Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
James Gillray,
A Cognocenti
Contemplating ye
Beauties of ye Antique
,
1801, hand-coloured
etching.
Image not available - no digital rights
was Burke's speech in the House of Commons denouncing the
French Revolutionary Constitution, in which he quoted Milton's
Paradise Lost
: 'Black it stood as night, Fierce as ten furies, terrible
as Hell'.4³ It is self-evident that these volcanic metaphors emerged
in the public prints during the course of Vesuvius' late-eighteenth-
century eruptive period, when the meaning of the cartoons
would be all too obvious.
In exactly the same way as Vesuvius provided a metaphor
for eighteenth-century cartoonists, so their twenty-first-century
