In the evening of the 18th of November, 1817, a mournful procession, at which all the great officers of state attended, quitted Claremont House _en route_ for Windsor. At the impressive ceremony which followed, Garter King at Arms proclaimed its melancholy purport in the following words: "Thus it has pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory life, unto His Divine mercy, the late most illustrious Princess Charlotte Augusta, daughter of His Royal Highness, George, Prince of Wales, Regent of the United Kingdom." It was even so. The pride and hope of the nation, the heiress of the crown, was on the 6th of November delivered of a still-born child, and within a very few hours afterwards had succumbed to the unlooked-for and fatal exhaustion which followed. The grief which this occasioned was so universal that every one seemed to realize the fact that he or she had sustained an individual loss; scarcely perhaps in English history had the death of a member of a royal family been more sincerely and truly regretted. The mournful event is referred to by the artist in a more than usually touching sketch, entitled, _England's Hope Departing_. Among the medical attendants of Her Royal Highness who followed her to the grave, was the accoucheur, Sir Richard Croft, Bart. This distinguished gentleman was so deeply affected with the unlooked-for result, that his mind refused to recover its tone, and within a month afterwards he committed self-destruction. Other pictorial satires of George Cruikshank, bearing the date of 1817, are: _Fashionables of 1817_, two figures--a male and female--outrageously caricatured, a rough affair, altogether differing from his usual style; the well-known _double entendre_, _A View of the Regent's Bomb_, which, with our knowledge of his sensitiveness on the subject of his personal appearance, must have given the exalted personage thus outrageously satirized the greatest possible mortification; _The Spa Fields Orator Hunting for Popularity to do Good_, (*) a punning satire on "Orator" Hunt; _A Patriot Luminary Extinguishing Noxious Gas_ (etched from the design of another artist); and two admirable designs bearing the titles of _Vis-a-Vis_ and _Les Graces_. The same year we meet with one of the earliest of his alliterative satires, afterwards so frequently to be seen among the famous illustrations to the "Comic Almanack": _La Belle Assemblee, or Sketches of Characteristic Dancing_, miscellaneous groups, comprising in all thirty figures (exclusive of the orchestra), engaged in a country dance, a Scotch reel, an Irish jig, a minuet, the German waltz, a French quadrille, the Spanish bolero, and a ballet "Italienne." The walls are hung with pictures of dancing dogs, a dancing bear, a dancing horse, rope dancing, the dance of St. Vitus, and "Dancing Mad." Besides this, we find the same year two large sheets showing the _Striking Effects produced by Lines and Dots, for the Assistance of every Draughtsman_,