It has ever been a source of regret to the writer, since his youthful fancies were first won by the marvels of grotesque art, and the pleasant creations of the graphic humourists, that while the names of the designers, familiarly known as _caricaturists_--who have enriched the more playful branches of the profession--are household words, no fitting memorials are to be found of the careers of these draughtsmen of true genius; they knew their generation, as is instanced in the inexhaustible memorials they have bequeathed their descendants in their works, and while they were themselves thoroughly familiar with the varied aspects and workings of the social life with which they were surrounded, their generation knew them not, and took no care to preserve any record of the capricious wits whose pleasant inventions had often afforded them enjoyment. The humourists, who did so much to contribute towards the amusement of others, have been suffered to pass away, in too many cases, as impersonalities. The works of their fanciful and fertile imaginations have been accepted on all hands and allotted their recognised position among the other agreeable accessories of life, while the gifted professors have, with one or two notable exceptions, which make the reverse the more marked, been pretty generally passed over, if they are thought of at all under the relationship of realistic characters, as mythical beings, less tangible--as regards their connection with the living people of their generations, of whose persons, habits, and follies they have bequeathed animated instances to posterity--than the most weird and fantastic creations of their own pencils or etching-points, emanations of the mind, whose utmost substance amounts to paper, and printing-ink, and ideas.
The whimsical conceptions which owe their origin to Gillray, Rowlandson, Bunbury, Ramberg, Woodward, Dighton, Nixon, Newton, Boyne, Collings, Kingsbury, Isaac Cruikshank, his son, 'the glorious George,' the veteran calcographist, who has just passed away full of years and reputation, Lane, Heath, Seymour, and a bevy of their contemporaries, were in their day tolerably familiar, their etchings and sketches were in the hands of the print-buying public of the period, and they enjoy, as far as these relics of the past are concerned, a posthumous reputation which varies according to the merits of their productions, a generation or two having assigned them their just relative positions on the ladder of fame; all the inimitable amusing travesties which reproduce the manners, and even the sentiments of past celebrities and perished generations, owe their creation to artists who were suffered to labour in partial obscurity; while the creatures of their brains were in the hands of every one, their contemporaries, for the most part, did not trouble themselves sufficiently to reflect whether the designers had any real existence, possibly classing the actual, practical, living, and working men under the category of abstract ideas in their own minds, impalpable atomies, less substantial than their tangible satirical pictures, which enjoyed a popular circulation.