s, in truth, rather an
amateur than an artist. Rowlandson was an able draughtsman, and
something more; but his style and his tastes are essentially coarse and
sensual, and his women are the overblown beauties of the Drury Lane and
Covent Garden of his day. George Moutard Woodward, whose productions he
sometimes honoured by etching, and whose distinguishing characteristics
are carelessness and often bad drawing, follows him at a respectful
distance. The genius of James Gillray has won him the title of the
"Prince of Caricaturists," a title he well earned and thoroughly
deserved. The only one of the nineteenth century caricaturists who
touches him occasionally in _caricature_, but distances him in
everything else, is our George Cruikshank.

Commencing work when George the Third was still a young man, Gillray and
Rowlandson necessarily infused into it some of the coarseness and
vulgarity of their century. With Gillray, indeed, this coarseness and
vulgarity may be said to be rather the exception than the rule, whereas
the exact contrary holds good of his able and too often careless
contemporary. As might have been expected, every one who excites their
ridicule or contempt is treated and (in their letterpress descriptions)
spoken of in the broadest manner. Bonaparte is mentioned by both artists
(in allusion to his supposed sanguinary propensities) as "Boney, the
carcase butcher;" Josephine is represented by Gillray as a coarse fat
woman, with the sensual habits of a Drury Lane strumpet; Talleyrand, by
right of his club foot and limping gait, is invariably dubbed "Hopping
Talley." The influence of both artists is felt by those who immediately
succeeded them. The coarseness, for instance, of Robert Cruikshank, when
he displays any at all, which is seldom, is directly traceable to the
influence of Rowlandson, whom (until he followed the example of his
greater brother) he at first copied.

INFLUENCE OF GILLRAY ON CRUIKSHANK.

Gillray wrought much the same influence upon George Cruikshank. I have
seen it gravely asserted by some of those who have written upon him,[2]
that this great artist never executed a drawing which could call a blush
into the cheek of modesty. But those who have written upon George
Cruikshank--and their name is legion--instead of beginning at the
beginning, and thus tracing the gradual and almost insensible formation
of his style, appear to me to have plunged as it were into _medias res_,
and commence