The limits of Cruikshank's genius and the spacious area between them are almost implied in the fact that he was a Londoner who seldom or never departed from the "tight little island." Born in Duke Street, St George's, Bloomsbury, if the statement in his epitaph in St Paul's Cathedral is to be accepted, he continued a Londoner to the end: living in Dorset Street, near Fleet Street, in Amwell Street, and Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville, and finally in the house called successively 48 Mornington Place and 263 Hampstead Road. Yet this cockney depicted the Spain of Don Quixote and Gil Bias, the Ireland of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the America of Uncle Tom. Such courageous versatility was the outcome of a training so practical that I hesitate to call it an artistic education.

His father, Isaac, was a Lowland Scot who lived and, unfortunately, drank by his art, which in 1789, 1790 and 1792 was represented at the Royal Academy. His period was from 1756 or 1757 to 1810 or 1811. Like his friend James Gillray, he caricatured on the side of Pitt. I remember no better caricature of his than Pastimes of Primrose Hill ("Attic Miscellany," 1st Sept. 1791), depicting a perspiring tallow chandler trundling his children up that eminence. He was energetic in the delineation of the insipid jollity considered appropriate to sailors, and he celebrated the O.P. riots at Covent Garden by drawing Angelica Catalani as a cat. Thomas Wright places him only after Gillray and Rowlandson as a caricaturist, but it is probable that the man's best is of an academic sort, such as the pretty drawings which he contributed to a 1794 edition of Thomson's "Seasons." Isaac Cruikshank's workroom was that of a busy hack, and George had not been long in the world before he played ghost there on his father's copperplates. One of his early tasks was the background of Daniel in the Lions' Den.

None who looks at the drawing of a supercilious benefactor, which is one of George's earliest efforts, can doubt that in him the caricaturing instinct was basic. The eye is indulgent to several crudities, because the flinging is drawn though the hand of contempt is not, while the gluttonous enthusiasm of the beggar is a triumph of juvenile observation. Here are characters if not figures; here from a little boy is work that deserves a laugh. Hence it is not surprising that George Cruikshank has been erroneously credited with a share in Facing the Enemy, a dateless etching, delightfully droll in animal expression, etched by his father, after a sketch by H. Woodward, and published in 1797-8, according to Mr A. M. Broadley, and not in 1803 as formerly conjectured.

1803 is the year of Cruikshank's Opus I., according to G. W. Reid, his most voluminous bibliographer. This work, printed and sold by W. Belch of Newington Butts, consists of four marine pieces on a sheet, most comfortably unprecocious and as wooden as a Dutch doll. A humorist inspecting it might profess to see in a woman, whose nose and forehead produce one and the same straight line, a prophecy of the Cruikshankian nose which is so monotonously recurrent an ornament in the works of "the great George." Cruikshank himself averred that one of the first etchings he was ever employed to do and paid for was a sheet of Lottery Prints (published in 1804) of which he made a copy in his eighty-first year. The etching contains sixteen drawings of shops. The barber's shop door is open to disclose an equestrian galloping past it, although, even as a man, he drew horses which G. A. Sala declared were wrong in all the traditional forty-four points. George Cruikshank himself, whom, as Mr G. S. Layard has shown, he repeatedly drew, appears in a compartment of this etching, in the act of conveying the plate of it to the shop of Belch, a name for which Langham is substituted in a re-issue of this gamblers' temptation, and which dwindles into Langley & Belch in the copy made by Cruikshank in 1873, published by G. Bell, York St., Covent Garden.

1806 is the date of the first book, or rather pamphlet, with which George Cruikshank is connected. It is entitled "The Impostor Unmasked," and pillories Sheridan for a farcical swindler and something worse. There is a folding plate to fortify the charges of Patricius the scandal-monger, and this is ascribed to George by Reid, though Captain Douglas, George's latest bibliographer, only allows that "there seems to be some of George's work in it." Reid's authority, which had in all probability the living George's behind it, excuses a brief description of this plate. Sheridan is depicted in the act of addressing a crowd of Stafford electors, amongst whom are several creditors who pun bitterly on the parliamentary word Bill and damn the respects which he pays them. A house on the right of the hustings might have been sketched on a slate by any child weary of pothooks, but there is a touch of true humour in the quiet joy shown on the face of a supporter of Sheridan in the heckling to which he is subjected. Gillray had already published (March 10, 1805) his Uncorking Old Sherry, and so this Cruikshankian caricature may be accepted as George's first step in the Gillrayan path.

The path of Gillray, in and out of which runs the path of Thomas Rowlandson, is seldom or never dull; sometimes unclean in a manner malodorous as manure, but with risings which offer illuminating views. His humour is tyrannically laughable. The guffaw is, as it were, kicked out of the spectator of The Apotheosis of Hoche (1798) by the descending boots, depicted as reluctantly yielding to the law of gravity, which the triumphant devastator of La VendÉe has overcome. Gillray's sense of design was superb, and he would be an enthusiast who should assert that George Cruikshank in political caricature produced works at once so striking and architecturally admirable as The Giant Factotum [Pitt] Amusing Himself (1797). Gillray possessed what Cruikshank lacked altogether, the inclination and power to draw voluptuousness with some justice to its charm. One has only to cite in confirmation of this statement The Morning after Marriage (August 5, 1788), and compare it with any of those caricatures in which Cruikshank exhibits the erotic preferences of George the Third's children. What, however, Cruikshank, in the artistic meaning of vision, saw in Gillray, he adapted with the force of a boisterous participant in the patriotism and demagogy of his day. Gillray had Napoleon for his prey, and no political criticism is pithier than the caricature which represents the Emperor as Tiddy-Doll, the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings (1806). On the other hand, nothing that Swift is believed to have omitted in his description of Brobdingnag could be coarser than The Corsican Pest (1803). It is almost literally humour of the latrine. Unhappily Cruikshank exulted like a young barbarian in the licence conferred by precedent, and it is hard to view with tolerance his pictorial records of "the first swell of the age." One of the wittiest is Boney Hatching a Bulletin, or Snug Winter Quarters (Dec. 1812); the Grand Army is there seen in the form of heads and bayonets protruding from a stratum of Russian snow; the courier who is to convey the bulletin has boards under his boots to prevent his submersion. Elsewhere one's admiration for inventive vigour struggles against disgust at a mode which one only hesitates to call blackguardism because the liveliest contents of the paint-box were lavished upon it. Take, for instance, the caricature which bears the rhymed title, Boney tir'd of war's alarms, flies for safety to his darling's arms (1813). The devil bears Bonaparte on his shoulders to the Empress Marie Louise, after the Russian campaign. "Take him to Bed, my Lady, and Thaw him," says the devil. "I am almost petrified in helping him to escape from his Army. I shall expect him to say his prayers to me every night!" Another Cruikshankian caricature, The Imperial Family going to the Devil (March 1814), represents the rejection of Napoleon by that connoisseur of reprobates, though Rowlandson in the same month and year depicted the fallen emperor as The Devil's Darling. Cruikshank's vulgar facetiousness, interesting by sheer vigour and self-enjoyment, pursues Napoleon even to St Helena in the heartless caricature which portrays him as an ennuyÉ reduced for amusement to rat-catching. It was not for nothing that Thomas Moore, alluding to the Prince Regent as Big Ben, made Tom Cribb say:—

Gillray is said to have sometimes disguised his style in order to evade his agreement with Humphrey that he would work for no other publisher; and there is more than one of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures which might be ascribed to Gillray's dram-providing alter ego if their authorship were in question. Of such is Quadrupeds, or Little Boney's Last Kick, published in "The Scourge" (1813). Here the Russian bear holds a birch in his right paw, and Napoleon by an ankle with his left; a naked devil points to the crown, tumbling from the head of the capsized emperor; on the ground is an ironical bulletin. Old Blucher beating the Corsican Big Drum (1814) is an even closer match of the baser sort of Gillrayan caricature; while the particular stench of it rises from Boney's Elb(a)ow Chair, of the same date. The last caricature from Cruikshank upon Napoleon came feebly in 1842 with the issue of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus," wherein he figures as a skeleton in boots surmounting a pyramid of skulls. The caricaturist's harlequinade had lasted too long; when it ceased, the soul of it utterly perished, and one views impatiently so formal and witless a galvanisation as was suggested by the return of Napoleon, dead, to the reconquest of France.

Of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures as a whole, it may be said that their function was solely to relieve by ridicule the pressure of a grandiose and formidable personality upon the nerves of his countrymen. He did not, like Gillray in The Handwriting on the Wall, confess the historic greatness of Napoleon by an allusion so sublime that it afforded Hone a precedent for unpunished impiety. When, for serio-comic verse, he attempted to delineate a monitory apparition, in the shape of Napoleon's "Red Man," the result was absurdity veiled by dulness.

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But it is time to turn to the Cruikshankian view of persons and things in Great Britain in the lifetime of "Adonis the Great." It is said that while Gillray was productive, an old General of the German Legion remarked, alluding to caricature, "Ah! I dell you vot—England is altogether von libel." With the spirit of this speech, one can cordially agree. The concupiscence of princes was serialised for the mirth of the crowd.

There were two great types of ascendant degeneracy to divert the eyes of Farmer George's subjects from their shops and Bibles. One was his son George, the other Mary Anne Clarke.

The cabinet in which George kept capillary souvenirs of so many women was fastened against contemporary critics of his career. Undivulged, therefore, was the touching sentiment of a philofeminism which, in excluding his legal wife, was construed but as vice. There was no Max Beerbohm in his day to appreciate his polish and talents and to pity his wife for playing her tragedy in tights. There was no one to pronounce him the slave of that most endearing of tyrants, the artistic temperament. The caricaturists saw simply a polygamist eager to convict of adultery the wife whom he disliked and avoided, and a spendthrift whose debt was inflicted upon the nation. So far as man can show up his fellow-men, this man was shown up, and in verse and picture became an instrument of public titillation. So roguish a severity as the caricaturists displayed can seldom be accepted as didactic Gillray, indeed, in The Morning after Marriage followed him into the bridal chamber of Mrs Fitzherbert whom he married in 1785, and this caricature is the best advertisement of his grace and beauty which perhaps exists. When attacked by Cruikshank, he was over forty, for the first caricature of him in which that artist's hand is noticeable was published in 1808. It is entitled John Bull Advising with His Superiors: the superiors being George and his brother Frederick, who sit under the portraits of their respective mistresses, "Mrs Fitz" and Mrs Clarke. John Bull is clean-shaven, fat-nosed, hatted, and holds a gnarled stick. "Servant Measters," he begins, "I be come to ax a bit of thy advice"; but he proceeds to freeze them with clumsy innuendo and adds, "I does love good old Georg [sic], by Goles! because he is not of that there sort," meaning their own. After this, the Regent was for Cruikshank a stimulant to the drollest audacities. The world was younger then and could laugh uproariously at the bursting of a dandy's stays and the mislaying of a rouÉ's removable whiskers. Mrs Grundy had not persuaded it of the superior comicality of Mrs Newlywed's indestructible pie-crust and Mr Staylate's interview with the parental boot. So George, who, at any rate, was real life, blossomed abundantly to another George's advantage. Thus The Coronation of the Empress of the Nairs (September 1812)—a simile suggested by a contemporary account of a curious Asiatic race—depicts him as crowning the Marchioness of Hertford in her bath; A Kick from Yarmouth to Wales illustrates the assault of the provoked Earl of Yarmouth upon his wife's too fervent admirer; and Princely Agility (January 1812) shows His Royal castigated Highness confined by a convenient sprained ankle to bed, where his whiskers and wig are restored to him. The opening of Henry the Eighth's coffin in St George's Chapel, Windsor, April 1, 1813, suggests to Cruikshank Meditations Amongst the Tombs, in which the greatness of the deceased sovereign forcibly strikes the Regent. "Great indeed!" he is made to say, "for he got rid of many wives, whilst I, poor soul, can't get rid of one. Cut off his beard, doctor, 'twill make me a prime pair of royal whiskers." The prince's partiality for the bottle is severely illustrated. In The Phenix [sic] of Elba Resuscitated by Treason (May 1, 1815), he receives the news of Napoleon's outbreak, seated on a cushion with a decanter behind him; and even when he was King, Cruikshank dared to draw him (1822) as drunk and curing an irritated cuticle by leaning his kilted person against one of the posts of Argyleshire.

If, however, Caroline of Brunswick had not, by adopting a Meredithian baby and other eccentricities, condemned herself to "Delicate Investigation" in 1806 and to a trial before the House of Peers in 1820, Cruikshank's delineations of Adonis the Great would have seemed genial compared with Thackeray's contempt. That his sentiment for the lady was less chivalrous than Thackeray esteemed it, may be divined by his caricature of her as an ugly statue of Xantippe put up to auction "without the least reserve" (1821), which is less than two months older than his conception of her as a rushlight which Slander cannot blow out. But he perceived, as did the whole intelligent proletariat, the monstrous irony of George's belated notice of his wife. Hence in his woodcuts to "The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder" and "Non Mi Ricordo!" he is not comic but satirical, and satirical with strokes that turn The Dandy of Sixty who bows with a grace into a figure abjectly defiant, meanly malevolent, devoid of levity. A cut in the former pamphlet shows him standing in a penitential sheet under the seventh, ninth and tenth commandments, meeting the gaze of an astonished urchin; on the outside of the latter pamphlet we see him in the throes of awkward interrogation, uttering the "Non Mi Ricordo" which Caroline's ill-wishers were tired of hearing in the mouth of Bergami.

Mary Anne Clarke, our second type of ascendant degeneracy, was, if Buck's drawing of her is truthful, a woman of seductive prettiness, but she could not teach Cruikshank her charm in atonement for her venality. He drew her petticoat "supported by military boots" and surmounted by a cocked hat and the mitre of the ducal bishop of Osnaburg (February 23, 1809); "under this," it is stated, "may be found a soothing for every pain." When Whigs and the Prince of Wales sent the Duke of York back in 1811 to the high post which he had disgraced, Mrs Clarke dwindled in Cruikshank's caricature to a dog improperly exhibiting its contempt for Colonel Wardle's left eye. It is curious that the Clarke scandal did not apparently inspire any caricature which deserves to live as pictorial criticism. Revealing, as it did, not only rottenness in the State, but in the Church, since Dr O'Meara sought Mrs Clarke's interest for the privilege of preaching "before royalty," one may well be surprised at the failure of caricature to ennoble itself in the cause of honour and religion. Yet Cruikshank produced in 1811 a powerful etching—Interior View of the House of God—which shows, apropos a lustful fanatic named Carpenter, his power to have seized the missed opportunity. In this plate is the contemporary portrait of himself which P. D'Aiguille afterwards copied.

If we ask, for our soul's sake, to sicken of the Regent's amours and of the demure "Magdalen" of York, whose scarlet somehow softens to maroon because she is literary and quotes Sallust, it is necessary to leave the caricatures which laugh with her—especially Rowlandson's—and look at Cruikshank's tormented John Bull. The most pathetic is perhaps John Bull's Three Stages (1815). In the last stage (Peace with all the World) his child, once pressed to eat after repletion, says, "Give me some more bone." The hand that drew the earlier plates of The Bottle is unmistakable in this etching.

It was seemingly in 1819 that Cruikshank first realised his great powers as a critic in caricature. To that period belongs what a pamphleteer called "Satan's Bank Note":—

The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street earned thereby the sobriquet of Hangland's Bank, and her victims included two women on a day when Cruikshank looked at the gibbet of the Old Bailey. They were hanged for passing forged one pound notes. Cruikshank thereupon drew his famous Bank Restriction Note, signed by Jack Ketch, and with a vignette of Britannia devouring her children above an L of rope. Hone issued this note (of which there are three varieties) from his shop on Ludgate Hill, a stone's throw from the gibbet; the public flocked to see and buy it, and the moral was not lost upon the Bank of England, who thereafter sent forth no more one pound notes. The pathos as distinct from the tragedy of the condition thus relieved is well recalled by the caricature invented by Yedis and drawn by Cruikshank entitled Johnny Bull and his Forged Notes (January 7, 1819).

We now turn to the lighter side of his topical journalism. One of his subjects was gas-lighting. The Good Effects of Carbonic Gas (1807) depicts one cat swooning and another cut off from the list of living prime donne by the maleficence of Winzer's illuminant. In 1833 Cruikshank reported a ghost as saying to a fellow-shade, "Ah! brother, we never has no fun now; this 'March of Intellect' and the Gaslights have done us up."

Jenner had him for both partisan (1808) and opponent (1812). In the former rÔle he makes a Jennerite say, "Surely the disorder of the Cow is preferable to that of the Ass," and the realism is nauseous that accompanies the remark. As opponent he wittily follows Gillray, who in 1802 imagined an inoculated man as calving from his arms. Prominent in Cruikshank's caricature (a bitter one) is a sarcophagus upon which lies a cow whom Time is decapitating. "To the Memory of Vaccina who died April the First," is the touching inscription.

I have already mentioned Cruikshank as a chronicler of fashion. Gillray was his master in this form of art, though the statement does not rest on the two examples here given. The thoughtful reader will not fail to admire the incongruity between the children in the drawing of 1826 and the great verities of Nature—cliff and sea—between which they strut. The latter drawing is as grotesquely logical as a syllogism by Lewis Carroll. Comparable with it in persuasiveness is Cruikshank's short-skirted lady (December 1833) who is alarmed at her own shadow, which naturally exaggerates the distance between her ankles and her skirt. Thence one turns for contrast to the caricature of crinolines in "The Comic Almanack" for 1850. It is called A Splendid Spread, and represents gentlemen handing refreshments to ladies across wildernesses of "dress-extenders" by means of long baker's peels. Such drawing educates; it has the value of criticism.

This praise is tributary to Cruikshank's second journalistic period. By journalistic I mean topical, attendant on the passing hour. His first journalistic period begins formally with his first properly signed caricature, an etching praised by Mr F. G. Stephens, entitled Cobbett at Court, or St James's in a bustle, and published by W. Deans, October 16, 1807. This period includes Cruikshank's contributions to "The Satirist," "The Scourge," "Town Talk" and "The Meteor." It merges into the second period in 1819, the year that saw the first three volumes of "The Humourist." The principal journalistic works of this second journalistic period are Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians (1820), "Scraps and Sketches" (1828-1832), "The Comic Almanack" (1835-1853), "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" (1842), and "George Cruikshank's Table Book" (1845).

Coriolanus is less a caricature than a tableau vivant. It was invented by J. S., whom Mr Layard says was Cruikshank's gifted servant Joseph Sleap. The "Plebeians" are Thistlewood the conspirator, Cobbett armed with Tom Paine's thigh bones, Wooler as a black dwarf, Hone, George Cruikshank, etc. George IV., in his Shakespearean rÔle abuses them soundly. As regards the monarch, the work is un-Cruikshankian; its laborious and minute technique is a foreshadowing of a happier carefulness.

The journalism of "Scraps and Sketches" is immortal in The Age of Intellect (1828), which even Mrs Meynell, writing as Alice Thompson, found "most laughable." Here a babe whose toy-basket is filled with the works of Milton, Bentley, Gibbon, etc., learnedly explains the process of sucking eggs to a gaping grandmother, who suspends her perusal of "Who Killed Cock Robin?" while she declares that "they are making improvements in everything!" To my mind the best topical plate in "Scraps and Sketches" is London going out of Town, or the March of Bricks and Mortar (1829). No one who has seen a suburb grow inexorably in field and orchard, obliterating gracious forms and sealing up the live earth, can miss the pathos of this masterpiece. Yet it is not a thing for tears, but that half smile which Andersen continually elicits by his evocation of humanity from tree and bird and toy. For Cruikshank gives lamenting and terrified humanity to hayricks pursued by filthy smoke. He gives devilish energy to a figure, artfully composed of builder's implements, which saws away at a dying branch; and he imparts an abominable insolence to a similarly composed figure which holds up the notice board of Mr Goth.

Nearer perhaps to Cruikshank's heart than this triumph of fancy was The Fiend's Frying Pan (1832), published in the last number of "Scraps and Sketches," which represents the devil, immensely exultant, holding over a fire a frying-pan which contains the whole noisy lascivious crowd and spectacle of Bartholomew Fair. The fair was proclaimed for the last time in 1855, and Cruikshank was pleased to figure himself as an inspirer of the force that struck at its corrupt charm after the fair of 1839 and condemned it to a lingering death. The Fiend's Frying Pan is now chiefly remarkable as an early example of Cruikshank's love of crowding a great deal of real life into a vehicle that belittles it. This frying-pan sends the thought forward to the etching entitled Passing Events, or the Tail of the Comet of 1853, where Albert Smith's lecture on Mont Blanc, a prize cattle show, emigration to Australia, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," are all jumbled together in the hair of a comet which possesses a chubby and beaming face.

The pictorial journalism of the "Comic Almanacks" is often delicious; no ephemerides, in my knowledge, equal them in sustained humorous effect. Guys in Council (1848) haunts one with its grave idiocy. Even His Holiness Pius X. could scarce refrain from smiling at the blank stare of the rigid papal guy in the chair, at the low guy who, ere leaving the conclave, challenges him with a glance of malignant cunning. On the other hand, it would be hypercritical to seek a prettier rendering of an almost too pretty custom than Old May Day (1836), with its dancers ringing the Maypole by the village church. Cruikshank's extraordinary power of conveying dense crowds into the space of a few square inches—say six by three—is shown in Lord Mayor's Day (1836) and The Queen's Own (1838), illustrating Victoria's Proclamation Day. In the 1844 Almanack he humorously foreshadows flying machines in the form of mansions; but the 1851 Almanack shows his liberality scarcely abreast of his imagination, as Modern Ballooning is represented by an ass on horseback ascending as balloonist above a crowd of the long-eared tribe.

One cannot, however, glance through Cruikshank's Victorian caricatures without perceiving that the passing of the Regent slackened his Gillrayan fire. True, in the "Table Book" we have a John Bull whose agony reminds us of the suffering figure in Preparing John Bull for General Congress (1813): the midgets of infelicitous railway speculation who strip this bewildered squire of hat and rings, of boots and pocket-book, while a demented bell fortifies their din, are of an energy supremely Cruikshankian: no other hand drew them than the hand which enriched the immortality of the elves in Grimm. Nor will one easily tire of a vote-soliciting crocodile in the "Omnibus"; and yet the fact remains that the great motives of Cruikshank's political caricature pulsated no more. He was ludicrously incompetent for the task of satirising the forward movement of women: the Almanacks show that, if their evidence be required. The subjects of Queen Victoria found in Keene and Du Maurier pictorial critics who, by the implication of their veracity, their success, demonstrate his imperfect understanding of a generation to whom George the Fourth was history and legend. To the ironists of that generation there was something in the Albert Memorial more provocative than the

which distinguished the Folly at Brighton. It is too much to say that the art of the Victorian epoch establishes this fact; yet of what caricaturist can it be said as of Cruikshank that his naÏf enthusiasm for all that an Age rather than a Queen signified by the Albert Memorial forced him into the rÔle of its patron rather than its satirist? In A Pop Gun (1860) there is a pathetically feeble engraving, after a drawing by Cruikshank of Prince Albert and the late Queen, which almost brings tears to the eyes, its insipidity is so loyally unconscious. And what does all his marvellous needlework in the Great Exhibition novel entitled "1851: or The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Cursty Sandboys," accomplish for satire in comparison with what it accomplishes as a puff and a fanfare? Here, as in the Comet of his ill-fated Magazine (1854), is a skill beside which his Georgian caricatures are but a brat's defacement of his Board School wall. And yet what is the answer to our question? Nothing. It is an answer that rings down the curtain on the diorama called "Cruikshank the journalist."

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