LIFE AND GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. J33 



we last dined with him. The boots, however, are obsolete ; he has 

 left them off, on account of a few infirmities, and now clothes his 

 veteran calves in what our facetious friend Hood terms, not simple 

 gaiters, butjive-barred ditto. He looks, in the cut, just as he did in 

 the chair, when, after Peter Corcoran had proposed, in compliment 

 to our host, " The Turf!" our capital confrere rose and said, that he 

 begged gentlemen would not conclude from the toast that his excel- 

 lent friend, Mr Corcoran, was a black-leg ; for he was sure that that 

 gentleman had only given a bit of turf for a lark. 



In a more sober and sedate article we should, at its commence- 

 ment, perhaps, have given our reasons for writing it. With regard 

 to the present, it is not too late, considering its character, to do so 

 even now. A multitude of boobies have, respectively, had their " no- 

 things monstered " in two volumes quarto. Every petty poetaster 

 every poetical pullet of Cockaigne has been brought out by some one 

 or other of the trashy publications with which his or her little lion- 

 loving friends are remotely or immediately connected. We know 

 aspires, precisely, to what segment of a circle Miss L. E. L.'s forehead 

 and how near Don Telesforo de Trueba's frontispiece approaches 

 to a parallelogram : there is no major-general of marines, with 

 whose private accomplishments we have not been made acquainted : 

 a French or Italian cook, or even a Lady Georgiana Mac Doll, if 

 she dresses well, is deemed worthy of immortality, by the proprie- 

 tors of periodicals ; the secretaries of associations, the Godfrey 

 Sykes's, and Mr. Murray's obtain the honour of having served up 

 to the public, at the printshops, 



" on capper-plates 



Their round fat pates, 



Like calves' heads in a larder ! " 



Even the myrmidon mistresses of theatrical managers have their me- 

 moir and likenesses in character and keeping ; yet no avowed por- 

 trait no notice of the life and genius, of our second Hogarth, 

 whom all the world appreciates, and of whom England may be justly 

 proud, is to be had. We question if there be a single anecdote 

 about him in print. No one, beyond the circles in which he moves, 

 can say whether he is fat and facetious, or lean and lachrymose. 

 Every one knows him pictorially ; while only a select few are ac- 

 quainted with him personally ; for he te keeps snug." His biogra- 

 phy, as most authors who attempt lives say in their prefaces, is 

 therefore " a desideratum, which we feel happy in being enabled to 

 supply." 



His deportment, generally speaking, is severe ; his glance bites 

 like aqua-fortis. As he passes through the streets, nobody knows 

 nobody notices him. He hears the ready laugh at one of his pictorial 

 effusions displayed in a shop-window, mentally curses the engraver 

 who has spoiled his design, and passes on gravely as though he were 

 going to a funeral. We have walked behind him from Dan to 

 Beersheba from the White Horse in Piccadilly, to the Black Horse 

 in Coventry Steeet, and the pedestrians passed us, looking as though 

 all were barren as though they had met no body ! But it is high 



