George Cruikshank





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GEORGE CRUIKSHANK



Examine him well; his beard, his pearl, his little round stomach, and his sweet smile. Only oysters know how to smile in this way; cool, gentle, waggish, and yet inexpressibly innocent and winning. Dando himself must have allowed such an artless native to go free, and consigned him to the glassy, cool, translucent wave again.

In writing upon such subjects as these with which we have been furnished, it can hardly be expected that we should follow any fixed plan and order -- we must therefore take such advantage as we may, and seize upon our subject when and wherever we can lay hold of him.




For Jews, sailors. Irishmen, Hessian boots, little boys, beadles, policemen, tall Life Guardsmen, charity children, pumps, dust- men, very short pantaloons, dandies in spectacles, and ladies with aquiline noses, remarkably taper waists, and wonderfully long ringlets, Mr Cruikshank has a special predilection. The tribe of Israelites he has studied with amazing gusto; witness the Jew in Mr Ainsworth's ' Jack Sheppard,' and the immortal Fagin of ' Oliver Twist.' Whereabouts lies the comic vis in these persons and things? Why should a beadle be comic, and his opposite a charity boy ? Why should a tall Life Guardsman have something in him essentially absurd? Why are short



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