Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/224

 for the Assistance of every Draughtsman, suggested by, but a very vast improvement on, G. M. Woodward's Multum in Panvo, or Liliputian Sketches, showing what may be done by Lines and Dots.

A report of the House of Commons, showing how four million pounds weight of sloe, liquorice, and ash-tree leaves were annually mixed with Chinese teas in England, was supplemented by a trial in the Court of Exchequer, in which a grocer named Palmer was fined in £840 penalties, for the fabrication of spurious tea. It appeared that there was a regular manufactory of imitation tea in Goldstone Street, which was composed of thorn leaves, which, after passing through a peculiar process, were coloured with logwood; the same leaves, after being pressed and dried, were laid upon sheets of copper, coloured with verdigris and Dutch pink, and sold as green tea. These revelations led, in 1818, to the artist's admirable caricature of The T Trade in Hot-water, or a Pretty Kettle of Fish: dedicated to J. Canister and T. Spoon, Esquires. Besides these, we have the same year: An Interesting Scene on Board an East Indian, a very coarse but admirable performance; Introduction to the Gout (a fiend dropping a hot coal on the toe of a bon vivant) A Fine Lady, or the Incomparable, in which it appears to us that Robert had a hand; Les Savoyards and Le Palais Royal de Paris; Comparative Anatomy, or the Dandy Trio; and The Art of Walking the Streets of London, eight subjects, etched by the artist after the design of George Moutard Woodward.

On the 4th of December, 1818, the number of convicts lying under sentence of death in his Majesty's goal of Newgate, amounted to no less than sixty, of whom ten were females; probably not three of these unfortunate beings would have been hung now-a-days. Under the Draconian laws, however, then in force, people were hung in scores for passing forged one-pound Bank of England notes; and this barbarous state of things, disgraceful to a Christian country, led to the famous and telling satire of the Bank Restriction Note, one of the very few which seem to have escaped oblivion, and which, having been repeated and reproduced in all the latest essays which have been written on him, calls for no extra description from our