illustrations; in 1828, 'Punch and Judy,' with thirty; in 1830, Three Courses and a Dessert,' with fifty-one; in 1831, 'Robinson Crusoe,' with forty; in 1831 and some following years, 'My Sketch-Book,' with two hundred; in 1835 and nineteen following years, 'The Comic Almanac,' with two hundred and thirty-eight; in 1838, 'Sketches by Boz,' with forty, and Oliver Twist,' with twenty-four; in 1840, Jack Sheppard,' with twenty-seven, and 'Tower of London,' with ninety-eight; in 1842, George Cruikshank's Omnibus,' with one hundred; in 1847, the Bottle,' in eight sheets, and in the following year a sequel to it, the 'Drunkard's Children,' also in eight sheets; in 1855, the "Table Book,' with twelve steel-plates and one hundred and fifteen woodengravings, etc. Latterly George Cruikshank turned his attention to oil-painting, and has contributed several pictures to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy and British Institution, among which may be mentioned his Disturbing a Congregation,' a richly humorous scene in church, the effect on a rural congregation of a boy having accidentally dropped his peg-top, painted for the late Prince Consort; A New Situation,' Dressing for the Day,' 'Tam-o'-Shanter,' Titania and Bottom the Weaver,' 'Cinderella,' 'A Runaway Knock,' and lastly his great picture, the 'Worship of Bacchus.' Of this last-named work we cannot do better than quote a description which appeared in the Times' of May 15th, 1863, on the occasion of its being exhibited by the painter himself in Exeter Hall. It is from the pen of Mr. Thackeray. "In a quiet little room in Exeter Hall a veteran lecturer is holding forth all day upon a subject which moves his heart very strongly. His text, on which he has preached before in many places, is still the Bottle.' He divides his sermon into many hundreds of heads, and preaches with the most prodigious emphasis and grotesque variety. He is for no half-measures. He will have no compromise with the odious god Bacchus; the wicked idol is smashed like Bel and Dagon. He will empty into the gutter all Master Bacchus's pipes, his barrels, quarter-casks, demijohns, gallons, quarts, pints, gills, down to your very smallest liqueur-glasses of spirits or wine. He will show you how the church, the bar, the army, the universities, the genteel world, the country gentleman in his polite circle, the humble artisan in his, the rustic ploughman in the fields, the misguided washerwoman over her suds and tubs,-how all ranks and conditions of men are deteriorated and corrupted by the use of that abominable strong liquor; he will have patience with it no longer. For upwards of half a century, he says, he has employed pencil and pen against the vice of drunkenness, and in the vain attempt to shut up drinking-shops, and to establish moderate drinking as a universal rule; but for seventeen years he has discovered that teetotalism, or the total abstaining from all intoxicating liquors, was the only real remedy for the entire abolition of intemperance. His thoughts working in this direction, one day this subject of the 'Worship of Bacchus' flashed across his mind, and hence the origin of a work of art measuring 13 ft. 4 in. by 7 ft. 8 in., which has occupied the author no less than a year and a half. In "This sermon has the advantage over others that you can take a chapter at a time, as it were, and return and resume the good homilist's discourse at your leisure. What is your calling in life? In some part of this vast tableau you find it is de te fabula. this compartment the soldiers are drinking and fighting; in the next the parsons are drinking 'Healths to the Young Christian.' Here are the publicans, filthily intoxicated with their own horrible liquors; yonder is a masquerade supper, where drunken masquerade fiends drag down columbines to drunkenness and ruin.' Near them are the public singers chanting forth the praises of the God of Wine.' 'Is it not marvellous to think,' says Mr. Cruikshank in a little pamphlet, containing a speech by him which is quite as original as the picture on which it comments, 'Is it not marvellous what highly talented poetry and what harmonious musical compositions have been produced from time to time in praise of this imaginative, slippery, deceitful, dangerous myth?' "This myth' the spectator may follow all though this most wonderful and labyrinthine picture. In the nursery the doctor is handing a pot of beer to mamma; the nurse is drinking beer; the little boy is crying for beer; and the papa is drawing a cork, so that he and the doctor may have a drop.' Here you have a group of women, victims of intemperance, tearing, biting, and mutilating one another.' Yonder are two of the police, carrying away a drunken policeman. Does not the mind reel and stagger at the idea of this cumulated horror? And what is the wine which yonder clergyman holds in his hand but the same kind of stuff which has made the mother in the christening scene above 'so tipsy that she has let her child fall out of her lap, while her idiotic husband points to his helpless wife, and exclaims, ' Ha, ha, she's dr-unk'? "With what vigour, courage, good humour, honesty, cheerfulness, have this busy hand and needle plied for more than fifty years ! From 1799, 'when about eight or nine years of age,' until yesterday, the artist has never taken rest. When you would think he might desire quiet, behold he starts up lively as ever, and arms himself to do battle with the demon drunkenness. With voice and paint-brush, with steel-plate and wood-block, he assails 'that deceitful, slippery, dangerous myth!' To wage war against some wrong has been his chief calling; and, in lighter moments, to waken laughter, wonder, or sympathy. To elderly lovers of fun, who can remember this century in its teens and its twenties, the benefactions of this great humourist are as pleasant and well remembered as papa's or uncle's 'tips' when they came to see the boys at school. The sovereign then administered bought delights not to be purchased by sovereigns of later coinage, tarts of incomparable sweetness which are never to be equalled in these times, sausages whose flavour is still fragrant in the memory, books containing beautiful prints (sometimes ravishingly coloured) signed with the magic initials of the incomparable 'G. Ck.'" George Cruikshank has had no more kindly and generous an admirer of his works and sentiments than the writer of the foregoing article. Twenty years ago Mr. Thackeray concluded an elaborate paper on the subject of our memoir in the 'Westminster Review' in the following words:-"Look at one of Mr. Cruikshank's works, and we pronounce him an excellent humourist. Look at all, his reputation is increased by a kind of geometrical progression, as a whole diamond is a hundred times more valuable than the hundred splinters into which it might be broken would be. A fine, rough, English diamond is this about which we have been writing." And again, ten years later, in the Quarterly Review' for December, 1854, in an article on Pictures of Life and Character,' Mr. Thackeray thus sums up his analysis of Cruikshank's works:-"Among the veterans, the old pictorial satirists, we have mentioned the famous name of one humorous designer who is still alive and at work. Did we not see, by his own hand, his own portrait of his own famous face, and whiskers, in the Illustrated London News' the other day? There was a print in that paper of an assemblage of Teatotallers in Sadler's VOL. I. 2 A Wells Theatre, and we straightway recognized the old Roman hand-the old Roman's of the time of Plancus-George Cruikshank's. There were the old bonnets and droll faces and shoes, and short trousers, and figures of 1820 sure enough. And there was George (who has taken to the water-doctrine, as all the world knows) handing some teatotalleresses over a plank to the table where the pledge was being administered. How often has George drawn that picture of Cruikshank! Where haven't we seen it? How fine it was, facing the effigy of Mr. Ainsworth in 'Ainsworth's Magazine' when George illustrated that periodical! How grand and severe he stands in that design in G. C.'s 'Omnibus,' where he represents himself tonged like St. Dunstan, and tweaking a wretch of a publisher by the nose! The collectors of George's etchings-O the charming etchings! O the dear old German popular tales!-the capital Points of Humour'-the delightful Phrenology and scrap-books, of the good time, our time-Plancus's in fact!-the collectors of the Georgian etchings, we say, have at least a hundred pictures of the artist. Why, we remember him in his favourite Hessian boots in Tom and Jerry' itself; and in woodcuts as far back as the Queen's trial. He has rather deserted satire and comedy of late years, having turned his attention to the serious, and warlike, and sublime. Having confessed our age and prejudices, we prefer the comic and fanciful to the historic, romantic, and at present didactic George. May respect, and length of days, and comfortable repose, attend the brave, honest, kindly, pure-minded artist, humourist, moralist!" JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, PRINTER, |