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The week after “Babes of the Wood,” Nast seems to have been utterly incapable
of resisting temptation himself. In “Satan Don’t Get Thee Behind Me! Any Thing
to Get Possession” (dated August 17; published August 7), the pious Greeley is
shown in a brutal burlesque of Jesus’ temptation on the mountain. The
Tribune editor is begging abjectly for the support of the Democratic devil
to help him enter the governmental “Kingdom of Washington” spread out before
him. Nast’s huge, two-page cartoon is modeled after a comparatively ethereal
image of the same scene by Gustave Dore in his illustrated Holy Bible
(1866, Vol. II, p. 171). |
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