APPENDIX.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF REFERENCE UPON ROWLANDSON'S CARICATURES.
CATALOGUE OF PRINTS AND DRAWINGS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
Further information is open to enquirers who are interested in tracing the works of the caricaturist. The important catalogue of the satirical prints and drawings in the British Museum, now in course of publication, will include all the examples found in that institution, if the Trustees decide to continue it beyond the limit originally settled (about 1770). The preparation of the catalogue in question, which has been placed in the hands of probably the very ablest authority on the subject of satire who has ever lived, is of necessity a work of time. The elucidation of the earlier graphic satires has occupied years of patient industry, by which alone the social and political pictorial 'skits' could be made intelligible—an undertaking which the lapse of time annually makes more complicated as regards the interpretation of those lighter trifles of bygone times, which, in spite of their triviality, often possess an historical value, unintelligible to the majority of students, because hidden away in the obscurity of allusions beyond the vision of the present generation.
The task of tracing and explaining the intentions of the graphic satirists, commenced by Mr. Edward Hawkins, original owner of an immense collection of their works, is being continued and successfully carried out for the Trustees of the British Museum by Mr. Frederic George Stephens. The catalogue, an important contribution to the history of the subject, has, as we have said, already been years in hand, and is slowly but surely advancing through the comparatively lost paths of the past. A new light has been thrown upon the satires of the times of the Tudors, the Stuarts, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the accession of the Prince of Orange and of the House of Hanover. The results of the editor's painstaking researches are completed and open for consultation up to the conclusion of the Hogarth period; the notices upon the works of the great luminary of the school, which are included in the volume published in the present year, will be found of so thoroughly exhaustive a character, that the interest generally felt in Hogarth is likely to be increased, especially as a considerable amount of entirely new and curious matter has been discovered by Mr. Stephens in the course of his investigations.
CATALOGUE OF PRINTS AND DRAWINGS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
Div. 1. Political and Personal Satires. Prepared for publication by Frederic George Stephens, and containing many descriptions by Edward Hawkins, late Keeper of the Antiquities, F.S.A. Printed by order of the Trustees. With an introduction by George William Reid, Esq., Keeper of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum.