fallen emperor as _The Devil's Darling_. Cruikshank's vulgar facetiousness, interesting by sheer vigour and self-enjoyment, pursues Napoleon even to St Helena in the heartless caricature which portrays him as an ennuyé reduced for amusement to rat-catching. It was not for nothing that Thomas Moore, alluding to the Prince Regent as Big Ben, made Tom Cribb say:-- "Having conquer'd the prime one, that mill'd us all round, You kick'd him, old Ben, as he gasp'd on the ground." Gillray is said to have sometimes disguised his style in order to evade his agreement with Humphrey that he would work for no other publisher; and there is more than one of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures which might be ascribed to Gillray's dram-providing _alter ego_ if their authorship were in question. Of such is _Quadrupeds, or Little Boney's Last Kick_, published in "The Scourge" (1813). Here the Russian bear holds a birch in his right paw, and Napoleon by an ankle with his left; a naked devil points to the crown, tumbling from the head of the capsized emperor; on the ground is an ironical bulletin. _Old Blucher beating the Corsican Big Drum_ (1814) is an even closer match of the baser sort of Gillrayan caricature; while the particular stench of it rises from _Boney's Elb(a)ow Chair_, of the same date. The last caricature from Cruikshank upon Napoleon came feebly in 1842 with the issue of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus," wherein he figures as a skeleton in boots surmounting a pyramid of skulls. The caricaturist's harlequinade had lasted too long; when it ceased, the soul of it utterly perished, and one views impatiently so formal and witless a galvanisation as was suggested by the return of Napoleon, dead, to the reconquest of France. Of Cruikshank's Napoleonic caricatures as a whole, it may be said that their function was solely to relieve by ridicule the pressure of a grandiose and formidable personality upon the nerves of his countrymen. He did not, like Gillray in _The Handwriting on the Wall_, confess the historic greatness of Napoleon by an allusion so sublime that it afforded Hone a precedent for unpunished impiety. When, for serio-comic verse, he attempted to delineate a monitory apparition, in the shape of Napoleon's "Red Man," the result was absurdity veiled by dulness. * * * * * But it is time to turn to the Cruikshankian view of persons and things in Great Britain in the lifetime of "Adonis the Great." It is said that while Gillray was productive, an old General of the German Legion remarked, alluding to caricature, "Ah! I dell you vot--England is altogether von libel." With the spirit of this speech, one can cordially agree. The concupiscence of princes was serialised for the mirth of the crowd. There were two great types of ascendant degeneracy to divert the eyes of Farmer George's subjects from their shops and Bibles. One was his son George, the other Mary Anne Clarke.