but his handling was grounded upon Gillray's style; and from early and attentive study of his works he must have acquired that boldness of treatment, that rotundity of light and shade, and that general "fatness," or _morbidezza_, of touch, which make the works of Gillray and Cruikshank stand out from the coarse scrawls of Rowlandson, and the bald and meagre scratches of Sir Charles Bunbury. Unless I am much mistaken, one of the first works that brought George into notice was an etching published in 1815, having reference to the exile of the detested Corsican to St. Helena. But it was in 1821 that he first made a decided mark. For William Hone--a man who was in perpetual opposition to the powers that were--he drew on wood a remarkable series of illustrations to the scurrilous, but perhaps not undeserved, satires against King George IV., called, "The Political House that Jack Built," "The Green Bag," "A Slap at Slop," and the like,--all of them having direct and most caustic reference to the scandalous prosecution instituted against a woman of whom it is difficult to say whether she was bad or mad or both, but who was assuredly most miserable,--the unhappy Caroline of Brunswick. George Cruikshank's sketch of the outraged husband, the finest and stoutest gentleman in Europe, being lowered by means of a crane into a pair of white kid pantaloons suspended between the posts of his bed, was inimitably droll, and clearly disloyal. But disloyalty was fashionable in the year '21. For twenty years afterwards the history of the artist's career is but the history of his works, of his innumerable illustrations to books, and the sketchbooks, comic panoramas, and humorous cartoons he published on his own account. Besides, I am not writing a life of George Cruikshank, and all this time I have been keeping him on the threshold of the city of Mexico. Let it suffice to say, briefly, that in 1841 came a stand-point in his life, through the establishment of a monthly magazine entitled "George Cruikshank's Omnibus." Of this he was the sole illustrator. The literary editor was Laman Blanchard; and in the "Omnibus," William Makepeace Thackeray, then a gaunt young man, not much over thirty, and quite unknown to fame,--although he had published "Yellowplush" in "Fraser,"--wrote his quaint and touching ballad of "The King of Brentford's Testament." The "Omnibus" did not run long, nor was its running very prosperous. George Cruikshank seemed for a while wearied with the calling of a caricaturist; and the large etchings on steel, with which between '40 and '45 he illustrated Ainsworth's gory romances, indicated a power of grouping, a knowledge of composition, a familiarity with mediaeval costume, and a command over chiaroscuro, which astonished and delighted those who had been accustomed to regard him only as a funny fellow,--one of infinite whim, to be sure, but still a jester of jests, and nothing more. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the