Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 21.djvu/381

 a handsome income by his labours, and in return supplied her retiring and somewhat morose lodger with every requirement. His health at length yielded to growing habits of intemperance, fostered, it is only charitable to suppose, by the constant strain upon his inventive powers, and about the end of 1811 he sank into comparative imbecility, passing a great part of the latter years of his life confined in an upper chamber of Miss Humphrey's house. Once, as witnessed by Stanley the picture-dealer, and the artist, Kenny Meadows, he was with difficulty restrained from throwing himself out of window. His last appearance, unclad, unshorn, and haggard, was in the shop which his creations had made so popular. He had escaped for a moment from the vigilance of his guardians, but was speedily reconducted to his room, and on the same day, 1 June 1815, he died, aged 58 years. He was buried near the rectory house in the churchyard of St. James's, Piccadilly, where there is a flat stone to his memory.

The miniature of Gillray in the National Portrait Gallery, painted by himself on ivory, represents an elderly man in a blue-grey coat and high collar, with shaven face, dull grey eyes, and grey hair. It has been engraved in mezzotint by Charles Turner (19 April 1819) and in stipple by J. Brown. In character he is described as a ‘silent, shy, and inexplicable’ personage, who took his pleasures in his own solitary fashion, a course which, coupled with his vocation as a caricaturist, favoured exaggerated rumours as to his peculiarities. But those who knew him intimately found him no more than reserved and undemonstrative, and never detected in him those evidences of grosser tastes with which he has been charged. His relations with Miss Humphrey were, perhaps inevitably, a fertile subject of scandalous speculation, but in justice to the poor lady, who when his mind gave way treated her demented lodger with the greatest kindness, an emphatic contradiction has been given to report. That, as might perhaps be expected, marriage was more than once mooted is not improbable, and there is a pleasant legend that the pair once actually set out for St. James's Church upon this errand. But the artist turned back before they reached their destination, having decided on the way that things were better as they were, a sentiment in which the lady apparently acquiesced.

Gillray's work extended to some fifteen hundred pieces. Many of his most popular efforts were levelled at ‘Farmer George’ and his wife, whose frugal habits he ridiculed in ‘Frying Sprats’ and ‘Toasting Muffins’ (23 Nov. 1791), and also in ‘Anti-Saccharites’ (27 March 1792), where the royal pair are subjecting the unwilling princesses to a régime of sugarless tea. He contrasts them again in ‘Temperance enjoying a Frugal Meal’ (28 July 1792) with their luxurious son and heir, who is depicted (2 July) as ‘A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion,’ a design which George Cruikshank afterwards recalled in his famous ‘First Gentleman in Europe’ recovering from a debauch. In ‘Monstrous Craws at a Coalition Feast’ (29 May 1787) and ‘A New Way to Pay the National Debt’ (21 April 1786) he satirised their avarice and the penniless condition of the Prince of Wales, whose marriage in 1788 prompted ‘Wife or no Wife’ (27 March) with its admirable sketch of Lord North as a sleeping coachman, and ‘A Scene on the Continent’ (5 April). ‘Ancient Music’ (10 May 1787) deals with one of the most defined royal tastes by showing their majesties enraptured at a discordant concert of ministers. Another exceedingly caustic design, prompted by some depreciatory utterance of royalty, is ‘A Connoisseur examining a Cooper’ (18 June 1792), in which, by the light of a candle on a save-all, King George blinks at a miniature of his special abhorrence, Oliver Cromwell. In ‘The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver’ (26 June 1803) and the sequel plate, which exhibits a diminutive Napoleon manœuvring a tiny boat in a cistern for the amusement of the royal family, the laugh is more against the terrible Corsican. The circle at the palace, where Gillray's latest efforts were always regularly supplied wet from the press, are said to have been delighted with this production. They were even pleased with ‘Anti-Saccharites,’ which is by no means complimentary to Queen Charlotte, but it is scarcely to be wondered at that they were highly offended by ‘Sin, Death, and the Devil’ (9 June 1792), in which the queen, as a loathsome hag, is shown interposing between Pitt and the black-browed Chancellor Thurlow. It may be doubted whether a more outrageous political attack has ever been made upon royalty. Certainly for daring and power (and it may be added for aptitude of allusion) it would be difficult to match this savage performance.

In several of Gillray's remaining designs the young premier, William Pitt, plays a prominent part. In ‘The Vulture of the Constitution’ (3 Jan. 1789), ‘An Excrescence’ (20 Dec. 1791), ‘God Save the King’ (27 May 1795), ‘Presages of the Millennium’ (4 June 1795), ‘The Death of the Great Wolf,’ a travesty of West (17 Dec. 1795), ‘The Plumb Pudding in Danger’ (26 Feb. 1805), ‘Uncorking Old Sherry’ (10 March 1805), and ‘Disciples Catching the Mantle’ (25 June