ABSTRACT
It is remarkable what pleasure the British nation takes in ugliness, with regard to general amusements both in private and public. Perhaps there is no nation among which female beauty or prettiness is more universally admired and courted; but in most other respects, and especially in subjects and objects of amusement and general taste, the love of the grotesque, the comic, the exaggerative and caricature, the broadly farcical, and even the downright ugly, have for a long time been a very marked peculiarity. Probably the extremes of nearly every kind and degree of ugliness among the popular amusements of the British nation were attained in the modern as well as old English Fairs. The spectator’s vision has now become confused by the complex and disordered motions of the barbarous, colossal, and uproarious living kaleidoscope.
