A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW 215 



nor the Czarina's big fat cheek; nor poor Bruhl, 

 "vainest of human clothes-horses," with his twelve 

 tailors and his three hundred and sixty-five suits of 

 clothes; nor Augustus, "the dilapidated strong," 

 with his three hundred and fifty-four bastards. Nor 

 can any reader of that work ever forget "Jenkins' 

 Ear," — the poor fraction of an ear of an English 

 sailor snipped oif by the Spaniards, and here made 

 to stand for a whole series of historical events. In- 

 deed, this severed ear looms up till it becomes like 

 a sign in the zodiac of those times. His portrait of 

 the French army, which he calls the Dauphiness, is 

 unforgetable, and is in the best style of his histor- 

 ical caricature. It makes its exit over the Rhine 

 before Duke Ferdinand, "much in rags, much in 

 disorder, in terror, and here and there almost in 

 despair, winging their w^ay like clouds of draggled 

 poultry caught by a mastiff in the corn. Across 

 "Weser, across Ems, finally across the E-hine itself, 

 every feather of them, — their long-drawn cackle, 

 of a shrieky type, filling all nature in those months. " 

 A good sample of the grotesque in Carlyle, pushed 

 to the last limit, and perhaps a little beyond, is in 

 this picture of the Czarina of Russia, stirred up to 

 declare war against Frederick by his Austrian ene- 

 mies: "Bombarded with cunningly-devised fabri- 

 cations, every wind freighted for her with phantas- 

 mal rumors, no ray of direct daylight visiting the 

 poor Sovereign Woman; who is lazy, not malig- 

 nant, if she could avoid it; mainly a mass of esuri- 

 ent oil, with alkali on the back of alkali poured in, 



