"Great indeed!" he is made to say, "for he got rid of many wives, whilst I, poor soul, can't get rid of one. Cut off his beard, doctor, 'twill make me a prime pair of royal whiskers." The prince's partiality for the bottle is severely illustrated. In _The Phenix [sic] of Elba Resuscitated by Treason_ (May 1, 1815), he receives the news of Napoleon's outbreak, seated on a cushion with a decanter behind him; and even when he was King, Cruikshank dared to draw him (1822) as drunk and curing an irritated cuticle by leaning his kilted person against one of the posts of Argyleshire. If, however, Caroline of Brunswick had not, by adopting a Meredithian baby and other eccentricities, condemned herself to "Delicate Investigation" in 1806 and to a trial before the House of Peers in 1820, Cruikshank's delineations of Adonis the Great would have seemed genial compared with Thackeray's contempt. That his sentiment for the lady was less chivalrous than Thackeray esteemed it, may be divined by his caricature of her as an ugly statue of Xantippe put up to auction "without the least reserve" (1821), which is less than two months older than his conception of her as a rushlight which Slander cannot blow out. But he perceived, as did the whole intelligent proletariat, the monstrous irony of George's belated notice of his wife. Hence in his woodcuts to "The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder" and "Non Mi Ricordo!" he is not comic but satirical, and satirical with strokes that turn The Dandy of Sixty who bows with a grace into a figure abjectly defiant, meanly malevolent, devoid of levity. A cut in the former pamphlet shows him standing in a penitential sheet under the seventh, ninth and tenth commandments, meeting the gaze of an astonished urchin; on the outside of the latter pamphlet we see him in the throes of awkward interrogation, uttering the "Non Mi Ricordo" which Caroline's ill-wishers were tired of hearing in the mouth of Bergami.