y, Rowlandson, Bunbury, and others,
although commencing work before, are really quite as much nineteenth
century graphic satirists as their successors. This I admit; but
inasmuch as their work has been already described by other writers, and
the present book concerns itself especially with those whose labours
commenced after 1800, I have endeavoured to connect them with those of
their predecessors and contemporaries, without unnecessarily entering
into detail with which the reader is supposed to be already more or less
familiar.

I am in hopes that the character in which I am enabled to present George
Cruikshank as the leading caricaturist of the century; the account I
have given of his hitherto almost unknown work of this character;
together with the view I have taken of the causes which led to his
sudden and unexampled declension in the very midst of an artistic
success almost unprecedented, may prove both new and interesting to some
of my readers.

I have to acknowledge the assistance I have derived from the 1864 and
1867 MS. diaries of the late Shirley Brooks, kindly placed at my service
by Cecil Brooks, Esq., his son; my thanks are likewise due to Mr.
William Tegg for some valuable information kindly rendered.

PREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.

Having been called on to write a Preface to a popular edition of this
book, I seize the opportunity which is now afforded me of correcting an
error which occurred in the original edition. By some unaccountable
accident the printer omitted my sub-title; and it was not unnatural that
some of my reviewers should inquire _why_, in a work dealing with
English Caricaturists of the Nineteenth Century, no mention should be
made of the graphic humourists who succeeded John Leech. This question
is answered by the restoration of the original title, from which it will
be seen that the work is simply "a _contribution_ to the history of
caricature from the time of the first Napoleon _down_ to the death of
John Leech, in 1864." To take in the later humourists, would be to carry
the work beyond the limits which I had originally assigned to it.

One word more, and I have done. My intention in writing this book was to
show how the caricaturist "illustrated" his time,--in other words, how
he "interpreted" the social and political events of his day, according
to his own bias, or the views he was retained to serve. While exhibiting
him in the light of an _historian_--which he most un