Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/270

 The "Tower of London" introduces us to two scenes of a dismal and terrible character in the etching entitled Xit Wedded to the Scavenger's Daughter, the artist carries us to a gloomy torture chamber, dimly lighted by a solitary lantern. On the framework of the rack sits the dwarf Xit, his limbs compressed in the grip of the. frightful instrument called the "Scavenger's daughter," while Simon Renard, scarcely able to repress a smile, interrogates the comical little figure at his leisure. Behind him stands Sorrocold, the surgeon; and in the farther corner Mauger (the headsman), Nightgall, and an assistant torturer, recline against the wall. The feeble rays of the lantern throw an obscure light upon the gloomy walls decorated with the stock in trade of the torturers, thumb-screws, gauntlets, collars, pinchers, saws, chains, and other horrible and suggestive implements. Affixed to the ceiling is a steel pulley, the rope which traverses it terminating with an iron hook and two leathern shoulder straps. Facing the gloomy door stands a brazier filled with blazing coals, in which a huge pair of pinchers are suggestively heating. Reared against the side of a deep dark recess is a ponderous wheel—broad as that of a wagon, and twice the circumference; and next it the iron bar with which the bones of those condemned to die by this most horrible torture were broken while alive. The etching of Mauger Sharpening his Axe is nearly as celebrated as that of Fagin in the Condemned Cell. "A wonderful weird dusk, with no light but that which glimmers on the bald scalp of the hideous headsman, who, feeling the edge of his axe with his thumb, grins with a devilish foretaste of his pleasure on the morrow. I need scarcely say that all the poetry, dramatic force, mystery, and terror of the design is attributable to Cruikshank, and not to Ainsworth." Scenes still more realistically terrible even than these, such as the Massacre at Tullabogue, The Rebel Camp on Vinegar Hill, and the Executions at Wexford Bridge, will be found in Maxwell's "History of the Irish Rebellion."

Mr. Lockhart, we may remember, advised the artist in the early