Excerpt from Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Vol. 5: 1771-1783 The strictly chronological order has been applied only to political satires. The prints fall into two categories, political and non-political, the latter being classed as personal in accordance with the title of the Catalogue. This group includes social satires and non-political prints in general. As the political prints exclude 'the purely historical print (e.g. Prints after West's Death of Wolfe, so opposed in spirit to Gillray's Death of the Great Wolf, a caricature of West's picture), so the personal and social satires exclude genre except where it is humorous or cautionary, and therefore a satire on manners or morals. Though most of the prints fall clearly into one or other category there are some which may be considered either political or personal; these are impossible to classify with rigorous consistency. But the value of these personal prints for social history depends upon a knowledge of their date; they are therefore arranged in years, though within each year chronological order has been waived in favour of arrange ment by series, by artist, or by subject, overlapping categories which cannot be strictly observed. Taken together, the sequence of political and social prints reflects, as nothing else does, the changing and elusive spirit of the period. At the same time, a traditional symbolism and the recurrence of the same theme from age to age show how strong was the power of tradition, even in this art, so essentially of the moment. The thirteen years covered by this volume saw a change in the manner of pictorial satire and a great development in its political importance. These developments were closely inter-related and can scarcely be dis cussed separately, they were due to the interaction of aesthetic and political causes, and they are the more marked since in 1771 political satire was at a low ebb, while during 1782 - 3 it was at the highest point yet reached. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.