ontispiece to a collection of
narratives by Cecil, "printed for Hone," in 1819, and stands by virtue
of its force and character apart from most of the book illustrations of
the period. From the moment that the new style was adopted, the
artist's services were brought into requisition for the purposes of book
illustration; and from the time work of this kind began to come in, he
relaxed and afterwards discontinued the practice of caricature. It is as
an etcher and designer of book illustrations we shall henceforth have to
consider him, and in this character one of his famous illustrations to
"Greenwich Hospital" will be found superior to the whole series of
Rowlandson's careless overdrawn designs to the three "Tours" of Syntax
put together.

This alteration in the man's style after he took to book illustration is
known only to those familiar with his early caricatures. If you take,
for instance, the etching of _St. Swithin's Chapel_, of the "Sketch
Book," or _The Gin Shop_ in the "Scraps and Sketches"[85] (we are
speaking of course of the early _coloured_ impressions), and show them
together with any two of the caricatures we have named to a person who
had never before seen either, we will venture to say that he would
pronounce them without hesitation to be executed by entirely different
hands.

GEORGE'S IDEAS OF FEMALE BEAUTY.

After Lockhart's statement that George Cruikshank was capable of
designing an _Annunciation_, a _Beatification_, or an _Apotheosis_, we
must accept his assertion that he "understood the [human] figure
completely" with a certain amount of reservation. Perhaps he did; and if
he did, he certainly played some extraordinary tricks with the "figure"
aforesaid. The truth is, that we forget the artist's weaknesses, many
and glaring as they are, in the lustre of his unexampled _genius_. _The
Times_, in an otherwise laudatory article which it published after his
death, remarked that "there was not a single beautiful face or figure
probably in the whole range of Cruikshank's work." Now, although this is
not entirely true, there is at least so much of truth in it that we may
admit that the cases in which he has produced a pretty face or figure
are very few and far between, and even those cases seem rather to have
been the result of accident than of design. There is no getting over
the fact that George's ideas of female beauty were, to say the least of
them, peculiar: his women are fearfully and wonder