humorist, as in any other calling, a man must be quite honest, and show that his heart is in his work.  A bad preacher will get admiration and a hearing with this point in his favor, where a man of three times his acquirements will only find indifference and coldness.  Is any man more remarkable than our artist for telling the truth after his own manner?  Hogarth’s honesty of purpose was as conspicuous in an earlier time, and we fancy that Gilray would have been far more successful and more powerful but for that unhappy bribe, which turned the whole course of his humor into an unnatural channel.  Cruikshank would not for any bribe say what he did not think, or lend his aid to sneer down anything meritorious, or to praise any thing or person that deserved censure.  When he levelled his wit against the Regent, and did his very prettiest for the Princess, he most certainly believed, along with the great body of the people whom he represents, that the Princess was the most spotless, pure-mannered darling of a Princess that ever married a heartless debauchee of a Prince Royal.  Did not millions believe with him, and noble and learned lords take their oaths to her Royal Highness’s innocence?  Cruikshank would not stand by and see a woman ill-used, and so struck in for her rescue, he and the people belaboring with all their might the party who were making the attack, and determining, from pure sympathy and indignation, that the woman must be innocent because her husband treated her so foully.

To be sure we have never heard so much from Mr. Cruikshank’s own lips, but any man who will examine these odd drawings, which first made him famous, will see what an honest hearty hatred the champion of woman has for all who abuse her, and will admire the energy with which he flings his wood-blocks at all who side against her.  Canning, Castlereagh, Bexley, Sidmouth, he is at them, one and all; and as for the Prince, up to what a whipping-post of ridicule did he tie that unfortunate old man!  And do not let squeamish Tories cry out about disloyalty; if the crown does wrong, the crown must be corrected by the nation, out of respect, of course, for the crown.  In those days, and by those people who so bitterly attacked the son, no word was ever breathed against the father, simply because he was a good husband, and a sober, thrifty, pious, orderly man.

This attack upon the Prince Regent we believe to have been Mr. Cruikshank’s only effort as a party politician.  Some early manifestoes against Napoleon we find, it is true, done in the regular John Bull style, with the Gilray model for the little upstart Corsican:  but as soon as the Emperor had yielded to stern fortune our artist’s heart relented (as Beranger’s did on the other side of the water), and many of our readers will doubtless recollect a fine drawing of “Louis XVIII. trying on Napoleon’s boots,” which did not certainly fit the gouty son of Saint Louis.  Such satirical hits as these, however, must not be considered as political, or as anything more than the expression of the artist’s national British idea of Frenchmen.