George
Cruikshank must have regretted that he ever had anything to do with it.
The major part of the impression must years ago have been used to line
trunks, inwrap pies, and singe geese; but to our generation, and to
those which are to come, this sorry volume will be more than a
curiosity: it will be literarily and artistically an object of great and
constantly increasing value. By the amateur of Cruikshankiana it will be
prized for the reason that the celebrated Latin pamphlet proving that
Edward VI. never had the toothache was prized, although the first and
last leaves were wanting, by Theodore Hook's Tom Hill. It will be
treasured for its scarcity. To the student of social history it will be
of even greater value, as the record of a state of manners, both in
England and France, which has wholly and forever passed away. The
letter-press portraits, drawn by the hack author, of a party of English
tourists are but foul and stupid libels; but their aquatint portraits,
as bitten in by George Cruikshank, are, albeit exaggerated, true in many
respects to Nature. In fact, we _were_ used, when George IV. was king,
to send abroad these overdressed and under-bred clowns and
Mohawks,--whelps of the squirarchy and hobbledehoys of the
universities,--Squire Gawkies and Squire Westerns and Tony Lumpkins,
Mrs. Malaprops and Lydia Languishes, by the hundred and the thousand.
"The Fudge Family in Paris" and the letters of Mrs. Ramsbotham read
nowadays like the most outrageous of caricatures; but they failed not to
hit many a blot in the times which gave them birth. It was really
reckoned fashionable in 1828 to make a visit to Paris the occasion for
the coarsest of "sprees,"--to get tipsy at Very's,--to "smash the
glims,"--to parade those infamous _Galeries de Bois_ in the Palais Royal
which were the common haunt of abandoned women,--to beat the gendarmes,
and, indeed, the first Frenchman who happened to turn up, merely on the
ground that he _was_ a Frenchman. But France and the French have changed
since then, as well as England and the English. Are these the only
countries in the world whose people and whose manners have turned
_volte-face_ within less than half a century? I declare that I read from
beginning to end, the other day, a work called "Salmagundi," and that I
could not recognize in one single page anything to remind me of the New
York of the present day. Thus in the engravings to "Life in Paris" are
there barely three which