figures sketched by Cruikshank, are those of men, women, and children, with whom the spectator is perfectly familiar: he feels that they are portraits, but cannot recollect of whom he recognizes "that nose," and "this eye;" but cannot for the moment tell to whom they belong. A proud and brutal, yet foolish face, the Glasgow man is certain belongs to one of the contemptable fellows who bring flocks of geese to the market by their red-rag; my lord thinks it resembles somebody with whom he has dined, at a party of brother borough-mongering Peers, in "the good old days”—at any rate, he is confident that the face exists on his once side of " the House."

Yet, we can confidently assert, that George never keeps a notebook-and rarely takes a sketch from nature. His elder brother Robert, books every queer head" he comes across." George, however, trusts to the ample stores of memory. Even that felicitous portrait of Rounding, the Epping Huntsman, which is recognized at a glance, by every Cockney sportsman who has paraded his white cords and hired hack, at the Easter Hunt, was drawn " at sixty days after sight." Here is the jolly old " Cock of the Woods."

That droll drawing up of the mouth-that roguish and appreciating twinkle of the eye-that well-filled waistcoat-those indispensables are all true. He sits before us, just as he did on the day when

we last dined with him. The boots, however, are obsolete; he has left them off, on account of a few infirmities, and now clothes his veteran calves in what our facetious friend Hood terms, not simple gaiters, but five-barred ditto. He looks, in the cut, just as he did in the chair, when, after Peter Corcoran had proposed, in compliment to our host, "The Turf!" our capital confrère rose and said, that he begged gentlemen would not conclude from the toast that his excellent friend, Mr Corcoran, was a black-leg; for he was sure that that gentleman had only given a bit of turf for a lark.

no

In a more sober and sedate article we should, at its commencement, perhaps, have given our reasons for writing it. With regard to the present, it is not too late, considering its character, to do so even now. A multitude of boobies have, respectively, had their " things monstered" in two volumes quarto. Every petty poetaster— every poetical pullet of Cockaigne has been brought out by some one or other of the trashy publications with which his or her little lionloving friends are remotely or immediately connected. We know aspires, precisely, to what segment of a circle Miss L. E. L.'s forehead and how near Don Telesforo de Trueba's frontispiece approaches to a parallelogram:-there is no major-general of marines, with whose private accomplishments we have not been made acquainted: -a French or Italian cook, or even a Lady Georgiana Mac Doll, if she dresses well, is deemed worthy of immortality, by the proprietors of periodicals; the secretaries of associations, the Godfrey Sykes's, and Mr. Murray's-obtain the honour of having served up to the public, at the printshops,

on copper-plates

Their round fat pates,

Like calves' heads in a larder!-"

Even the myrmidon mistresses of theatrical managers have their memoir and likenesses in character and keeping; yet no avowed portrait-no notice of the life and genius,-of our second Hogarth, whom all the world appreciates, and of whom England may be justly proud, is to be had. We question if there be a single anecdote about him in print. No one, beyond the circles in which he moves, can say whether he is fat and facetious, or lean and lachrymose. Every one knows him pictorially; while only a select few are acquainted with him personally; for he "keeps snug." His biography, as most authors who attempt lives say in their prefaces, is therefore "a desideratum, which we feel happy in being enabled to supply."

His deportment, generally speaking, is severe; his glance bites like aqua-fortis. As he passes through the streets, nobody knowsnobody notices him. He hears the ready laugh at one of his pictorial effusions displayed in a shop-window, mentally curses the engraver who has spoiled his design, and passes on gravely as though he were going to a funeral. We have walked behind him from Dan to Beersheba-from the White Horse in Piccadilly, to the Black Horse in Coventry Steeet, and the pedestrians passed us, looking as though all were barren-as though they had met no body!-But it is high

66

time to introduce him. Here he is, drawn by himself—on the right, discussing with Hone about the " Slap at Slop,” or some other of their joint political facetiæ.

This is a capital portrait of George:-and although done some years ago it is still delightfully like him. An hour ago, George Cruikshank was sitting opposite us, pencil in hand; at this moment, with a trifling difference in apparel and mustachio, gentle reader, if you will condescend to fancy yourself Hone, and mosaic yourself into the engraving, George Cruikshank will sit opposite you.

Now for his autograph. George writes a queer, dashing, hurried, run-away hand, much like our own: but his signature is pictorial. The reader may form a tolerably correct idea of it, by magnifying to the breadth of a side of letter-paper, the letters interwoven among the ground lines of the subsequent cut-a tail-piece to the bill of fare, of "Three Courses and a Dessert."

It may be gratifying to the public, perhaps, to learn that George is about our own age ;-that he resembles us in having a remarkably pleasant little wife-one who makes most poetical and accurate tea eschewing the urn and concocting the delectable infusion, with water, from a bright, parlour-grate adorning kettle, just as the liquid has been irritated, for the first time, by the caloric material beneath it, to the boiling point. Although she does not personally superintend the toast-it is properly browned and buttered on both sides, under her auspices of course, therefore we respect and love her. To carry the parallel one point further ;-since we entered the matrimonial ring, neither we nor George have ever been able to make out what this

means:

By-the-bye, George has committed a species of blunder in the above sketch of which he rarely is guilty: the right hand Cupid, judging from his position, is evidently left-handed: perhaps the idea was put on wood shortly after the fight between Turner (a left-handed man) and the great little Jack Randall; but this is of little consequence.

The biographers of eminent men generally begin their narratives with the name of William the Conqueror. We are not so happy. Prior to the famous "forty-five," the name of Cruikshank, or as it used to be spelt by its Scotch proprietors, Crookshank, appears to have been recorded only in the Highland fogs. The mother of George was a Mac Naghten. The Crookshanks and the Mac Naghtens were both Charlie Stewart's men. Many of them were killed and more of them wounded at Preston Pans, and Culloden. After the fatal encounter which settled the fortunes of the young chevalier, the Mac Naghtens were among his most faithful friends. The rebels who bore the name of Crookshank were equally disloyal to the dynasty of the Guelphs: and, as we have often heard from an old man of this family, men of the two races frequently held meetings for the discussion of political questions, which, as they were all of the same opinion, invariably ended in an enthusiastic conflagration of their joint and several wigs.

Had George Cruikshank lived in the "famous forty-five," the result of Charlie Stewart's speculation might have been different. His progenitors were doubtless "stout and stalwart;" but what were their cuts at Preston Pans, and Falkirk, compared with his in Hone's political facetiæ? How immeasurably more formidable is his sixpenny pencil, than were their claymores! It is a question if a sketch of George the Second, "done after the life," with the same truth and felicity as the following specimen of George the Fourth

would not have wrought more for the Jacobite cause than a great victory. Who, if any opposition King had been set up would like to have acknowledged such a "high, mighty, and puissant Monarch"such a "Defender of the Faith as this?

This is "the most finished gentleman in Europe." Look at the

floor. His Majesty "the King of Hearts" has been "

playing the