and answers, supplemented by dreary and unnecessary remarks of
a moralizing tendency. The persons in whose company Smeeton would send
us round, in order that we may form a just conception of the "vice and
deception in all their real deformity," of which he speaks, are a
couple of idiots, one Peregrine Wilson, and an attendant mentor, whom we
drop at the earliest convenient opportunity. Information combined with
morality is all very well. The "History of Sandford and Merton" may have
been, as Lord Houghton assures us it was, "the delight of the youth of
the first generation of the present century." As one of the youth of the
generation referred to, we refuse to admit it, and we are perfectly
certain that the youth of the present generation would have nothing
whatever to do with it. We resign ourselves preferentially to the
guidance of Isaac Robert and George Cruikshank, sensible that they at
least, while conversant with the scenes they so graphically describe,
will not bore us with unnecessary moral reflections. We prefer, if the
truth must be told, to "sport a toe among the Corinthians at Almack's"
with hooked-nosed Tom and rosy-cheeked Jerry; to visit with these merry
and by no means strait-laced persons, Mr. O'Shaunessy's rooms in the
Haymarket; the back parlour of the respected Thomas Cribb, ex-champion
of England; to take wine with them "in the wood" at the London Docks; to
enjoy with them, if they will, "the humours of a masquerade supper at
the opera house." The work which Smeeton designed with such indifferent
success was subsequently carried out in a far more efficient manner by
Mr. James Grant, in his "Sketches in London,"[65] and at a later date by
Mr. Mayhew, in his well-known "London Labour and the London Poor."

The "Doings in London" owe whatever value they possess to the
thirty-nine curious designs on wood of Isaac Robert Cruikshank, engraved
by W. C. Bonner, which, on the whole fair examples of his workmanship in
this style, strongly remind us of the smaller woodcuts in Hone's
"Every-Day Book."

The best specimens, however, of Robert's designs on wood are those which
will be found in two small volumes, known indifferently as "Facetiae" and
"Cruikshank's Comic Album," which contain a series of _jeux d'esprits_,
published between the years 1830 and 1832, and comprising _Old Bootey's
Ghost_ and _The Man of Intellect_, by W. F. Moncrieff; _The High-mettled
Racer_ and _Monsieur Nongtongpaw_, by Charles Dibdi