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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;

. . . .

And now a widow I must mourn
Departed joys that ne’er return;
No comfort but a hearty can
When I think on John Highlandman.”

Sweet “raucle carlin,” she has none of the sentimentality of the English highwayman’s lady; but being wooed by a tinker and

“A pigmy scraper wi’ his fiddle
Wha us’d to trystes and fairs to driddle,”

prefers the practical to the merely musical man. The tinker sings with a noble candor, worthy of a fellow of his strength of body and station in life–

“My bonnie lass, I work in brass,
A tinker is my station;
I’ve travell’d round all Christian ground
In this my occupation.
I’ve ta’en the gold, I’ve been enroll’d
In many a noble squadron;
But vain they search’d when off I march’d
To go an’ clout the caudron.”

It was his ruling passion. What was military glory to him, forsooth? He had the greatest contempt for it, and loved freedom and his copper kettle a thousand times better–a kind of hardware Diogenes. Of fiddling he has no better opinion. The picture represents the “sturdy caird” taking “poor gut-scraper” by the beard,–drawing his “roosty rapier,” and swearing to “speet him like a pliver” unless he would relinquish the bonnie lassie for ever–

“Wi’ ghastly ee, poor tweedle-dee
Upon his hunkers bended,
An’ pray’d for grace wi’ ruefu’ face,
An’ so the quarrel ended.”

Hark how the tinker apostrophizes the violinist, stating to the widow at the same time the advantages which she might expect from an alliance with himself:–

“Despise that shrimp, that withered imp,
Wi’ a’ his noise and caperin’;
And take a share with those that bear
The budget and the apron!

“And by that stowp, my faith an’ houpe,
An’ by that dear Kilbaigie!
If e’er ye want, or meet wi’ scant,
May I ne’er weet my craigie.”

Cruikshank’s caird is a noble creature; his face and figure show him to be fully capable of doing and saying all that is above written of him.