If the last Number (the Eighth) of GEORGE CRUIK SHANK'S
Sketch- Book be not cramined so full of fun and humour as some of the former, it is only less in quantity, not in quality: and we fancy the cause of this slight falling off to be that he has not in this number confined himself so strictly to one class of subjects in each plate ; so that the ideas evolved seem fewer and more scattered : had the arrange- ment been arbitrary, there would have appeared no lack of them. By the way, why does not GEORGE hunt down the monstrosities of fashion ? He starts the game in the present number : see the " Beau- nassus," (teases being doubtless meant as an abridgment of Nar- cissus)—a biped whose " fell of hair " and whisker, and hump of fur collar cresting his rough coat, may vie with his quadrupedal counter- part in the Zoological Gardens. GEORGE has a touch at the belles too ; whose huge ear-rings of platted hair he likens to the handles of vases : but as for the " Nursery tails "—nought but themselves can be t ieir parallel.
The Horse Hospital, with its four-footed patients in nightcaps and gowns—head and body cloths we should say—and the doctors and dressers, one feeling a pulse, another looking at a tongue, a third ad- ministering a dose—is rendered inexpressibly comic, by the long faces and resigned aspect of the patients, who seem equally in earnest with
the doctors. In the garniture of equestrians surrounding the plate, the ease of the exquisite, who sits with one leg thrown over the pummel of the saddle, is amusingly contrasted with the persevering exertion of the Cockney who is riding much harder than his horse trots, and rises higher in his saddle than the horse's legs from the ground. The illustration of " Omnibus Brutes," and the interpreta- tion of the beer-shop inscription " To be drunk on the premises," and the two specimens of " Lumber Troopers," are capital : the pre- ponderance of the waistcoats of the Lumber Troopers prove them to be members of corporations, and of belly-gerent propensities. The dustman and a sailor in this plate are inimitable; and GEORGE'S verbal comparison of the statue at Battlebridge, the back view to a sack of wheat and the front to Dusty Bob in a blanket, is as good as the graphic proof he gives of the aptness of the similes.
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