e represents, that the Princess was the most
spotless, pure-mannered darling of a Princess that ever married a
heartless debauchee of a Prince Royal. Did not millions believe
with him, and noble and learned lords take their oaths to her Royal
Highness's innocence? Cruikshank would not stand by and see a woman
ill-used, and so struck in for her rescue, he and the people belaboring
with all their might the party who were making the attack, and
determining, from pure sympathy and indignation, that the woman must be
innocent because her husband treated her so foully.

To be sure we have never heard so much from Mr. Cruikshank's own lips,
but any man who will examine these odd drawings, which first made him
famous, will see what an honest hearty hatred the champion of woman has
for all who abuse her, and will admire the energy with which he flings
his wood-blocks at all who side against her. Canning, Castlereagh,
Bexley, Sidmouth, he is at them, one and all; and as for the Prince, up
to what a whipping-post of ridicule did he tie that unfortunate old man!
And do not let squeamish Tories cry out about disloyalty; if the crown
does wrong, the crown must be corrected by the nation, out of respect,
of course, for the crown. In those days, and by those people who so
bitterly attacked the son, no word was ever breathed against the father,
simply because he was a good husband, and a sober, thrifty, pious,
orderly man.

This attack upon the Prince Regent we believe to have been Mr.
Cruikshank's only effort as a party politician. Some early manifestoes
against Napoleon we find, it is true, done in the regular John Bull
style, with the Gilray model for the little upstart Corsican: but as
soon as the Emperor had yielded to stern fortune our artist's heart
relented (as Beranger's did on the other side of the water), and many
of our readers will doubtless recollect a fine drawing of "Louis XVIII.
trying on Napoleon's boots," which did not certainly fit the gouty
son of Saint Louis. Such satirical hits as these, however, must not be
considered as political, or as anything more than the expression of the
artist's national British idea of Frenchmen.

It must be confessed that for that great nation Mr. Cruikshank
entertains a considerable contempt. Let the reader examine the "Life in
Paris," or the five hundred designs in which Frenchmen are introduced,
and he will find them almost invariably thin, with ludicrous
spindle-shanks, pigtails,