The cabinet in which George kept capillary souvenirs of so many women was fastened against contemporary critics of his career. Undivulged, therefore, was the touching sentiment of a philofeminism which, in excluding his legal wife, was construed but as vice. There was no Max Beerbohm in his day to appreciate his polish and talents and to pity his wife for playing her tragedy in tights. There was no one to pronounce him the slave of that most endearing of tyrants, the artistic temperament. The caricaturists saw simply a polygamist eager to convict of adultery the wife whom he disliked and avoided, and a spendthrift whose debt was inflicted upon the nation. So far as man can show up his fellow-men, this man was shown up, and in verse and picture became an instrument of public titillation. So roguish a severity as the caricaturists displayed can seldom be accepted as didactic Gillray, indeed, in _The Morning after Marriage_ followed him into the bridal chamber of Mrs Fitzherbert whom he married in 1785, and this caricature is the best advertisement of his grace and beauty which perhaps exists. When attacked by Cruikshank, he was over forty, for the first caricature of him in which that artist's hand is noticeable was published in 1808. It is entitled _John Bull Advising with His Superiors_: the superiors being George and his brother Frederick, who sit under the portraits of their respective mistresses, "Mrs Fitz" and Mrs Clarke. John Bull is clean-shaven, fat-nosed, hatted, and holds a gnarled stick. "Servant Measters," he begins, "I be come to ax a bit of thy advice"; but he proceeds to freeze them with clumsy innuendo and adds, "I does love good old Georg [_sic_], by Goles! because he is not of that there sort," meaning their own. After this, the Regent was for Cruikshank a stimulant to the drollest audacities. The world was younger then and could laugh uproariously at the bursting of a dandy's stays and the mislaying of a roué's removable whiskers. Mrs Grundy had not persuaded it of the superior comicality of Mrs Newlywed's indestructible pie-crust and Mr Staylate's interview with the parental boot. So George, who, at any rate, was real life, blossomed abundantly to another George's advantage. Thus _The Coronation of the Empress of the Nairs_ (September 1812)--a simile suggested by a contemporary account of a curious Asiatic race--depicts him as crowning the Marchioness of Hertford in her bath; _A Kick from Yarmouth to Wales_ illustrates the assault of the provoked Earl of Yarmouth upon his wife's too fervent admirer; and _Princely Agility_ (January 1812) shows His Royal castigated Highness confined by a convenient sprained ankle to bed, where his whiskers and wig are restored to him. The opening of Henry the Eighth's coffin in St George's Chapel, Windsor, April 1, 1813, suggests to Cruikshank _Meditations Amongst the Tombs_, in which the greatness of the deceased sovereign forcibly strikes the Regent.