Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/168

 off with and married Mademoiselle Mercandotti, première dansense at His Majesty's Theatre, a beautiful girl of sixteen, reported in the scandal of the day to be a natural daughter of the Earl of Fife. The incident of Lady Jane Paget we have mentioned is thus referred to by Charles Molloy Westmacott, the Ishmael of the press of his day, in the English Spy, a work which, as we shall presently see, was also illustrated by the artist:—

Other of Robert's satires of the same year bear the title of The Commons versus the Crown of Martyrdom, or King Abraham's Coronation Deferred; and A View in Cumberland, that is the royal duke of that name—a most unpopular personage, and of course proportionately fertile subject of satire in his time.

Among Robert's pictorial satires of 1824, I find one entitled Arrogance or Nonchalence of the Tenth Reported,—the "tenth" here referred to being the Tenth Hussars. This distinguished regiment set the pencils of the Brothers Cruikshank and their fellow caricaturists in motion at this period, and I find an amazing number of caricatures of the date of 1824, of which they form the subject. The officers would seem to have acquired considerable unpopularity by the exclusive airs they gave themselves in society, refusing to dance, declining introductions at public and private balls, and otherwise assuming an arrogant and exclusive tone which made them supremely ridiculous. So far did they carry these absurdities, that they even declined to associate with an officer of their own regiment unless he previously submitted to them the particulars of his birth, parentage, and education, and general claim to be admitted to the privilege of their august society. A certain Mr. Battier, who seems to have been ignorant of the peculiar arrangement they had established in opposition to the rules and policy of the service, had