We should like to go through every one of these prints. There is the
jolly miller, who, returning home at night, calls upon his wife to
get him a supper, and falls to upon rashers of bacon and ale. How he
gormandizes, that jolly miller! rasher after rasher, how they pass away
frizzling and, smoking from the gridiron down that immense grinning gulf
of a mouth. Poor wife! how she pines and frets, at that untimely hour of
midnight to be obliged to fry, fry, fry perpetually, and minister to the
monster's appetite. And yonder in the clock: what agonized face is that
we see? By heavens, it is the squire of the parish. What business has he
there? Let us not ask. Suffice it to say, that he has, in the hurry of
the moment, left up stairs his br----; his--psha! a part of his dress,
in short, with a number of bank-notes in the pockets. Look in the next
page, and you will see the ferocious, bacon-devouring ruffian of a
miller is actually causing this garment to be carried through the
village and cried by the town-crier. And we blush to be obliged to
say that the demoralized miller never offered to return the banknotes,
although he was so mighty scrupulous in endeavoring to find an owner for
the corduroy portfolio in which he had found them.

Passing from this painful subject, we come, we regret to state, to a
series of prints representing personages not a whit more moral. Burns's
famous "Jolly Beggars" have all had their portraits drawn by Cruikshank.
There is the lovely "hempen widow," quite as interesting and romantic as
the famous Mrs. Sheppard, who has at the lamented demise of her husband
adopted the very same consolation.

"My curse upon them every one,
They've hanged my braw John Highlandman;

. . . .