The path of Gillray, in and out of which runs the path of Thomas Rowlandson, is seldom or never dull; sometimes unclean in a manner malodorous as manure, but with risings which offer illuminating views. His humour is tyrannically laughable. The guffaw is, as it were, kicked out of the spectator of _The Apotheosis of Hoche_ (1798) by the descending boots, depicted as reluctantly yielding to the law of gravity, which the triumphant devastator of La Vendée has overcome. Gillray's sense of design was superb, and he would be an enthusiast who should assert that George Cruikshank in political caricature produced works at once so striking and architecturally admirable as _The Giant Factotum_ [Pitt] _Amusing Himself_ (1797). Gillray possessed what Cruikshank lacked altogether, the inclination and power to draw voluptuousness with some justice to its charm. One has only to cite in confirmation of this statement _The Morning after Marriage_ (August 5, 1788), and compare it with any of those caricatures in which Cruikshank exhibits the erotic preferences of George the Third's children. What, however, Cruikshank, in the artistic meaning of vision, saw in Gillray, he adapted with the force of a boisterous participant in the patriotism and demagogy of his day. Gillray had Napoleon for his prey, and no political criticism is pithier than the caricature which represents the Emperor as _Tiddy-Doll, the great French Gingerbread-Baker, drawing out a new Batch of Kings_ (1806). On the other hand, nothing that Swift is believed to have omitted in his description of Brobdingnag could be coarser than _The Corsican Pest_ (1803). It is almost literally humour of the latrine. Unhappily Cruikshank exulted like a young barbarian in the licence conferred by precedent, and it is hard to view with tolerance his pictorial records of "the first swell of the age." One of the wittiest is _Boney Hatching a Bulletin, or Snug Winter Quarters_ (Dec. 1812); the Grand Army is there seen in the form of heads and bayonets protruding from a stratum of Russian snow; the courier who is to convey the bulletin has boards under his boots to prevent his submersion. Elsewhere one's admiration for inventive vigour struggles against disgust at a mode which one only hesitates to call blackguardism because the liveliest contents of the paint-box were lavished upon it. Take, for instance, the caricature which bears the rhymed title, _Boney tir'd of war's alarms, flies for safety to his darling's arms_ (1813). The devil bears Bonaparte on his shoulders to the Empress Marie Louise, after the Russian campaign. "Take him to Bed, my Lady, and Thaw him," says the devil. "I am almost petrified in helping him to escape from his Army. I shall expect him to say his prayers to me every night!" Another Cruikshankian caricature, _The Imperial Family going to the Devil_ (March 1814), represents the rejection of Napoleon by that connoisseur of reprobates, though Rowlandson in the same month and year depicted the