George Cruikshank also created the ladies of the Sairy Gamp order. We find one in a set of his Lottery Puffs, published in January 1818--a midwife with a prodigious bonnet. And does she not appear as Mrs. Toddles, the ancestress of Mrs. Brown of our day, in the _Omnibus?_ The debt of the humourists and public caricaturists who have lived and flourished (aye, flourished as poor George never did) on the crumbs of his Rabalaisian banquet of humour, is immeasurable. Many of the comic London characters of to-day are only his figures redressed. They are seen through the spectacles which he invented. Only, the fine fancy, the rollicking gaiety, the cumulation of fun in some four inches square of box-wood, are thinly spread over square feet. Think of Cruikshank’s Irishmen! Thackeray says of them,-- “We have said that our artist has a great love for the drolleries of the Queen Island.... We know not if Mr. Cruikshank has ever had any such good luck as to see the Irish in Ireland itself, but he certainly has obtained a knowledge of their looks, as if the country had been all his life familiar to him. Could Mr. O’Connell himself desire anything more national than the following scene? or would Father Mathew have a better text to preach upon? There is not a broken nose in the room that is not thoroughly Irish.” The observer of all the humours of London life, the member of Mr. Joseph Grimaldi’s club at the Sir Hugh Middleton, and of many other very free-and-easy theatrical, artistic, and literary clubs of the hour, nursed very serious and ambitious designs, even while he threw out his pictorial squibs for his daily bread. It is sad to think that even the mighty quantity of work which he got through, and of work that filled publishers’ pockets, and set up laughing faces from the Highlands to Portsmouth, was never well paid enough to give him ease to do justice to his genius. In a note to Mr. Hotten* (April 1865) he said, “The first time that I put a _very large figure_ in perspective was about forty years back, in illustrating that part of ‘Paradise Lost’ where Milton describes Satan as ‘Prone on the flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood.’ * Explanatory of his drawing (here reproduced) of the giant This I never published, but possibly I may do so,” the intrepid old man adds, “one of these days.” [Illustration: 201] In a letter to Mr. J. P. Briscoe he explained how, in 1825, Bolster, which forms the frontispiece of Mr. Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of the West of England.” when his caricatures were in all the shop-windows, he was engaged to illustrate Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” “Previous to the year of 1825, I was engaged to illustrate Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ A friend of mine, Mr. Lewis, was to be the editor, and a bookseller in the Strand, near Holywell Street, named Birch, was, I believe, to be the publisher.