[28] The woodcut of the irascible George suspending the unhappy Brooks by the nose from a pair of tongs is reproduced in my little book on _Cruikshank’s Portraits of Himself_. [Illustration: The suppressed portrait of “John Jorrocks, Esq., M.F.H., etc.” (_By Henry Alken, the younger_)] Let it be clearly understood, then, that the plate which we here reproduce was the work of Henry Alken the younger. Though of little artistic merit, it is yet not unworthy of those which were published, and the reason of its {161} suppression is difficult to fathom. The plate should be undoubtedly annexed, on its very rare appearance, by him who values his _Jorrocks_. This would make his copy, in the words of the second-hand booksellers, a “really desirable” one. Our reproduction is not quite the size of the original, which exactly tallies in size and shape with the published plates. The line of publication runs: “London, Published by R. Ackermann at his Eclipse Sporting Gallery, 191 Regent St. 1843.” The method employed in its production is a mixture of etching and aquatinting, and this impression has been coloured by hand with the brilliant tints which appealed to our sporting forebears. There need be no complaint about its lowness of tone. It would put to the blush the most versi-coloured of kaleidoscopes! To parody Dr. Johnson’s animadversion upon a certain ode, it would be just from the strict artistic standpoint to say, “Bolder colour and more timorous meaning, I think, were rarely brought together.” * * * * * So much for some unattached suppressions of the first half of the century. We will conclude {162} this chapter with certain cancelled plates of only yesterday. To those who have not yet grasped the fact (cried aloud in the wilderness by Mr. Kipling) that our age is as romantic as any other if we only know how to regard matters, the fact will probably come as something of a surprise that the last decade of the nineteenth century has as surely its crop of “suppressed plates,” as have those ages which were, we choose to flatter ourselves, more brutal than our own. Less unmannerly in some respects doubtless we tend to become, and that perhaps is the very reason (paradoxical though it may sound) why we do not have to search in vain for “modern instances.” For now that Mrs. Grundy is sharper-eyed than she was (notwithstanding her age), and the libel laws are more closely knit by precedents, slips which would have been treated as passing peccadilloes by our less squeamish forebears rise to the dignity of “copy” for the pressman, and form staple conversation for the insatiate tea-table. And when we mention the late most five-o’clock and kind-hearted of artists, Mr. du Maurier, and {163} the still living most dainty limner of hoops and patches, Mr. Hugh Thomson, as the providers of century-end “cancelled illustrations,” we may be sure that the details will not be very scandalous, nor the outrages very shocking.