“The Gallery of Comicalities” was a great success. Mr. William Bates, of Birmingham, says of it, in _Notes and Queries_, “I am happily able to count myself among those collectors who possess these witty sheets--the delight of my boyhood--in a perfect state.” The eight series into which the gallery is divided, introduces us for the first time to Kenny Meadows and John Leech, as well as to rich stolen fruit from Cruikshank’s highly productive orchard; and, according to Mr. Bates, to plentiful gleaning from the works of Isaac Robert Cruikshank. Here Meadows’ sketches from Lavater appeared, including “The Phisogs of the Traders of London,” and giving a foretaste of his “Heads of the People and in the gallery are some of poor Seymour’s sketches of the “Sporting Cockney,” and drawings by Chatfield,--an artist now forgotten, but a light in the early times of Douglas Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray, Meadows,--and Leech’s early drawings; and the great variety of subjects treated with a vigorous, fresh, racy humour by them and others, are a foretaste of _Punch_ that was to start in a few years. The popular appetite for caricature, and for humorous and sarcastic commentaries on the subjects of the day, was diffused among the people by Cleave’s coarser and cheaper pictorial gallery. The taste for pictorial journalism was distinctly the creation of our caricaturists. Founded by James Gillray and his humbler contemporaries, it was developed by the genius of Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, and so popularised by the latter, that his drawings were, as we have seen, actually carried into the columns of a newspaper. Even this paper he may be said to have indirectly created. _Bells Life in London_ originally appeared in 1824, as _Pierce Egan’s Life in London, and Sporting Gazette_. Egan was, when Tom and Jerry took the town by storm, the sporting contributor to the _Weekly Dispatch_; and the success of this work so roused the jealousy of the _Dispatch_ conductors, that they gave Egan his _congé_. His dismissal, and the popularity he enjoyed at the moment, emboldened him to start a paper on his own account. It flourished awhile, and in 1827 Mr. Egan sold it to a Mr. Bell, who placed his name upon the title-page, where Egan’s had stopd. So that the journal which Mr. Cruikshank was indirectly instrumental in creating, rewarded him by unceremoniously transferring his drawings to its columns, and thus inaugurating the pictorial journalism of England. The Phrenological Illustrations which Mr. Bell treated so unceremoniously had enjoyed more than a year’s extraordinary popularity, and had even been a topic in Christopher North’s “Noctes.” * * November 1826. “_Tickler_. James, a few minutes ago you mentioned the name of that prince of caricaturists, George Cruikshank; pray, have you seen his Phrenological Illustrations?