of so overturning the innocent plan of original portraiture. To make a
mental image of all things that are named to the ear, or conceived in the
mind, being an industrious custom of children and childish people which
lapses in the age of much idle reading, the making of a material image is
the still more diligent and more sedulous act, whereby the primitive man
controls and caresses his own fancy. He may take arms anon,
disappointed, against his own work; but did he ever do that work in
malice from the outset?

From the statue to the doll, images are all outraged in the person of the
guy. If it were but an antithesis to the citizen's idea of something
admirable which he might carry in procession on some other day, the
carrying of the guy would be less gloomy; but he would hoot at a
suspicion that he might admire anything so much as to make a good-looking
doll in its praise. There is absolutely no image-making art in the
practice of our people, except only this art of rags and contumely. Or,
again, if the revenge taken upon a guy were that of anger for a certain
cause, the destruction would not be the work of so thin an annual malice
and of so heartless a rancour.

But the single motive is that popular irony which becomes daily--or so it
seems--more and more the holiday temper of the majority. Mockery is the
only animating impulse, and a loud incredulity is the only intelligence.
They make an image of some one in whom they do not believe, to deride it.
Say that the guy is the effigy of an agitator in the cause of something
to be desired; the street man and boy have then two motives of mocking:
they think the reform to be not worth doing, and they are willing to
suspect the reformer of some kind of hypocrisy. Perhaps the guy of this
occasion is most characteristic of all guys in London. The people,
having him or her to deride, do not even wait for the opportunity of