The coloured caricatures of Robert Seymour, besides being comparatively scarce and little known, seem hardly to call for any particular description; the titles of some of them will be found mentioned in our Appendix. One which has survived, and with which the public are probably most familiar, is one of the worst of the series. It is entitled, _Going it by Steam_, is signed "Short Shanks," and was published by King. Among rarer and better ones may be named two very excellent specimens, without date, published by Creed, of Chancery Lane, labelled respectively, _A Musical Genius_ (a butcher boy playing on the Pandean pipes and accompanying himself with marrow bone and cleaver), and _A Man of Taste and Feeling_ (a tramp caught in a trap while helping himself in a butler's pantry). Among the best of his coloured political caricatures, we may mention, _Greece and her Rough Lovers_ (_i.e._ Russia and Turkey), published by Maclean, in 1828. Lithography afforded greater facilities of execution than the old process, and much of Seymour's work in political as well as social satire was executed by himself on stone.
The year 1830 brought the life and reign of George the Fourth to a close. He had been breaking up for a long time past. The first entry of any moment occurs in Mr. Greville's diary, of 25th August, 1828: "The king has not been well; he goes fishing and dining at Virginia Water, stays out late, and catches cold." A year later, the diarist relates that the king had nearly lost his eyesight, and would be "couched" as soon as his eyes were in a proper state for the operation. On the 7th of December he attended a chapter of the Bath, "looked well," but was so blind that "he could not see to read the list, and begged [Mr. Greville] to read it for him." The Sangrado treatment was then in full force; and we find that in January, 1830, the king, being very ill, "lost forty ounces of blood." He grew at last so much worse that the preparations for the festivities with which the royal birthday was to have been celebrated were obliged to be postponed _sine die_. A victim to dropsy, the operation of puncturing the legs was resorted to, with the result of giving him temporary relief. The patient, however, became liable to violent fits of coughing, in one of which he ruptured a blood vessel, and expired early on the morning of Saturday the 26th of June, 1830.