the youths who are examining her operations (one a literary gentleman, in a remarkably neat nightcap and pinafore, who has just had his finger in the pudding); the genius who is at work on the slate, and the two honest lads who are hugging the good-humored washerwoman, their mother,—­all, all, save, this worthy woman, have noses of the largest size.  Not handsome certainly are they, and yet everybody must be charmed with the picture.  It is full of grotesque beauty.  The artist has at the back of his own skull, we are certain, a huge bump of philoprogenitiveness.  He loves children in his heart; every one of those he has drawn is perfectly happy, and jovial, and affectionate, and innocent as possible.  He makes them with large noses, but he loves them, and you always find something kind in the midst of his humor, and the ugliness redeemed by a sly touch of beauty.  The smiling mother reconciles one with all the hideous family:  they have all something of the mother in them—­something kind, and generous, and tender.

Knight’s, in Sweeting’s Alley; Fairburn’s, in a court off Ludgate Hill; Hone’s, in Fleet Street—­bright, enchanted palaces, which George Cruikshank used to people with grinning, fantastical imps, and merry, harmless sprites,—­where are they?  Fairburn’s shop knows him no more; not only has Knight disappeared from Sweeting’s Alley, but, as we are given to understand, Sweetings Alley has disappeared from the face of the globe.  Slop, the atrocious Castlereagh, the sainted Caroline (in a tight pelisse, with feathers in her head), the “Dandy of sixty,” who used to glance at us from Hone’s friendly windows—­where are they?  Mr. Cruikshank may have drawn a thousand better things since the days when these were; but they are to us a thousand times more pleasing than anything else he has done.  How we used to believe in them! to stray miles out of the way on holidays, in order to ponder for an hour before that delightful window in Sweeting’s Alley! in walks through Fleet Street, to vanish abruptly down Fairburn’s passage, and there make one at his “charming gratis” exhibition.  There used to be a crowd round the window in those days, of grinning, good-natured mechanics, who spelt the songs, and spoke them out for the benefit of the company, and who received the points of humor with a general sympathizing roar.  Where are these people now?  You never hear any laughing at HB.; his pictures are a great deal too genteel for that—­polite points of wit, which strike one as exceedingly clever and pretty, and cause one to smile in a quiet, gentleman-like kind of way.

There must be no smiling with Cruikshank.  A man who does not laugh outright is a dullard, and has no heart; even the old dandy of sixty must have laughed at his own wondrous grotesque image, as they say Louis Philippe did, who saw all the caricatures that were made of himself.  And there are some of Cruikshank’s designs which have the blessed faculty of creating laughter as often as you see them.  As Diggory