Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/244

 speaking, and from the muzzle to the spavin-place, from the crest to the withers, from the root of the dock to the fetlock, George was wrong in them all. His fiery steed bore an equal resemblance to a Suffolk punch with the head of a griffin and the legs of an antelope, and that traditionary cockhorse on which the lady was supposed to ride to Banbury Cross with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes." His peculiarities notwithstanding, George himself was in no wise conscious of them, and never hesitated to introduce "the fiery untamed" into any scene—battle or otherwise—in which the services of the eccentric animal might be turned to account. We find him assisting Washington in his triumphal journey to the capitol; astonishing the French squares in the character of a Mameluke charger at the Battle of the Pyramids; and leaping into the lake along with "Herne the Hunter," that peculiar creation of the late Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, on which supernatural occasion he comes out, as might have been expected, with peculiar force and vigour.

Thackeray, moreover, says of his trees, that they were decidedly original, "being decidedly of his own make and composition, not imitated from any master;" another and a minor difficulty with the artist was a boot, which he invariably drew half a foot too long. George lived in the days of straps, and being strictly conservative in principle, when he met with a pair of trousers, his idea of the "fitness of things" was not satisfied until he pinned them to the wearer's feet with a pair of these most uncomfortable appendages.

Against these shortcomings, which are a sufficient answer to those who would give him credit for possessing the faculty of designing "Annunciations, Beatifications, Apotheoses," and the like, we must set his excellencies, the power and brilliancy of his imaginative faculties, his extraordinary talents of conception and realization, the delicacy of his manipulation and execution: in a word, the strong original "genius" with which Lockhart credited him from the moment he had seen his "Points of Humour." Examples of this