The history of caricature in England travels very little beyond George Cruikshank’s lifetime. The very word _caricatura_, used by Sir Thomas Browne in his Christian morals, and transplanted to the +Spectator+, appeared first as an English word in Johnson’s dictionary in the middle of the last century Caricature--the modern word and the modern art the use of the pencil and the etcher’s point as ironical and satirical weapons--may be said to have taken root in this country under the breath of Hogarth’s genius. It flourished in Germany,--nay may be said to have been born there, during the Renaissance. The Reformation gave it its first great impulse, under the hand of Lucas Cranach. From Germany it travelled to France, thence to Holland, and from Holland to England. The famous caricaturists, however, are not many. Cranach, Peter Breughel, Jacques Callot--but particularly the latter--may be noted as caricaturists who made the way for our Hogarth, for the Spaniard Goya (a caricaturist of infinite humour), and so for Gillray, Rowlandson, Daumier, the Cruikshanks, Leech, and the elder Doyle. Our earliest caricaturists came over to us from the French and Dutch schools; and they flourished (albeit their names are forgotten now) until the genius of Hogarth rose, and founded a British school of caricature, racy of the soil. The names of John Collet, Paul Sandby, Bunbury, and Woodward, were famous in their day; but they were destined to be eclipsed by the glory of James Gillray and the lesser light of Rowlandson; and these two, with Goya in Spain, and the renowned Daumier in France, represent the power which caricature exercised in the political world at the close of the last and in the early days of the present century. A writer in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” * has remarked of the rise of George Cruikshank, “The satirical grotesque of the eighteenth century had been characterised by a sort of grandiose brutality, by a certain vigorous obscenity, by a violence of expression and intuition, that appear monstrous in these days of reserve and restraint, but that doubtless suited well enough with the strong party feelings and fierce political passions of the age. After the downfall of Napoleon (1815), however, when strife was over, and men were weary and satisfied, a change in matter and manner came over the caricature of the period. In connection with this change, the name of George Cruikshank, an artist who stretches hands on the one side towards Hogarth and Gillray, and on the other towards Leech and Teniiel, deserves honourable mention. Cruikshank’s political caricatures, some of which were designed for the squibs of William Hone, are, comparatively speaking, uninteresting; his ambition was that of Hogarth--the production of moral comedies.” * Ninth edition.