A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE KOW 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 tifty-four bastards. Nor 

 can any reader of that work ever forget "Jenkins' 

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

 sailor snipped ofi' 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 way like clouds of draggled 

 poultry caught by a mastiff in the corn. Across 

 Weser, across Ems, finally across the Kliine 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 wmd 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, 



