Two naval veterans drinking to the future outside a seaside inn, with an accompanying poem

Etched by Isaac and George Cruikshank, this print shows two disabled naval veterans — one on a wooden leg, one gesturing with a raised cup — toasting outside a waterside inn while sailors drink at a table behind them. Ships ride at anchor in the middle distance. The accompanying verse, sentimental rather than savage, celebrates British tars and soldiers who have borne wounds in the Napoleonic wars. The Cruikshanks worked in the lineage running from Hogarth's moral sequences through Gillray's grotesquerie and Rowlandson's ribald crowd scenes — artists who filled single sheets with sequential action, verse captions, and typed social figures. That formula — image plus text, stock characters, moral or political point — passed directly into the Victorian illustrated press and, by the 1890s, into the comic strip. The veterans here are class-coded as weathered, gap-toothed working men; the sentimentality is genuine, if patronising by modern measure.