but we personally have met with little of his work
prior to 1816, which is accounted for by the fact that he followed for a
short time a sea life in the service of the East India Company, and
after having thrown this up in favour of a calling more congenial to his
tastes, he devoted himself for some years almost exclusively to
miniature and portrait painting, by which he earned not only a fair
livelihood, but a certain amount of fashionable patronage. Gradually,
however (George tells us), he abandoned this occupation, and took almost
exclusively to designing and etching. He occasionally alternated his
work with water-colour drawing, in which he is said to have greatly
excelled. His works in this line are extremely rare, for Robert had
neither the means nor the patience to wait for the tardy patronage to be
commanded by a higher walk in art; there was a demand for caricatures
and comic etching in his day, which afforded a present means of
livelihood, and Robert's water colours were executed more by way of
relaxation than in the way of actual artistic pursuit. Among his early
caricatures we may mention a rough and coarsely coloured affair engraved
by him after the design of an amateur, published by Fores on the 28th of
April, 1816, entitled, _The Mother's Girl Plucking a Crow, or German
Flesh and English Spirit_. The Princess Charlotte, as we have seen, had
an undoubted will of her own, and could, as we have also seen, assert it
when occasion demanded. Here she is presented to us at the moment when a
hideous German duenna, catching her in the act of writing to her mother
abroad, orders her at once to desist. The princess, however, in plain
terms, enforced with a clenched fist, gives her clearly to understand
that she fully intends to have her own way. Another caricature,
published by T. Sidebotham, in 1817, bearing the title of _The Horse
Marine and his Trumpeter in a Squall_, is dedicated to the United
Service Club.

STRANGE FRENCH FASHIONS.

Subjects for the pencil of a clever graphic satirist were not wanting
sixty years ago. France in those days set the fashion both in male and
female attire, and the strangest eccentricities had marked the
emancipation of that country from the thraldom of the Terror. There were
the _incroyables_, a set of young dandies who affected royalist
sympathies, and paraded the streets of Paris when young Napoleon was yet
a general in the service of the Directory. They wore short-waisted c