e was continually
betting crown-bowls of punch that he would design, etch, and bite in so
many plates within a given time, and, with the assistance of a private
bowl, he almost always won his bets; but the punch was too much for him
in the long run. He went mad and died miserably. George Cruikshank was
never his pupil; nor did he ever attain the freedom and mastery of
outline which the crazy old reprobate, who made the fortune of Mr.
Humphries, the St. James's Street print-seller, undeniably possessed;
but his handling was grounded upon Gillray's style; and from early and
attentive study of his works he must have acquired that boldness of
treatment, that rotundity of light and shade, and that general
"fatness," or _morbidezza_, of touch, which make the works of Gillray
and Cruikshank stand out from the coarse scrawls of Rowlandson, and the
bald and meagre scratches of Sir Charles Bunbury. Unless I am much
mistaken, one of the first works that brought George into notice was an
etching published in 1815, having reference to the exile of the detested
Corsican to St. Helena. But it was in 1821 that he first made a decided
mark. For William Hone--a man who was in perpetual opposition to the
powers that were--he drew on wood a remarkable series of illustrations
to the scurrilous, but perhaps not undeserved, satires against King
George IV., called, "The Political House that Jack Built," "The Green
Bag," "A Slap at Slop," and the like,--all of them having direct and
most caustic reference to the scandalous prosecution instituted against
a woman of whom it is difficult to say whether she was bad or mad or
both, but who was assuredly most miserable,--the unhappy Caroline of
Brunswick. George Cruikshank's sketch of the outraged husband, the
finest and stoutest gentleman in Europe, being lowered by means of a
crane into a pair of white kid pantaloons suspended between the posts of
his bed, was inimitably droll, and clearly disloyal. But disloyalty was
fashionable in the year '21.

For twenty years afterwards the history of the artist's career is but
the history of his works, of his innumerable illustrations to books, and
the sketchbooks, comic panoramas, and humorous cartoons he published on
his own account. Besides, I am not writing a life of George Cruikshank,
and all this time I have been keeping him on the threshold of the city
of Mexico. Let it suffice to say, briefly, that in 1841 came a
stand-point in his life, through the e