“At such a crisis, and against such a Ministry, William Hone had the boldness to enter the lists. He commenced the publication of cheap pamphlets, in which the literature was below par, and the main reliance was upon the _telling_ points of the woodcuts. The first was ‘The Political House that Jack Built,’ with thirteen cuts after designs by George Cruikshank. This was a parody upon the old nursery rhyme. It _took_ amazingly. Upwards of 100,000 copies sold. George Cruikshank was too young at the time to have any very decided politics, but there is no doubt that then, as now, his sympathies were with the people. At any rate, he did his work well. Every one laughed at what Hone had issued; and though it did the Ministry a thousand times the actual damage which even Cobbett’s ‘Register’ could have done, they could not prosecute it. The Attorney-General would have been laughed out of Court, had he attempted anything of the kind. The light arrows of ridicule went through the armour which a heavier weapon could not enter. All the world laughed; Canning, Castlereagh, and Company enjoying the joke, no doubt, as well as the rest of the people.” * But George Cruikshank was working for William Hone, according to his own showing, in 1817 or 1818, when he produced his “Bank Note not to be Imitated”--a modest work to which he was wont to revert to the end of his life with infinite satisfaction, because he attributed to it the withdrawal of Bank of England one-pound notes, and consequently to “the punishment of death” for such offence. In a letter to Whitaker, dated from the Hampstead Road, in 1875, he said, entitling his account “How I put a stop to Hanging”:-- * The London Journal, November 20th, 1847. “Dear Whitaker,--About the year 1817 or 1818 there were one-pound Bank of England notes in circulation, and, unfortunately, there were forged one-pound bank notes in circulation also; and the punishment for passing these forged notes was in some cases transportation for life, and in others death.