholicism. It mattered little whe-
ther the spectators of these proceedings were
orthodok Protestants, or Presbyterians, or Non-
' conformists ; every ono appreciated on the in-
stant the high and honourable' motives which
induced Mr. Doyle, without a moment's
hesitation, to sacrifice everything rather than con-
sent to the violation of his sense of religious con-
sistency. We respected his known reasons for a
sudden retirement from the establishment of our
great comic publication. But, in doing so, we
grievously lamented over the necessity of his de-
parture. .We have ever since then regretted the
disappearance from the pages of the "London
Charivari" of his fanciful and bizarre grotesque-
ness. Although Mr. Leech was still left in
his old post as facile princeps among the weekly
illustrators. Although the gap occasioned by the
secession of Mr. Doyle was partially filled up very
soon afterwards by the timely induction into his
vacant place of a humorous draughtsman no less
ingenious than Mr. Tenniel. In spite of all this,
we could not but miss those inimitable freaks and
frolics of the pencil to which the satirist of "Ye
Manners and Customs of ye Englishe" in the nine-
teenth century had habituated us almost to the
exhaustion of our risibility. It has so chanced,
moreover, that from the date we are here alluding
to, down to the, latest number of our comic con-
temporary, every separate issue has borne upon its
title-page a tantalising reminder of Richard Doyle
as an interrupted genius among caricaturists. We
have there perpetually thrust provokingly before
our eyes she well-remembered effigy in the wood-
cut frontispiece of Punch of what the Dublin
Reviewer once called 'the " little cocky bird"
perched on the reversed initials of the banished illus-
trator. TrueJ. L. is still ours with his glass-covered
leech-bottle—but R. D. with his pert little fledg-
ling is still absent from the body of the work,
though still presiding over it in the customary
nook at the left-hand corner of the familiar title-
page. The non-appearance elsewhere in Punch
of that ever - delightful and laughter-provoking
monograph being in no way compensated either by
the symbolic scrawl of the half-opened pair of
" barnicles," or that queer, odd, fantastic triple- ,
zigzag which may be described as the three-frog's
legs hieroglyph. Nay we are not altogether solaced
for the absence of Doyle by the indefatigable and
ever-lively pencillings of home life by Leech, or the
occasional outlines vouchsafed by the hand of Ten-
',del when not more ambitiouslyemployed in paint-
ing at his easle, or embellishing with his compeers
the frescoed walls of the New Houses of Parliament.
We want Richard Doyle back again in his old po-
sition on the London Charivari. We am unwil-

ling to regard his return to that position, sooner or
liter, as quite impracticable. We long to have our
appetite for the ridiculous feasted once more by his
pictorial extravagance.

And precisely as we are disposed to grumble over
the remembrance of that perversity which deprived
Mr. Punch of the pencil of Doyle, we are prepared
to quarrel with the old gentleman, heart and soul,
tooth and nail, over the recollection of that incorrigible
wrongheadedness which struck out of his fasces the
well-nibbed pen of Thackeray. As the artist was
driven away, in 1850, from the establishment hard
by St. Bride's and over against Mr. Bogue's, in
Fleet-street, because of his all-mastering love of
religious consistency—so was the novelist scared
out of the same incongruous manufactory of bur-
lesque and bigotry, of puns and prejudice, by rea-
son of the warmth of his patriotism and the sincerity
of his devotion to the interests of fair play.
Punch, like the rest of his contemporaries, with
one " base exception "—ourselves—had long per-
sisted in directing ridicule,, abuse, and all kinds of
unmannerly personalities and flagitious vitupera-
tions against the imperial ruler of France, as though
a nation of 30,000,000 could be hoodwinked by an
unprincipled charlatan with the ballot and uni-
versal suffrage three times placed at their disposal
for the settlement of his disputed claims upon their
respect or upon their vengeance. It mattered
nothing apparently to the revilers of Charles Louis
Napoleon that upon the first occasion when that
double test of the ballot and universal suffrage was
applied, the electoral boxes were in the hands of
the foes and even of the rivals of " The Pretender"
—so that there could not possibly be even a sus-
picion of jugglery when, under the repub-
lican rule of General Cavaignac, close upon
six millions of votes were counted out of
the urns of franchise in favour of his princi-
pal opponent. Nothing seemed capable of opening
the eyes- of the more scurrilous assailants of the
chief of the house of Bonaparte to a recognition of
their mistake in regarding him as the deceiver
instead of as the chosen leader of France : not even
the subsequent re-election of the same man to the
chair of the Presidency by a still larger majority
than the one which had first nominated, him the
supreme magistrate of the Democracy. Nay, not
even the augmentation upon a third and conclud-,
ing trial (when the votes by universal suffrage were
again, and for the last time, passed through the
alembic of the ballot-box) not even the augmenta-
tion upon that crowning test of six to eight millions,
as a majority, when the Prince-President was
raised upon the shield of the people and his brow
bound with the diadem of the modern Charlemagne.
No—the blundering animosity of the vituperators
of the third Napoleon was not to be silenced in this
country until self-interest at last pointed out the
folly of further perseverance in the same insensate
onslaughts upon .the ruler of France, now the mag-
nanimous ally of England. When the complication
of European difficulties in the East had gradually
revealed, among other things, the sincerity of his
Imperial Majesty's desire to maintain the position of
his empire side by side with that of Victoria in the
van of the great army of civilisation, a new light
suddenly began to dawn upon our contemporaries.
One by one the journalists of England, daily,
weekly, monthly, quarterly, recognised the mis-
take they bad been all along committing in allow-
ing the prejudice to run riot in _unthinking abuse
of the thrice-elect of the neighbouring population.
One by one they changed their tactics. One by
one they dropped. off from the ranks of his assail-
ants, until at last but a single scurrilous vituper-
ator of the French Emperor remained, that
one, however, a deadly " good hater," being no
other than the little hump-backed gentleman Mr.
Punch. Ultimately this dunderheaded obstinacy
proved altogether too much for Mr. Thackeray.
He quitted the establishment of the gross-grained
censor, satisfied that the course doggedly pursued
by the 2Esop of the nineteenth century in carping
to the Very end of the chapter at everything done
or said by the friend and ally of England, could
not possibly be consonant with the dictates of true
patriotism—of right reason, or of common decency.
And so the sustained petulance of Punch, in the
matter of the Catholic Hierarchy, deprived him of
the genius of Mr. Doyle ; and his yet more flag-
rant pertinacity in reference to the French Em-
peror deprived him of the genius of Mr. Thackeray.
The secession of the former was at the period of its
occurrence a subject of general notoriety. That of
the latter was not long since announced by him in
a delightful paper contributed to the pages of the
Quarterly. It is just as it should be, therefore, to
find the two eminent seceders from the London
Charivari working amicably together upon the
same " labour of love," R. D. embellishing with
etchings and woodcuts the delectable history of
that most respectable family " The Newcomes,"
edited, we presume, from the original manuscripts
of M. A. T., by our friend of the Pall-Mall Gazette,
Arthur Pendennis. Fortunately for the admirers
of both Doyle and Thackeray, this joint periodical,
now rapidly approaching its completion, ii very far
from being the only vehicle for the display of their
peculiar powers—one as an inimitable droll of the
pencil, the other as a foremost name among those
of the great masters of fiction who have built the
glorious fabric of the Walhalla of our Imaginative
Literature. As for Mr. Thackeray his industry has
been proving itself to be no less indefatigable than
his rare and delightful genius appears to be many-
sided and seemingly inexhaustible. Besides the
continuance, month by month, of his serial story,
in two dozen numbers, besides his occasional con-
tribution just now referred to as adorning a recent
instalment of the Quarterly, he could find leisure,
at Christmas, to narrate the adventures of Prince
"130)0, and, his worthy Wooie,tva is QM poor Little

fairy tale " The Rose and the Ring," sprinkled-by
his own hand with the oddest, strangest, plea-
santest of absurd embellishments. Beyond which
he even discovered time and opportunity the other
day to deliver another charming discourse, stlP-
plementd prelection to his witty and genial lec-
tures upon the lives and works of our English
Humorists. Not by any means so industrious has
been Mr. Doyle—the products of whose whimsical
genius appear to have been restricted all this while
to the drawings coming forth, month after month,
under the yellow leaves of " The Newcomes," and
to vague promises of other good things, put forth
intermittently among the Messrs. Smith and
Elder's advertisements. Promises only these tan-
talising announcements still remain—ghostly
"shadows," cast before them by those "coming
events," popularly known as works " in the press,"
or " preparing for publication." Meanwhile we
have yet upon our bookshelves the fatuous Diary
of Mr. Pips, decorated with those interleaved litn-
nings—outlines of " figures of fun,"
in impractic-
able attitudes, set off for the most part by imPos-
Bible perspectives. And still lying upon our side-
table, cheek-by-jowl with all imaginable and un-
imaginable pictorial oddities from Hogarth to
Leech, from Gilray to Crnikshamk, we have still at
our'elbow, Richard Doyle's incorrigibly ridiculous
record of " The Foreign. Tour of Messrs. Brown,
Jones, and Robinson"—being a history of what
they saw and did, one memorable autumn, in
Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.
However immethodical may be the researches
made in'this ample repertory of the purely ludi-
crous, those who may turn over the pages of the
"eventful history" therein, represented, may
count with absolute certainty upon not closing the
volume without having first of all laughed over its
contents "consumedly," besides drawing, both from
pictures and from explanatory letterpress, a wonder-
ful store of exhilarating recollections. Recollections
which are to the genuine appreciator of the comic
what the daffodils were to the pensive memory of
Wordsworth—that " host of golden daffodils "
seen

" Beside the lake, beneath the traes
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
And' fterwards immortalised in that exquisite
remembrance—

" How oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude ;
And then my heart with pleasur4 fills
And dances with the daffodils."
It is precisely thus, we repeat, with regard to the
humorous conceits conjured up by the mere recol-
lection of Mr. Doyle's laughable memorial of the
wanderings and ponderings of Messrs. Brown,
Jones, and Robinson. How vividly we recall to
mind each one of them—per se—in his amazingly
ridiculous individuality. Shockheaded little
" Brown"—intended, we can't help fancying some-
times, to stand forth from the canvass in some
sort as our artist's own representative. Tall,
slim, not to say lanky " Jones "—the very
embodiment of English sang froid, of cool
British self-possession. And stupid, delightful,
fat, sentimental, old " Robinson"—a very tub in
shape and a veritable butt in good-natured
stupidity. Don't we recollect each of them in his
particular form, in his distinguishing garb, in his
peculiar and especial idiocyncrasy Robinson
going abroad with a perfect pyramid of luggage,
hat-boxes, bags, boxes, portmanteaux—and coming
back with that wonderful melange of foreign pur-
chases, the fuzzy, broad-rimmed hat, never worn
and always in, the way ! the wooden pipe, evidently
impervious to tobacco-smoke ! the cornet-a-piston,
bought in Germany with the vague intention of
learning to play it some day 1 the Venie e
gloves, obtained as a great bargain, and found to
be utterly worthless ! and so on with the eau-de-
cologne, and the cigars, and the tanchoritz editions
of nice little books seized by the Custom-house
authorities ! Jones, too, setting out on his voyaging
smooth and sleek, and returning homewards with
that astonishing moustache ! To say nothing of
Brown starting without the key of that gluttonous
carpet-bag, which he has packed with the pressure
of his feet, and which he ultimately leaves behind
him at MindenLdiscovering his forgetfulness only
by the time he has reached Dusseldorf I Besides
this heroic trio of Roving Englishmen, what mar-
vellous personages have we not introduced to us
personally, bodily, living and breathing it almost
seems, during the oourse of their continental
peregrinations. The Bore, for example, that
stupendously dreary infliction suggestive at mo-
ments, even to the meekest victims, of either sui-
cide or assassination. How we shudder in sympa-
thy with poor Brown and Jones, at that mere
glimpse of the wretch in the moonlight at Heidel-
berg I How we tremble with them as they peer
round the corner of the tobaeoonist's shop at
Frankfort, at tho glimmer of his abominable coat
tails, as he passes round the corner on the'Other
side of the way, without recognising the fact of
their proximity. The Citizen of the United States,
too, met on board the Rhine steam-boat—who
opinionates to Brown that " old Europe is 'tarnally
thawed up," and that " this here Rhine aint much
by the side of our Mississipi." The English "Mi-
lord" on the same river (the Rhine), seen through
his carriage window, muffled up in a cloak and
travelling cap, engaged in reading the literature of
his country, i.e., the Times and the Quarterly.
Again—the London Gent up the Rhine, his lip in
bristles, and his limbs in very loud plaid—repre-
sented at the moment when expressing his opinion
that the whole is a " do" and a " sell." Or—the
British Farmer and Son in foreign parts—sur-
prised by everything into a perpetual grin and
stare, horridly obfuscated chawbacons, in reference
to whom Jones wickedly insinuates that they must
have taken leave of England and their senses at once,
owing to the withdrawal ofProtection ! Or that intol-
erable M.P. travelling in search of facts—the very
double of Sir Charles Wood—pragmatical and poli-
tico-economic, who favoqrs Brown (unasked) with
his view upon mattersgenerally, and the statistics of
everything. Above all, there must not fail to be
particularly mentioned the most miraculous life-
portrait among all these—the calletype of the Great
Briton, stout, comfortable, broad-cloth'd, well-
buttoned, and supercilious his feet warm in
gaiters, his hand leaning negligently on his um-
brella, his nose in the air contemplating the
Rhine-land, wondering if it would be possible to
live in that country, and considering (suppose he
had one of those castles now) how many thousands
a year ono could do it with ! When he shall turn
away at the end of his contemplations, putting his
hand in his trowser pocket as he strolls along deck,
we can already hear by anticipation the luscious
chink of the warm gold running through his fin-
gers. Never was a man evidently more well-to-do,
smug, plump, and self-satisfied. He little thinks,
as he stands there, musing, what Brown (otherwise
Doyle) is doing all the while, in the distance, with
his magic, little, twittering pencil ! Any more
than the demure nun—jotted down the next
minute by the same hand in a rapid act of sketch-
ing. Several of the more symbolical of Brown's
pictorial freaks, bythe way, are deserving of peculiar
observation : ex. gr., "the first glimpse of Rhine
Scenery," represented by diagrams of fields and
lines of poplars in parallelograms 1 or the first im-
pression of the river itself "from an original
sketch" in the possession of Brown's family, show-
ing us a perspective of sugar-loaf hills on either
side, each hill-cop surmounted by a ruined castle !
or the somewhat indistinct representation of the
same scenery when it, becomes " mysterious" under
the combined influence of Mist (Scotch) and Fog
(London November)! The narrative of the tour
is, of course, not without its adventures. Indeed
each of the three heroes has his own separate and
distinctive adventures. Little Brown, for example,
his famous pas de desespoir et de resignation in his
night-gown at Venice—during the whole of which
dance of torture his head is enveloped in a cloud,
or halo, or aureole of what Mrs. Gudge called the
" musketeers." Beginning with an agonised kick-
up in the bedclothes—followed by a sitting bolt
upright in a state of dogged " Misery''—then by a
dashing exit from between the 'sheets in a condi-
tion of frantic' " Desperation "—and after " mo-
mentary relief" at the open window, a series of
effective tableaux : one (with the bolster and pil-
low) entitled " Madness !" another, " Bell 1 !"
another "Boots ! !" and, finally, in the midst of a
chaos of furniture, the effigy of the hero of the
midnight incident (still in hisnight gear), his hands
on his knees, his hair bristling, his head still in its
aureole of " musketeers," in the crowning stage of
all, that of entire blank " Despair ! ! ! Robin-
son's adventure presents him to us in divers extra-
ordinary attitudes; after he has fallen asleep while
sitting in front of the fire in the public room of the
hotel at' Heidelburg—bringing him- through the
various contortions produced in a sitting body
by profound somnolency to that horizontal
position in 'which Brown and Jones are
horrified to discover him on their return—
his hands , in his pockets, and snoring sono-
rously. Jones's Adventure threatens a somewhat
more serious termination than eitherof"
those
already deScribed, originating in a squabble
be-
tween his Isle-of-Skye terrier, and a small sentinel
at Baden, leading the master of the dog to an
assault upon the soldier-in-miniature, and conduct-
ing him at last into the custody of the local military
authorities--fromwhoseclutches he is at length with
some difficulty extricated on the potent score of his
being Civis Britannieus. It were idle, however,
to attempt following our three friends through the
whole tangled maze of their
idle a
occasionally
it w
o u d
l rathereccentric proceedings—as
dream of affording- any adequate idea by mere
words, however adroitly selected, of,the appearance
-presented by Bobinipil the Oven aged of

• his beard un to the date of his memorable shave at
Milan, or the same gentleman as he shone forth in
the Vienna tailor's when first endowed with that
astonishing compound of cloak and overcoat, em-
broidered down the seams, decorated with ,a
hood, and adorned with a tassle ! Possibly the
most characteristic sketches of the " glori-
ous three " are those representing Jones as
he appeared at the opera " abroad," and
" home"—Brown as he looked late at night,
while endeavouring to square the accounts of the
voyageurs and Robinson as he looked while writ-
ing his celebrated letter to the Times, on the sub-
ject of the deficiency of soap and water among the
benighted nations of the continent. Wonderful is
the gleaming "Eye of the Government," (kept upon
the travellers during their stay in the Austrian
dominion) as drawn from Brown's haunted imagi-
nation. Wonderful is that little daguerreotype of
Kellner, the German waiter, who is small in sta
-
turn (remaining always a boy, like the driver of
our own post horses), scarcely the size of life,
as Jones takes occasion to remark, wbe:i
they' first behold a veritable specimen of his class
at Cologne. Wonderful beyond all is that übi-
quitous official, who, after haunting our three
wanderers in a frightful manner during the whole
period of their stay in the Austrian capital, is at
last presumed by them to have had his suspicions
originally excited in their regard by mistaking
them for—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity out
on the loose ! And so, in au inexhaustible torrent
of drollery, the freaks of the Foreign Tour of our
heroes, through Belgium, Germany, Italy, and
Switzerland, are poured out over eighty quarto
pages of the humorous, by the pencil of Richard
Doyle, the fun of which appears to us
equally apparent in the fantastic pictures and
the explanatory commentaries. Nothing flags in
the ludicrous panorama of the wanderings
of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, from the animated
frontispiece on the title-page down to that notable
joke given by way of L'Eitvoi—iudicativo of the
agonies and joys of a return homewards from the
Continent, viz., " Sic (k) Transit," as shadowed
forth in mid-Channel ! " Gloria Mundi," as sym-
bolised at Dover by a return banquet of London
porter and the roast beef of Old England !
Chuckling over which comic climax to the book,
the reader closes it with every willingness to greet
Brown, Jones, and Robinson with the heartiest Bon
Voyage ! in the event of their ever betraying a dis-
position to make, sooner or later, another tour upon
the continent—a tour not like that of Doctor
Syntax in search of the picturesque, but in quest,
we take it, of the grotesque and exhilarating. Ex-
hilarating the contemplation of their journeying
has been to us, and so, as they hurry off towards
their several situations—Brown, with his note-
book and portfolio ; Jones, with his ragged little
scaramouch of a dog at his heels ; and Robinson,
flustered under the weight of the responsibility of
that mountainous mass of baggage—we greet them,
cordially, with a hail and farewell !

SPORTING NOTES.