There are men still alive who remember the six-bottle period and all its strenuous vulgarities, the period when the whole strength of the empire was put forth in the Bonaparte wars. William Chambers, who was born when George Cruikshank was a boy of eight, speaks of those years as a time of universal violence. Children, ruled by violence at home and by cruelty at school, pummeled and bullied one another in turn, besides practicing habitual cruelty toward birds and beasts, hunting cats, pelting dogs, plundering birds' nests. He tells us of a carter who used to turn out his horses to die on the common of his native town, where the boys, in the sight of the people, and without being admonished by them, would daily amuse themselves by stoning the helpless creatures till they had battered the life out of them. The news that roused the people was all of bloodshed on land and sea. The only pleasures that were held to be entirely worthy of men were hard riding and deep drinking. Those diaries of persons who flourished in the first half of George Cruikshank's life, of which so many volumes have been published lately--those, for example, of Moore, Greville, Jerdan, and Young--what are they but a monotonous record of dinner anecdotes? Marryat's novels preserve a popular exhibition of that fighting age, and we perceive from his memoirs that he did not exaggerate its more savage characteristics. Several of his most brutal incidents were transcripts from his own experience. Comic art, which the amelioration of manners has purified, has done much in its turn to strengthen and diffuse that amelioration. Isaac Cruikshank was among the last of the old school. He seems to have kept his pencil on hire, for we have caricatures of his on all sides of the politics of his time, from conservative to radical. In 1795 he represented William Pitt as the royal extinguisher putting out the flame of sedition; but in 1797 he exhibited the same minister in the character of a showman deceiving the people with regard to the condition of the country. "Observe," says "Billy," "what a busy scene presents itself. The ports are filled with shipping, riches are flowing in from every quarter." But the countrymen standing around declare that they can see nothing but "a woide plain with some mountains and mole-hills upon't," and conjecture that the fine things which Billy sees must be behind one of the mole-hills. During the same year we find him caricaturing Fox, the leader of the Opposition, as having laid a train for the purpose of blowing up the Constitution, and then leaving to others the risk of touching it off. On both sides of the Irish questions of his day he employed his pencil, ridiculing in some pictures the Irish discontents, and in others the measures proposed by ministers for quieting them. When the old king was losing his reason, he drew him as a "farthing rush-light," around which were the Prince of Wales, Fox, Sheridan, and