as
"Fossil Tories." He is rather a fossil Liberal. He was a Whig Radical,
and more, when the slightest suspicion of Radicalism exposed an
Englishman to contumely, to obloquy, to poverty, to fines, to stripes,
to gyves, and to the jail. He was quite as advanced a politician as
William Cobbett, and a great deal honester as a man. He was the fast
friend of William Hone, who, for his famous "Political Catechism,"--a
lampoon on the borough-mongers and their bloated king,--was tried three
times on three successive days, before the cruel Ellenborough, but as
many times acquitted. George Cruikshank inveighed ardently, earnestly,
and at last successfully, with pencil and with etching-point, against
the atrocious blood-thirstiness of the penal laws,--the laws that strung
up from six to a dozen unfortunates on a gallows in front of Newgate
every Monday morning, often for no direr offence than passing a
counterfeit one-pound note. When the good old Tories wore top-boots and
buckskins, George Cruikshank was conspicuous for a white hat and
Hessians,--the distinguishing outward signs of ultra-liberalism. He was,
of course, a Parliamentary Reformer in the year '30; and he has been a
social reformer, and a most useful one, ever since. Still is there
something about this brave old English worthy that approaches the fossil
type. His droll dislike to the French--a hearty, good-humored disfavor,
differing widely from the polished malevolence of Mr. John Leech, who
never missed an opportunity to represent the airy Gaul as something
repulsive, degraded, and ungentlemanly--I have already noticed. Then
George Cruikshank has never been able to surmount a vague notion that
steamboats and steam-engines are, generically speaking, a humbug, and
that the old English sailing craft and the old English stage-coach are,
after all, the only modes of conveyance worthy the patronage of Britons.
Against exaggerated hoop-skirts he has all along set his face, and
seldom, if ever, condescends to delineate a lady in crinoline. His
beau-ideal of female beauty is comprised in an hour-glass waist, a skirt
that fits close to the form, a sandalled shoe, and very long ringlets;
whereas tight lacing, narrow skirts, sandalled shoes, and ringlets have
been banished from the English _modes_ any time these fifteen years.
Those among George's critics, too, who are sticklers for exactitude in
the "abstract and brief chronicle of the time" complain that his dandies
always wear