their friends, all trying to blow out the flickering flame. At length, in 1810, he caricatured the Burdett riots in a manner to please the most "advanced" radical. This picture, however, may have been a tribute to the mere audacity of the member for Westminster, who barricaded his house for four days against the officers of the House of Commons ordered to arrest him. It was while Isaac Cruikshank was occasionally drawing such caricatures as these that he "kindly allowed" his son George, "a mere boy," to "play at etching on some of his copper-plates." The first real work done by the lad was of a very modest character, but he speaks of them in a way to make us regret that even they should have been lost. "Many of my first productions, such as half-penny lottery books and books for little children, can never be known or seen, having been destroyed long, long ago by the dear little ones who had them to play with." Men who write so of little children that tore up their picture-books seventy years before are not formed for the strife of politics. George Cruikshank early in life withdrew from political caricature, but not before he had executed a few pictures of which he might reasonably boast in his old age, after time had justified their severity. This aged artist, who has lived to see the laws repealed which restricted the importation of grain into England, was just coming of age when those laws were passed, and he expressed his opinion of them in a caricature called "The Blessings of Peace; or, The Curse of the Corn Bill." It was in 1815--the year that consigned Bonaparte to St. Helena, and gave peace to Europe. A vessel laden with grain has arrived from a foreign port, and the supercargo, holding out a handful, says, "Here is the best for fifty shillings." But on the shore stands a store-house filled with home-grown grain, tight shut, in front of which is a group of British land-owners, one of whom waves the foreign trader away, saying: "We won't have it at any price. We are determined to keep up our own to eighty shillings, and if the poor can't buy it at that price, why, they must starve." The foreign grain is thrown overboard, while a starving family looks on, and the father says, "No, no, masters, I'll not starve, but quit my native country, where the poor are crushed by those they labor to support, and retire to one more hospitable, and where the arts of the rich do not interpose to defeat the providence of God." Such is the Protective System: an interested few, having the ear of the Government, thriving at the expense of the many who have not the ear of the Government! This young man saw the point in 1815 as clearly as Cobden, Peel, or Mill in 1846.