Ned Ward and Tom Brown; without the Somers Tracts and the Sessions Papers; without King and Nicholls' anecdotes and the lives of Nollekens and Northcote; without a set of the British Essayists, from Addison to Hawkesworth; without the great Grub-street Journal and the Daily Courant; without Gay's Trivia and Garth's Dispensary; without Aubrey, Evelyn, and Luttrell's diaries; without the London Gazette and Defoe's Complete English Tradesman; without Swift's Journal to Stella, and Vertue and Faithorne's maps, and Wilkinson, Strype, Maitland, Malcolm, Gwynn, and the great Crowle Pennant; with plenty of small deer in the way of tracts, broadsides, and selections from the bookstall-keepers' sweepings and the cheesemongers' rejected addresses; without these modest materials, how is this humble picture to be painted?
After this little glance behind the scenes of a book-maker's workshop, you will be wondering, I dare say, as to what was the curious coincidence I spoke of in connection with William Hone's sojourn in Ship Court, Old Bailey. Simply this. Three years after his Litany escapades, the restless man went tooth and nail into the crapulous controversy between George IV. and his unhappy wife; who, though undoubtedly no better than she should be, was undoubtedly used much worse than she or any other woman, not a Messalina or a Frédégonde, should have been. From Hone's shop issued those merry, rascally libels against the fat potentate late of Carlton House, and which, under the titles of "The Green Bag," "Doctor Slop," the "House that Jack built," and the like, brought such shame and ridicule upon the vain, gross old man, that all Mr. Theodore Hook's counter-scurrilities in the high Tory John Bull could not alleviate or wipe away the stains thereof. Ah! it was a nice time—a jocund, Christian time. Reformers calling their king "knave, tyrant, and debauchee;" loyalists screaming "hussey," and worse names, after their queen. That was in the time of the Consul Unmanlius I should think. Hone's clever rascalities sold enormously, especially among the aristocracy of the "Opposition." But Mr. Hone's disloyal facetiæ from Ship Court were relieved and atoned for by the illustrations, engraved from drawings executed with quite an astonishing power of graphic delineation and acuteness of humour, by a then very young artist named George Cruikshank: a gentleman whose earliest toys, I believe, had been a strip of copper and an etching-needle; who has, since those wild days of '21, achieved hundreds of successes more brilliant, but not more notorious, than those he won by working for restless Mr. Hone; and whom I am proud to speak of here, with Hogarth's name at the head of my sheet, now that he, our George, is old, and honoured, and famous. Do I attach too much importance to the works of these twin geniuses, I wonder, because I love the style of art in which they have excelled with a secret craving devotion, and because I have vainly striven to excel in it myself? Am I stilted or turgid when I paraphrase that which Johnson said of Homer and Milton in re the Iliad and the Paradise Lost, and say of Hogarth and Cruikshank that George is not the greatest pictorial humorist our country has seen only because he is
