One cannot, however, glance through Cruikshank's Victorian caricatures without perceiving that the passing of the Regent slackened his Gillrayan fire. True, in the "Table Book" we have a John Bull whose agony reminds us of the suffering figure in _Preparing John Bull for General Congress_ (1813): the midgets of infelicitous railway speculation who strip this bewildered squire of hat and rings, of boots and pocket-book, while a demented bell fortifies their din, are of an energy supremely Cruikshankian: no other hand drew them than the hand which enriched the immortality of the elves in Grimm. Nor will one easily tire of a vote-soliciting crocodile in the "Omnibus"; and yet the fact remains that the great motives of Cruikshank's political caricature pulsated no more. He was ludicrously incompetent for the task of satirising the forward movement of women: the Almanacks show that, if their evidence be required. The subjects of Queen Victoria found in Keene and Du Maurier pictorial critics who, by the implication of their veracity, their success, demonstrate his imperfect understanding of a generation to whom George the Fourth was history and legend. To the ironists of that generation there was something in the Albert Memorial more provocative than the "--huge teapots all drill'd round with holes, Relieved by extinguishers, sticking on poles" which distinguished the Folly at Brighton. It is too much to say that the art of the Victorian epoch establishes this fact; yet of what caricaturist can it be said as of Cruikshank that his naïf enthusiasm for all that an Age rather than a Queen signified by the Albert Memorial forced him into the rôle of its patron rather than its satirist? In _A Pop Gun_ (1860) there is a pathetically feeble engraving, after a drawing by Cruikshank of Prince Albert and the late Queen, which almost brings tears to the eyes, its insipidity is so loyally unconscious. And what does all his marvellous needlework in the Great Exhibition novel entitled "1851: or The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Cursty Sandboys," accomplish for satire in comparison with what it accomplishes as a puff and a fanfare? Here, as in the _Comet_ of his ill-fated Magazine (1854), is a skill beside which his Georgian caricatures are but a brat's defacement of his Board School wall. And yet what is the answer to our question? Nothing. It is an answer that rings down the curtain on the diorama called "Cruikshank the journalist." III