A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 235 ! 



or manner is seized upon, magnified, "and made prom- 

 inent on all occasions. We are never suffered to 

 forget George the Second's fish eyes and gartered 

 leg, nor the lean May-pole mistress of George the 

 First, 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 off by the Spaniards, and here made to stand 

 for a whole series of historical events. Indeed, 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 historical caricature. 

 It makes its exit over the Rhine before Duke Ferdi- 

 nand, " 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 Rhine 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, 

 stired up to declare war against Frederick by his 

 Austrian enemies. " Bombarded with cunningly-de- 

 vised fabrications, every wind freighted for her with 



