Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/223

 had succumbed to the unlooked-for and fatal exhaustion which followed. The grief which this occasioned was so universal that every one seemed to realize the fact that he or she had sustained an individual loss; scarcely perhaps in English history had the death of a member of a royal family been more sincerely and truly regretted. The mournful event is referred to by the artist in a more than usually touching sketch, entitled, England's Hope Departing. Among the medical attendants of Her Royal Highness who followed her to the grave, was the accoucheur, Sir Richard Croft, Bart. This distinguished gentleman was so deeply affected with the unlooked-for result, that his mind refused to recover its tone, and within a month afterwards he committed self-destruction.

Other pictorial satires of George Cruikshank, bearing the date of 1817, are: Fashionables of 1817, two figures—a male and female—outrageously caricatured, a rough affair, altogether differing from his usual style; the well-known double entendre, A View of the Regent's Bomb, which, with our knowledge of his sensitiveness on the subject of his personal appearance, must have given the exalted personage thus outrageously satirized the greatest possible mortification; The Spa Fields Orator Hunting for Popularity to do Good,(*) a punning satire on "Orator" Hunt; A Patriot Luminary Extinguishing Noxious Gas (etched from the design of another artist); and two admirable designs bearing the titles of Vis-à-Vis and Les Graces. The same year we meet with one of the earliest of his alliterative satires, afterwards so frequently to be seen among the famous illustrations to the "Comic Almanack": La Belle Assemblée, or Sketches of Characteristic Dancing, miscellaneous groups, comprising in all thirty figures (exclusive of the orchestra), engaged in a country dance, a Scotch reel, an Irish jig, a minuet, the German waltz, a French quadrille, the Spanish bolero, and a ballet "Italienne." The walls are hung with pictures of dancing dogs, a dancing bear, a dancing horse, rope dancing, the dance of St. Vitus, and "Dancing Mad." Besides this, we find the same year two large sheets showing the Striking Effects produced by Lines and Dots,