fully made; they are
horse-faced; their eyebrows are black and strongly marked; their hair is
plastered to the sides of their faces, and meet bobs of hair at the back
of their heads; their waists are as thin as their necks; and they all
bear a strong family likeness to one another. _The Times_ assertion is
happily, however, so broad that it is easy to traverse and contradict
it. George's handsome women are so few, that it is difficult at the
moment to say where any of them may be found. I know at least of one
amazingly handsome one--the _London Barrow Woman_ in Hone's "Every-Day
Book." Some pretty servant girls will be found in the etching of _The
Sergeant Introducing his Dutch Wife to his Friends_ in "St. James's, or
the Court of Queen Anne," and I will undertake to point out at least
half a dozen pretty faces in the course of illustrations to "The Miser's
Daughter"; but after all, these are only exceptions to the general rule;
and it may be safely conceded that as a delineator of female beauty,
George could not hold a candle to John Leech, to John Tenniel, or even
to his own brother, Isaac Robert.

THE CRUIKSHANKIAN STEED.

As for the celebrated Cruikshankian steed, I give him up at once as an
utterly irreclaimable and unmanageable brute. Thackeray, writing in
1840, said, that "though our artist does not draw horses very
scientifically, to use the phrase of the _atelier_; he feels them very
keenly, and his queer animals, after one is used to them, answer quite
as well as better." Even on this subject, however, the ablest critics
have contradicted each other. George Augustus Sala tells us that the
artist "could draw the ordinary nag of real life well enough," and cites
by way of example the very horses of the celebrated _Deaf Postilion_, in
"Three Courses and a Dessert," which Thackeray had previously held up to
well-merited execration. He goes on to tell us that when George "essayed
to portray a charger or a hunter, or a lady's hack, or even a pair of
carriage horses, the result was the most grotesque of failures. The
noble animal has, I apprehend, forty-four 'points,' technically
speaking, and from the muzzle to the spavin-place, from the crest to
the withers, from the root of the dock to the fetlock, George was wrong
in them all. His fiery steed bore an equal resemblance to a Suffolk
punch with the head of a griffin and the legs of an antelope, and that
traditionary cockhorse on which the lady was supposed to r