In 1867 he put forth “The British Bee-Hive,” which was a rearrangement of a design made in 1840. The artist drew a section of the hive, displaying fifty-four cells, in which the various grades of society--from the Queen to the costermonger--are shown, all supported by the army, the navy, and the volunteers, and surmounted by the crown, the royal standard, and the union jack. This was a protest against further Parliamentary Reform; for, as it has been observed, Cruikshank was something of a Radical and something of a Tory--but more of a Tory. He afterwards issued this plate on a double sheet, inscribed “A Penny Political Picture for the People, with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform, by their old friend, George Cruikshank.” In the following year the old satirist drew a “Design for a Ritualist High Church Tower and Steeple,” which he dedicated to Dr. Pusey and the Vicar of Bray. It was etched on glass by Hancock’s process. The tower of the church was a fool’s cap and bells, with the Pope for weathercock. The porch was a bull’s head, with a procession of Ritualist fools entering by the nostrils. The last, dated July 1869, is a satire upon Miss Rye’s proposition to export “gutter children” to America. “The little dears,” as the artist always called children, are being scooped by a clergyman into a mud-cart, from the volunteers, and sur-royal standard. The satire was against those who had christened the little waifs and strays of our streets “gutter children.” The name jarred upon Cruikshank’s sensitive heart. Mr. Wedmore, referring to the closing years of the great pictorial moralist, remarks, “He continued to labour; some of his work being even now but little known. * Early unpublished plates for the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ remain, amongst others, in the hands of Mr. Truman. Quite in recent years” (it was in 1868) “he must have executed a private plate for Mr. Frederick Locker, which shows that there were moments at least in which the store of his fancy was not impoverished. No more ingenious design could have been furnished to a collector than this of ‘Fairy Connoisseurs examining Mrs. Locker’s treasures of Durer, Rembrandt, etc.’ For Mr. Ruskin, too, in 1866, there had been designed the ‘Piper of Hamelin,’ leading the children mountain wards with the spell of his wonderful music. And in 1870 a a frontispiece representing the fertile Mr. Barham, surrounded by the creatures of his brain. And yet more recent plates, the property of Mr. Bell, the publisher--one of the ‘Family Window,’ and one in ‘Lob-lie-by-the-Fire’--show that Cruikshank did not wholly outlive his talent. What he outlived was the social conditions he had best comprehended. Dying as it were only yesterday, he belongs so much to the past, because, though his period of production did not seem long over, his time of receptiveness was gone by. As a satirist, he belonged in spirit to another generation; we could not ask him to grapple, at fourscore years, with the foibles of ours.”