Mary Anne Clarke, our second type of ascendant degeneracy, was, if Buck's drawing of her is truthful, a woman of seductive prettiness, but she could not teach Cruikshank her charm in atonement for her venality. He drew her petticoat "supported by military boots" and surmounted by a cocked hat and the mitre of the ducal bishop of Osnaburg (February 23, 1809); "under this," it is stated, "may be found a soothing for every pain." When Whigs and the Prince of Wales sent the Duke of York back in 1811 to the high post which he had disgraced, Mrs Clarke dwindled in Cruikshank's caricature to a dog improperly exhibiting its contempt for Colonel Wardle's left eye. It is curious that the Clarke scandal did not apparently inspire any caricature which deserves to live as pictorial criticism. Revealing, as it did, not only rottenness in the State, but in the Church, since Dr O'Meara sought Mrs Clarke's interest for the privilege of preaching "before royalty," one may well be surprised at the failure of caricature to ennoble itself in the cause of honour and religion. Yet Cruikshank produced in 1811 a powerful etching--_Interior View of the House of God_--which shows, apropos a lustful fanatic named Carpenter, his power to have seized the missed opportunity. In this plate is the contemporary portrait of himself which P. D'Aiguille afterwards copied. If we ask, for our soul's sake, to sicken of the Regent's amours and of the demure "Magdalen" of York, whose scarlet somehow softens to maroon because she is literary and quotes Sallust, it is necessary to leave the caricatures which laugh with her--especially Rowlandson's--and look at Cruikshank's tormented John Bull. The most pathetic is perhaps _John Bull's Three Stages_ (1815). In the last stage (_Peace with all the World_) his child, once pressed to eat after repletion, says, "Give me some more bone." The hand that drew the earlier plates of _The Bottle_ is unmistakable in this etching. It was seemingly in 1819 that Cruikshank first realised his great powers as a critic in caricature. To that period belongs what a pamphleteer called "Satan's Bank Note":-- "Notes which a 'prentice boy could make At fifteen for a shilling."