Before the punctuality of his interest in everything new that rose to the surface to obliterate an expiring mode or event, we stand astonished. It is not so much as an artist that we here admire him. It is as an Argus of the street, an Argus not only with many eyes but with feet enough to plant him at once in a hundred corners. From this voluble Argus his mistress Clio recoils but cannot dismiss him. Aghast she observes him presenting the Prince Regent in a hundred burlesquely improper parts; and it is a discreet generation indeed which remembers _Coriolanus addressing the Plebeians_ and forgets _The Fat in the Fire_. Clio withdraws, but does not forbid us to stay. And stay I do, at all events, to examine the packed and ugly caricatures which are the visible laughter of Cruikshank the Argus of journalism. Their violent colours and vigorous lines fail not in invocation. Before the student of them rise the supple, blue-eyed leech called Mrs Clarke and her grossly-doating Commander-in-chief; Lady Jersey, Lady Douglas and the other villains of the drama entitled "Queen Caroline;" the Marchioness of Hertford, the Countess of Yarmouth, or whoever brought down upon _Coriolanus_ the "heigho!" of a ribald Rowly; and, lest one grow lenient to royal self-indulgence, it is accused by the recurring presence of a figure of tormented respectability. It is the Cruikshankian John Bull, as different from Sir F. C. Gould's well-fed monitor of Conservative politicians as is Cruikshank's darkly criminal Punch from Richard Doyle's domesticated patron of humour. This John Bull is hacked to make a Corsican and Yankee holiday, taxed at the bayonet's point, starved on bread at eighteenpence the quartern, and offered up as a sacrifice to a Bourbon "Bumble-head." [Illustration: CARICATURE ON TAXATION No. 464 of Reid's Catalogue, published March 19, 1815.] But the visions that detain the student of Cruikshank the journalist are not only of personages and events. He saw and recorded the crowd and the clothes of the crowd. His art preserves the ladies of 1816, who resembled the bowls of tobacco pipes; the men of 1822, who wore trousers like pears; and the children of 1826, whom the hatter turned into "Mushroom Monstrosities." Cruikshank the journalist constitutes a fame in himself whose trumpeters are Fairburn, Fores, Humphrey, Hone ..., publishers who, in an age before photo-engraving, easily sold topical caricatures separately at a shilling or more. Gillray's name, in my estimation, outweighs Cruikshank's at the foot of such publications, while Rowlandson's weighs less. Together these three masters of caricature compose a constellation of third and fourth Georgian humour.