On the space so covered the reckless George, unmindful of the fate of Henry White, had etched the scantily clothed figure of the unhappy valet Sellis, with bleeding throat, crying aloud, “Is this a razor that I see before me? Thou canst not say I did it.” [18] This use of lamp-black has its parallel in the case of one of the tailpieces to Bewick’s _Birds_, in the first edition of which an apprentice was employed to veil certain indelicacies with a coat of ink. Unfortunately, from want of density, the colouring rather serves to accentuate than hide the offending details. In the next edition a plug was inserted in the block and two bars of wood engraved in the interests of decency. After but one or two proofs had been pulled, George and his publisher would seem to have become appalled at their temerity, and the plate was only issued coloured and with the peccant {69} figure blotted out. For many years I hoped and hoped in vain to come across an uncoloured proof displaying the hidden figure. But it was not until 1905 that I was fortunate enough to light upon the probably unique proof here reproduced, which had passed out of the Bruton collection into that of the omnivorous collector, the late Edwin Truman. For the sake of those who have preserved the valuable catalogue of the sale in 1897 of the Bruton collection of the works of George Cruikshank, it should be observed that Reid’s misnomer of the valet to which I have drawn attention above has been there repeated. So much, then, for the partially suppressed broadside of 1815, which incidentally may be looked upon as the forerunner of the blottesque censorship of Russian newspapers. We will now pass on to another broadside which was not only suppressed in full, but of which the copies that had already been sold were assiduously bought up. The circumstances surrounding this plate are by no means so dramatic as those with which we have last dealt. At the same time, by means of it we obtain one of those sharp contrasts in political {70} moods and tenses which pleasurably tickle the imagination. We learn how little is absolute in life, how much is relative. We realise how the reactionary of to-day may have been the reformer of yesterday. In a word, we see in this most conservative member of the Russell administration of 1846–1852 and of the Coalition of 1853, in this complacent recipient of the peerage of Broughton de Gyfford and the Grand Cross of the Bath, in this happy husband of a Marquis’s daughter,—we see, I say, in this Tory nobleman of the ’fifties the irreconcilable John Cam Hobhouse of the early years of the century, committed to Newgate for breach of privilege, the author of the subversive _Letters to an Englishman_, and the representative for Parliament of the Westminster mobocracy. [Illustration: “_A Trifling Mistake_”——_Corrected_——]