It must be confessed that for that great nation Mr. Cruikshank entertains a considerable contempt.  Let the reader examine the “Life in Paris,” or the five hundred designs in which Frenchmen are introduced, and he will find them almost invariably thin, with ludicrous spindle-shanks, pigtails, outstretched hands, shrugging shoulders, and queer hair and mustachios.  He has the British idea of a Frenchman; and if he does not believe that the inhabitants of France are for the most part dancing-masters and barbers, yet takes care to depict such in preference, and would not speak too well of them.  It is curious how these traditions endure.  In France, at the present moment, the Englishman on the stage is the caricatured Englishman at the time of the war, with a shock red head, a long white coat, and invariable gaiters.  Those who wish to study this subject should peruse Monsieur Paul de Kock’s histories of “Lord Boulingrog” and “Lady Crockmilove.”  On the other hand, the old emigre has taken his station amongst us, and we doubt if a good British gallery would understand that such and such a character was a Frenchman unless he appeared in the ancient traditional costume.

A curious book, called “Life in Paris,” published in 1822, contains a number of the artist’s plates in the aquatint style; and though we believe he had never been in that capital, the designs have a great deal of life in them, and pass muster very well.  A villanous race of shoulder-shrugging mortals are his Frenchmen indeed.  And the heroes of the tale, a certain Mr. Dick Wildfire, Squire Jenkins, and Captain O’Shuffleton, are made to show the true British superiority on every occasion when Britons and French are brought together.  This book was one among the many that the designer’s genius has caused to be popular; the plates are not carefully executed, but, being colored, have a pleasant, lively look.  The same style was adopted in the once famous book called “Tom and Jerry, or Life in London,” which must have a word of notice here, for, although by no means Mr. Cruikshank’s best work, his reputation was extraordinarily raised by it.  Tom and Jerry were as popular twenty years since as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller now are; and often have we wished, while reading the biographies of the latter celebrated personages, that they had been described as well by Mr. Cruikshank’s pencil as by Mr. Dickens’s pen.

As for Tom and Jerry, to show the mutability of human affairs and the evanescent nature of reputation, we have been to the British Museum and no less than five circulating libraries in quest of the book, and “Life in London,” alas, is not to be found at any one of them.  We can only, therefore, speak of the work from recollection, but have still a very clear remembrance of the leather gaiters of Jerry Hawthorn, the green spectacles of Logic, and the hooked nose of Corinthian Tom.  They were the schoolboy’s delight; and in the days when the work appeared we