After the Devil comes Punch, who in the puppet play destroys him. Punch is only by irony a nursery character. He represents the comic genius of murder. A Hooligan may feel like a Pharisee after looking at him. His coarse materialism would affront a _pierreuse_. Cruikshank drew Punch as early as 1814 in a plate, satirising a fête given by the Duke of Portland on the occasion of the baptism of an infant marquis. The plate is entitled "Belvoir Frolic's" [sic] and appears in No. 4 of "The Meteor." A very long-nosed Punch extols the beverage bearing his name, and his infant son falls into a punch-bowl while being baptised by a drunkard. It was not, however, till 1828 that a reasonable joker could call Cruikshank's great hit a punch. That date is on the title-page of "Punch and Judy" edited by J. Payne Collier, for whose publisher (S. Prowett) Cruikshank drew the scenes of the immortal puppet-play as produced by Piccini, who defied any other puppet-showman in England to perform his feat of making the figure with the immoderate neck remove its hat with one hand. Thanks to Piccini, then, Cruikshank's Punch is the real Punch--a goggling miscreant, whose hump is a rigid and misplaced tail and whose military hat, above a crustacean's face, completes a rather melancholy effect of mania. The conductor of "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" confessed to feeling "that it was easy to represent" Punch's "eyes, his nose, his mouth, but that the one essential was after all wanting--the _squeak_." Cruikshank was barely just to his pencil. As one looks at his Punch one feels that such a being is either a squeaker or a mute. As for the Devil, whose rôle is so humiliating in the Punch tromedy (as a neologist might call it), he is of an aspect pitiably mean--like a corpse attired in river mud. [Illustration: PUNCH THROWING AWAY THE BODY OF THE SERVANT. From "Punch and Judy," 1828 (early proof). The portrait of George Cruikshank below his initials does not appear in the book.] After this, it is impossible not to realise the enormity of the compliment paid by the hand of Cruikshank (serving the imagination of G. H.) to Napoleon in that publication of August 1815, rashly stated by Mr Bruton to be the finest Napoleonic caricature, which depicts the imperial exile of St Helena as the Devil addressing a solar Prince Regent. Here the Devil gets the credit of a handsome face and Napoleon the debit of cloven feet. Cruikshank's representation of the Devil as Old Nick has the absurd merit of recalling his idea of the servant of a good Peri! Compare _The Handsome Clear-starcher_ ("Bentley's Miscellany," 1838) with _The Peri_ [, the Djin] _and the Taylor_ ("Minor Morals, Part III.," 1839). Both these ornaments of my sex have white eyes windowing a black face, and the former, with heraldic sulphur fumes above his figure of Elizabethan dandy, is, if we do not date him, a horrible gibe at the feminine Satan of "sorrows."