_Shepherd_. “What a subject for a picture by Geordie Cruik-shanks--Ha!
ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!” *
* Noctes Ambrosiano, Nov. 1828.
Exactly. What a picture for the inimitable George! Humphreys in St.
James’s Street, Fores in Piccadilly, Fairburn of Broadway, Ludgate Hill,
Hodgson and Co. of Newgate Street, W. Hone of Fleet Street, S. Knight of
Sweeting’s Alley, J. Dolby of the Strand, poor old Limbird of the same
thoroughfare, and many others, all joined in the chorus. “What a subject
for a picture by Geordie Cruikshanks”--let the new subject of the moment
be what it might--a scene in the condemned cell, characters for Twelfth
Night, a frontispiece to a song, His Most Gracious Majesty George the
Fourth returning from Westminster Hall in his Coronation Robes, or the
Mermaid now exhibiting at the Turf Coffee House in St. James’s Street,
or Liston, or the elder Watkins in a new character, or Grimaldi in
motley, pattering his last song! I have glanced at the more important
work produced by George Cruikshank between 1820 and 1830; and the reader
has seen what kind of effect it made in its time, and how it has been
judged by critics of high authority. But the full strength of the artist
can be estimated only after an examination of the sum of minor work
which he got through at the same time. When his “Life in London” and
Paris, “Phrenological Illustrations,” “Humourist,” “Points of Humour,”
and many series of book illustrations--comprehending a notable
quantity of his best creations--are estimated, in conjunction with his
hand-to-mouth work for the caricature shops, and the whole has been
surveyed at once, the connoisseur stands literally amazed at the
immeasurable fecundity of the artist. Within the range of this decade
of feverish activity is amassed such wealth of fancy, of invention, of
jocund spirit, of sympathy for suffering, of rage over wrong, of
minute observation of men and things, and withal such conscientious,
ever-improving execution with pencil and needle, and lithographic ink
and tinting-brush, upon wood and stone, and steel and copper, as not
all the caricaturists or comic artists who have swarmed in Fleet Street
since the Queen’s coronation day could equal, if they made a joint show
of their best. Cruikshank was lavish with his fancy, and his humour
lives upon the smallest subject. He never made one poor little idea
stand alone, as the practice is in the comic or satirical cartoons of
the present day. It was his wont to support his dominant conception with
a score of helpful accessories. He laid every detail under contribution
towards the elucidation of the story to be told. His caricatures, as
well as his serious pictures, abound in admirable by-play. His power of
concentrating interest is unmatched. His chairs and tables speak. There
is life in every accessory. _Nature morte_ did not exist for him. “Dead
as a door-nail” he could not understand; for under the magnetism of his
etching-needle the nail would laugh and speak. He was so full of life
himself--a hornpipe dancer in his eighty-fourth year *--that, in spite
of him, he infused it into anything he touched. No artist ever threw
such movement and infused such vital breath into his pictures, as this
untaught man of genius spontaneously breathed into his etchings and
woodcuts. A scrimmage by him inclines the beholder to lift his arm
to protect himself. When he leads off a dance upon copper, you
involuntarily hum a jig. When his characters are merry, you laugh
outright with them.
* Meeting Mr. R. H. Horne some two years before his death,
he danced the hornpipe before him, to show how sound and
strong and active he still was.
On the other hand, is his mood solemn, he can make your heart
beat quick, and send you shuddering away, with his images in your
brain--presences you will find it hard to banish. “The awful Jew
that Cruikshank drew” lingered for years in Thackeray’s mind; and the
profound impression which it made on the public, when it appeared, has
not faded even now.
More searching observation than that of Cruikshank in his prime was
never possessed by an artist. His range did not stretch beyond the
suburbs of London except perhaps to Margate in the hoy, but all that
came within it he made his own. Out of the suburban landscapes he
conjured fairy scenes; and Highgate and Hampstead supplied him with
distant horizons which his imagination widened at his will. Thackeray
declared that Cruikshank had a fine eye for homely landscapes, and yet
his trees are as bad as his horses. “Old villages, farm-yards, groups
of stacks, queer chimneys, churches, gable-end cottages, Elizabethan
mansion-houses, and other old English scenes, he depicts with evident
enthusiasm.” His scenes to Brough’s “Life of Falstaff” are exquisitely
drawn. Where Falstaff is arrested at the suit of Mrs. Quickly, and again
when he persuades her to lend him more money, the old houses are fine
picturesque studies.
But London, and London streets and suburbs, constituted Cruikshank’s
world in his heyday; and he caught all the phases of this his universe,
save and except its upper classes. He lived in the midst of the people;
he was of them. His humble fortunes cast his lot, in his early time,
among the poorer classes of professional men. He was passionately fond
of the stage, and was familiar with the popular comedians of the minor
theatres, and the landlords of the houses which they and he frequented.
He lived at Islington, and belonged to a club called “The Crib,” which
had a room at the Sir Hugh Middleton public-house, of which Joseph
Grimaldi,* the clown, was president. Mr. C. L. Gruneisen, who made
Cruikshank’s acquaintance at “The Crib,” related how on one occasion,
when a member bantered George rather savagely, and he--contrary to his
custom--had borne the “chaff” without replying, he presently turned
to him, and holding up his hand, showed a caricature of his assailant
executed upon his thumb-nail, and said, “Look here! See how I have
booked him!”
* Cruikshank illustrated songs Grimaldi sang; for instance,
“All the World’s in Paris. Sung with great applause by M.
Grimaldi, in the popular pantomime of Harlequin
Whittington.” Published Feb. 1st, 1815.
In 1824 he drew “the celebrated actor astride of a common
washing-stool, metamorphosed, with the aid of the copper-
stick, a broom, and an animal’s skull, into his “Neddy,”
while singing his favourite song of the season--“Here we go,
me and my neddy, gee woo!”
In 1825 he drew another portrait of Grimaldi in the
pantomime of Harlequin Whittington.
It was in this and kindred scenes with which Cruikshank was familiar
in his prime, and out of the excesses which, as we have seen, Professor
Wilson--himself no fastidious liver--tried to tempt him by promises of
a higher and wider fame, that Cruikshank drew the matchless gallery
of contemporary life, in which the humours, passions, whims, and
absurdities of our fathers and grandfathers are snatched from oblivion,
and left to inform and brighten the page of the future historian.
“We can submit to public notice,” says Mr. Thackeray, “a complete
little gallery of dustmen. Here is, in the first place, the professional
dustman, who, having in the enthusiastic exercise of his delightful
trade, laid hands upon property not strictly his own, is pursued, as we
presume, by the right owner, from whom he flies as fast as his crooked
shanks will cany him. What curious picture it is--the horrid rickety
houses in me dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered
butcher, the very trees which are covered dust--it is fine to look at
the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. The fiery
charioteer who belabours yonder poor donkey has still a glance for
his brother on foot, on whom punishment is about to descend. And not a
little curious is it to think of the creative power of the man who
has arranged this tale of low life. How logically it is conducted! how
cleverly each one of the accessories is made to contribute to the effect
of the whole! What a deal of thought and humour has the artist expended
on this little block of wood! a large picture might have been painted
out of the very same materials which Mr. Cruikshank, out of his wondrous
fund of merriment and observation, can afford to throw away upon a
drawing not twi inches long. From the practical dustmen we pass to those
purely poetical. Here are three of them, who rise on a cloud of their
own raising, the very genius of the sack and shovel. Is there no one to
write a sonnet to these? and yet a whole poem was written about Peter
Bell the waggoner, a character by no means so poetic.* And, lastly, we
have the dustman in love. The honest fellow is on the spectator’s right
hand; and having seen a young beauty stepping out of a gin-shop on a
Sunday morning, is pressing eagerly his suit. His arms round the ‘young
beauty’s’ neck, her face is hidden behind the dustman’s fantail hat.”
That society of dustmen, which Cruikshank used to observe, when he lived
in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, sank deep into his mind. In the
Triumph of Cupid, many years later, we shall still find the dustman.
He is lying in the foreground, “compelled to bite the dust”--while the
artist smokes his long pipe, and Cupid, astride his slippers, toasts a
heart at the fire. That long pipe (only it was honest clay, and not
the magnificent meerschaum to which George has treated himself in
his vision) was his companion for many a year. “Yes, I remember Mr.
Cruikshank very well when I was a little girl,” writes an old friend of
his. “When he came, a long clay pipe was sent for. He would sit
smoking it after dinner, and we were greatly amused by the energetic
gesticulation with which he accompanied his conversation.” His was
a handsome face, with steely blue eyes that struck through you.
They flashed as brightly as the eyes of Mr. Dickens, but they had no
merriment--only keenness, and a certain fierceness in them. Those eyes
penetrated all the mysteries of London life, and peered through clouds
of tobacco-smoke, and over foaming tankards in all kinds of strange and
queer places.
* Mr. Thackeray overlooked “The Literary Dustman.”
“For Jews, sailors, Irishmen, Hessian boots, little boys, beadles,
policemen, tall life-guardsmen, charity children, pumps, dustmen, very
short pantaloons, dandies in spectacles, and ladies with aquiline noses,
remarkably taper waists, and wonderfully long ringlets,” says Thackeray,
“Mr. Cruikshank has a special predilection. The tribe of Israelites he
has studied with amazing gusto; witness the Jew in Mr. Ainsworth’s ‘Jack
Shepherd,’ and the immortal Fagin of ‘Oliver Twist,’ Whereabouts lies
the comic _vis_ in these persons and things? Why should a beadle
be coinic, and his opposite a charity boy? Why should a tall
life-guards-man have something in him essentially absurd? Why are short
breeches more ridiculous than long? What is there particularly jocose
about a pump? and wherefore does a long nose always provoke the beholder
to laughter? These points may be metaphysically elucidated by those
who list. It is probable that Mr. Cruikshank could not give an accurate
definition of that which is ridiculous in these objects, but his
instinct has told him that fun lurks in them, and cold must be the heart
that can pass by the pantaloons of his charity boys, the Hessian boots
of his dandies, and the fantail hats of his dustmen, without respectful
wonder.”
George Cruikshank also created the ladies of the Sairy Gamp order. We
find one in a set of his Lottery Puffs, published in January 1818--a
midwife with a prodigious bonnet. And does she not appear as Mrs.
Toddles, the ancestress of Mrs. Brown of our day, in the _Omnibus?_
The debt of the humourists and public caricaturists who have lived and
flourished (aye, flourished as poor George never did) on the crumbs of
his Rabalaisian banquet of humour, is immeasurable. Many of the comic
London characters of to-day are only his figures redressed. They are
seen through the spectacles which he invented. Only, the fine fancy, the
rollicking gaiety, the cumulation of fun in some four inches square
of box-wood, are thinly spread over square feet. Think of Cruikshank’s
Irishmen! Thackeray says of them,--
“We have said that our artist has a great love for the drolleries of
the Queen Island.... We know not if Mr. Cruikshank has ever had any such
good luck as to see the Irish in Ireland itself, but he certainly has
obtained a knowledge of their looks, as if the country had been all his
life familiar to him. Could Mr. O’Connell himself desire anything more
national than the following scene? or would Father Mathew have a better
text to preach upon? There is not a broken nose in the room that is not
thoroughly Irish.”
The observer of all the humours of London life, the member of Mr.
Joseph Grimaldi’s club at the Sir Hugh Middleton, and of many other
very free-and-easy theatrical, artistic, and literary clubs of the hour,
nursed very serious and ambitious designs, even while he threw out his
pictorial squibs for his daily bread. It is sad to think that even the
mighty quantity of work which he got through, and of work that filled
publishers’ pockets, and set up laughing faces from the Highlands to
Portsmouth, was never well paid enough to give him ease to do justice to
his genius.
In a note to Mr. Hotten* (April 1865) he said, “The first time that I
put a _very large figure_ in perspective was about forty years back, in
illustrating that part of ‘Paradise Lost’ where Milton describes Satan
as
‘Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood.’
* Explanatory of his drawing (here reproduced) of the giant
This I never published, but possibly I may do so,” the intrepid old man
adds, “one of these days.”
[Illustration: 201]
In a letter to Mr. J. P. Briscoe he explained how, in 1825, Bolster,
which forms the frontispiece of Mr. Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of
the West of England.”
when his caricatures were in all the shop-windows, he was engaged to
illustrate Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
“Previous to the year of 1825, I was engaged to illustrate Milton’s
‘Paradise Lost.’ A friend of mine, Mr. Lewis, was to be the editor, and
a bookseller in the Strand, near Holywell Street, named Birch, was, I
believe, to be the publisher.
“For this work I made two drawings on wood, one was ‘Satan, Sin, and
Death, at the Gates of Hell,’ and the other, ‘Satan calling up the
fallen Angels.’
‘Awake! arise! or be for ever fallen!
They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprang
Upon the wing.’
This illustration was very _crowded with figures, and the best drawing
that I ever did in my life_; but when the wood engraver saw it, he
said he was afraid he could not engrave it: however, it was done and
published, but the _block_ is missing; however, there is an _impression_
of it (No. 116) now exhibiting in the _selection_ of my works at the
“Royal Aquarium,” Westminster, London.
“I expect there had been some kind of arrangement made as to a
partnership between the editor and the publisher; but some disagreement
followed, which stopped the work, and this is the reason why the subject
you mention of the large figure in perspective
‘Lay floating many a rood’
was not published; and since then I have had so many matters to attend
to, that I don’t think I shall ever publish it, nor be able to do an oil
painting of the subject, as I always wished to do, being now too much
overwhelmed with various engagements.”
The light heart and courage with which Cruikshank bore up against many
a bitter disappointment like this, hindering his flight to the higher
regions of his art, are delightful characteristics of him.
While he was dreaming of Paradise Lost, and designing “the very best
drawing he ever did in his life,” and the dream and the labour were
cast by unkind Fate to to the winds, see how prodigally he was using his
genius as the popular pictorial chronicler, moralist, and provider of
laughter of the day.
Not only did he execute the caricatures I have already noted, for and
against Queen Caroline; he threw off series after series, as “Doll
Tear-Sheet,” “The Green Bay,” “Non mi ricordo,”
“Political Lectures on Tails,” in which the Prince Regent, Lord Eldon,
the Marquis of Conyngham, Lord Castlereagh, and Mr. Wilberforce figured;
the King led blindfolded by his evil advisers, Lords Sidmouth and
Castlereagh; to say nothing of “The Political Apple Pie,” “The
Constitutional Apple Pie,” “The Men in the Moon,” “The Man in the
Moon,” and the “Political Quixote.” The satirical grotesque force and
plentifulness of point in these streams of running pictorial commentary
on current events, show the acuteness of the artist’s intellect, as well
as the sleeplessness of his power of observation, the tenderness of his
sympathies, and his alertness as a moralist. Moore, dressed as a rough
Irish peasant, holding Erin’s harp in one hand, and a shillelagh in the
other, to protect a basketful of poems on his arm--while Old Nick is
putting a rope round one of his legs, and the other is fettered with the
twopenny post bag--is called “Erin’s Pocket Apollo.” Under the title
of “The Botley Showman,” William Cobbett is presented, with a peepshow,
through which a crone looks, while the devil is grinding a tune on an
organ. The proprietor announces the Hampshire Hog and Tom Paine’s bones,
a flag floats above, inscribed ‘How to raise the Wind;’ while a bumpkin
and his boy look on horror-struck by the idea of the bones being in
the box. This drawing is supplemented by a tail-piece, in which we see
Cobbett going in a cart to a place of execution, followed by the devil
carrying his coffin. And now we light upon Hone tied to a whipping-post,
with his companion Old Nick. Lord Castlereagh is holding up the Radical
rascal’s coat-tails, and flogging him, to the delight of Lord Sidmouth
and Vansittart, who are looking on. The moral to this caricature, which
is entitled “A Printer and his Devil Restrained,” is given in an apt
quotation, in Cruikshank’s usual manner:--
_Lucio_. “Why, how now, Claudio? whence comes this
restraint?”
_Claud._ “From too much liberty, my Lucio,--liberty.
A surfeit is the father of much fast;
So every scope, by the immoderate use,
Turns to restraint.”
The “Men in the Moon” series (1820), forerunners of Mr. Albert Smith’s
“Man in the Moon,” is all levelled at the Liberals, or Radicals: Cobbett
and Hunt, as representatives of the _Weekly Register_ and _Reform_,
appear as the agents of Satan. A little devil (his Satanic majesty
figured largely in all the caricatures of the time, and most public men
in their turn were humorously given over to him) perched on a gibbet
is waiting, no doubt impatiently, for the souls of the Radicals. A big
devil clutches cloven-hoofed Lord Byron, “The Lord of the Faithless,”
and points to the distant gibbet Hunt, “knocked out of time” in a
pugilistic encounter with Lord Castlereagh, is being “attended to” by
his friends--the devil and Cobbett. But so bad were the Radical leaders,
that the friendship even of the devil is at last denied them. They
appear, with other Radicals, as the political hydra, and their faithless
friend Satan, with his pitchfork, is lending a hand to Lords Castlereagh
and Sidmouth, for their destruction. They have an awful end in the
hydra’s skin, being nailed by the tail to a gibbet, and burned amidst
the rejoicing shouts of “the first gentleman in Europe,” the Iron Duke,
and the King’s ministers.
But in “The Man in the Moon” the impartial caricaturist has his fling
at the King and his ministers. Here the Goddess of Reason protects the
liberty of the press from the gag and dagger, which are presented by
Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, and Canning. The Prince Regent, mounted
upon Lord Sidmouth’s back, shoots at the cup of liberty. And now his
Royal Highness is Guy Fawkes carried by his favourites, Castlereagh
and Sidmouth. It was at this time, when Hone appeared tied to a
whipping-post, supplied by Cruikshank’s needle, that the artist
illustrated “The Bank Restriction Barometers,” for the incorrigible
Radical of Fleet Street, who probably revenged himself upon Cruikshank
in St. James’s Street, by under-paying him in the city.
The “Barometer” was ingeniously illustrated: at top, Britannia in the
full tide of prosperity; at bottom, weeping and dejected, with ships
wrecked and children hanged. The gibbet played as conspicuous a part in
these daily squibs as the devil.
The Cato Street conspirators gave Cruikshank hand-to-mouth work. He drew
the prisoners in the dock. Trifling incidents that hit the public mind
brought work to his nimble needle. Mrs. Geoffrey Gubbins became famous,
in death, by being buried in an iron coffin which the authorities of
St. Andrew’s parish declined to deposit in their graveyard. Cruikshank
showed churchwarden and beadle astride the open grave. In the midst
of all this he drew a frontispiece--to-day for the “Memoirs of Captain
Huddart”--on the morrow, for the second volume of Thornton’s “Pastorals
of Virgil”; and the next day he designed one of those little domestic
scenes which he always loved. A little girl is seated under a spreading
tree at a cottage door. The village church is in the distance, and a
feeble old woman is shambling along the road. The scene of peace is
called “The Adventures of a Bible.” From this bit of sentiment the
artist could turn swiftly to illustrations called “The Right Divine
of Kings to Govern Wrong.” What a monster of despotism has the artist
conceived! The figure has a huge bomb for a body, cannon for legs. It
is armed with fire and sword. Swinging to and fro in chains, it tramples
upon and mutilates the mob upon the ground. It wears a crown, and a
glory of daggers is the nimbus about its head!
The same hand that drew this monster, turned away to “The White Cat,” in
which Caroline and her friends are outrageously treated. The vignette is
enough. The crown of England is shown in a cage guarded by the sword of
Justice against a black cat, the cat being the Queen. In the series we
have the old stage properties of the political caricature--the block,
the headsman’s axe, the gibbet, the guillotine, a coffin, etc. Let
us pass on--without even glancing at “The Miraculous Host,” and other
similar pencillings. This was all very sad pot-boiling; and we respect
the artist for the regret with which he looked back upon it.
It was redeemed and put in the shade by better work. Let us glance by
way of relief at “Fairy Experience arriving to solemnize the Baptism of
Bright Star,” and “Prince Iris entertained at a Banquet by Zephyrina
and her Nymphs;” * or “The courageous young Girl Rosa plunging into the
Water to save her young Mistress, Pulchra, from the Jaws of the Shark,”
or “The Little Deformed Old Man destroying the huge Serpent which
has coiled its folds about his body.” Here we discover indications of
Cruikshank’s fancy in its more gracious moods: we come upon him at home
for the first time in fairy-land.
* Cruikshank’s illustrations to Gardener’s “Original Tales
of my Landlord’s School,” 1822. Ditto to Gardener s “Royal
Present,” 1822.
[Illustration: 212]
“The Folly of Pride,” Italian tales, in which there is a Jew, as in “The
Merchant of Venice,” embarrassed on being told by Gianetto to “ take the
pound of flesh from Ansaldo,” and “Tales of Irish Life” (1824), and his
illustrations to Clinton’s “Life of Lord Byron” (1824-5), mark
Cruikshank’s progress from political caricature to experience;
four-and-twenty cuts to “The Universal Songster, or Museum of
Mirth,”--coarse bits of street, pot-house, and play-house wit; sixteen
illustrations of the humours of sailors’ life--the sailors being perfect
salts; illustrations to Hone’s “Every-Day Book” (1852); twenty-five more
wood-cuts to the “Log-Book” (1826-7), full of fun, spirit, and
character; some curious bits of mountainous and other scenery in “The
Pocket Magazine;” twenty-one cuts to “Philosophy in Sport” (1827)--to
say nothing of diagrams; three quaint bits to Walpole’s “Anecdotes of
Painters;” twenty-four “More Mornings at Bow-Street;” a vignette,
“Bolton reclining in the Fairies’ Bower;” a frontispiece to “Harcourt’s
Jests;” etchings of many of A. Crowquill’s drawings; and “Punch and
Judy” (1827-8). In these latter careful etchings the power of Cruikshank
to inform a puppet with life, and keep it wooden still, is conspicuous.
He has related how he studied his subject:--
[Illustration: 215]
“Having been engaged by Mr. Prowett, the publisher, to give the various
scenes represented in the cuts to the street performances of ‘Punch and
Judy,’ I obtained the address of the proprietor and performer of that
popular exhibition. He was an elderly Italian, of the name of Piccini,
whom I remembered from boyhood, and he lived at a low public-house, the
sign of The ‘King’s “Philosophy in Sport.”
[Illustration: 217]
Having made arrangements for a ‘morning performance,’ one of the window
frames on the first-floor of the public-house was taken out, and the
stand, or Punch’s theatre, was hauled into the ‘club-room.’ Mr. Payne
Collier (who was to write the description), the publisher, and myself,
formed the audience; and as the performance went on, I stopped it at the
most interesting parts, to sketch the figures, whilst Mr. Collier noted
down the dialogue, and thus the whole is a faithful copy and description
of the various scenes represented by this Italian, whose performance of
‘Punch’ was far superior in every respect to anything of the sort to
be seen at the present day. The figure whose neck he used to stretch
to such a great height was a sort of interlude. Piccini made the figure
take off his hat with one hand, which he defied all other puppet-show
performers to do. Piccini announced the approach of Punch by sound of
trumpet.”
Even now I have but glanced at the more important subjects on the list.
How infinitely various is the humour! how wide and searching, I must
repeat, is the observation! Could anything be better than these
“Four Specimens of the Reading Public”? Here is Romancing Molly, a
servant-girl, asking for “rum-ances in five wollums;” at her elbow is
Sir Harry Luscious, a feeble old sinner, inquiring for the first volume
of “Harriette Wilson” (to which, by the way, Cruikshank furnished some
etchings after Dighton’s caricatures); next to Sir Harry comes, of
course, Cruikshank’s favourite figure, the Dustman, his dirty hand
thrust into his pocket for the price of a “Cobbett”; and the fourth
reader is “Frank à la Mode,’ a scented fop, with his poodle, who wants
to know whether “Waverley’s new novel is out.” After Punch, in quick
succession came illustrations to Hood’s “Epping Hunt,” and to Cowper’s
Mr. “John Gilpin,” wherein Cruikshank, as a pure humourist, is at his
best.
[Illustration: 219]
“Famous books in their day were Cruikshank’s ‘John Gilpin’ and ‘Epping
Hunt,” says Thackeray; “for though our artist does not draw horses very
scientifically,--to use a phrase of the _atelier_, he _feels_ them very
keenly; and his queer animals, after one is used to them, answer quite
as well as better.
[Illustration: 221]
Neither is he very happy in trees, and such rustical produce; or rather,
we should say, he is very original, his trees being decidedly of his
own make and composition, not imitated from any master.... The horses
of John Gilpin are much more of the equestrian order; and, as here, the
artist has only his favourite suburban buildings to draw; not a word is
to be said against his design.... The rush, and shouting, and clatter
are here excellently depicted by the artist; and we, who have been
scoffing at his manner of designing animals, must here make a special
exception in favour of the hens and chickens; each has a different
action, and is curiously natural. Happy are children of all ages who
have such a ballad and such pictures as this in store for them!”
[Illustration: 223]
The miscellaneous activities of the decade over which while a curious
crowd gloats over the body of the murderer. A lady, who has obtained
a front place, exclaims, “Oh, how delightfully horrible!” In another
corner the sheriff takes the murderer’s pistols from the gaoler, saying
he would not part with them for a hundred guineas.
We find ladies with opera-glasses in “front places” still, at
“sensational” trials for murder.
[Illustration: 224]
[Illustration: 225]