by brainless Cockneys
or cynical dyspeptics. The laugh awakened by a droll picture hurts
nobody. It is that ugly letter-press which smarts and rankles, and
festers at last into a gangrene of hatred. The Patriarch of Uz wished
that his enemy had written a book. He could have added ten thousand fold
to the venom of the aspiration, had he likewise expressed a wish that
the book had been printed.

You will be pleased to understand, then, that the name of the gentleman
who serves as text for this essay is Cruikshank, and not Cruickshank.
There is an old Scottish family, I believe, of that ilk, which spells
its name with a _c_ before the _k_. Perhaps the admirers of our George
wished to give something like an aristocratic smack to his patronymic,
and so interpolated the objectionable consonant. There is no Cruikshank
to be found in the "Court Guide," but Cruickshanks abound. As for our
artist, he is a burgess among burgesses,--a man of the people _par
excellence_, and an Englishman above all. His travels have been of the
most limited nature. Once, in the course of his long life, and with what
intent you shall presently hear, he went to France, as Hogarth did; but
France didn't please him, and he came home again, like Hogarth, with all
convenient speed,--fortunately, without being clapped up in jail for
sketching the gates of Calais. I believe that he has not crossed the
Straits of Dover since George IV. was king. I have heard, on good
authority, that he protested strongly, while in foreign parts, against
the manner in which the French ate new-laid eggs, and against the
custom, then common among the peasantry, of wearing wooden shoes. I am
afraid even, that, were George hard pressed, he would own to a dim
persuasion that _all_ Frenchmen wear wooden shoes; also pigtails;
likewise cocked hats. He does not say so in society; but those who have
his private ear assert that his faith or his delusion goes even farther
than this, and that he believes that all Frenchmen eat frogs,--that nine
tenths of the population earn their living as dancing-masters, and that
the late Napoleon Buonaparte (George Cruikshank always spells the
Corsican Ogre's name with a _u_) was first cousin to Apollyon, and was
not, upon occasion, averse to the consumption of human flesh,---babies
of British extraction preferred. Can you show me an oak that ever took
so strong a root as prejudice?

Not that George Cruikshank belongs in any way to the species known