brilliant coruscations than any other; and if we may be permitted to compare his powers of realizing the grave, the comical, the supernatural, and the terrible to the facets of a diamond, we think the one which would be found to emit the most brilliant flashes of light would be the last. Thackeray, one of the most friendly and most competent of his critics, would seem to have considered that much of his power was shown in depicting subjects of this kind. "What a fine eye," he tells us, in his famous article which has supplied the backbone-the muscles-the very integuments of so many others,— "what a fine eye the artist has, what a skilful hand, and what a sympathy for the wild and dreadful!"

From an early period of his career as an etcher and designer, George had waged a deadly war with gin,-that potent, insidious, and evil spirit of London; the most priceless services he rendered to the cause of temperance being unquestionably given long before he had any notion of joining the ranks of the total abstainers. Like the Triumph of Cupid, the well-known Gin Juggernaut of the "Sketch Book" requires nothing more than a passing allusion. An example less known but quite as admirable will be found in the "Scraps and Sketches." It is called The Gin Shop, and shows us the interior of a London gin palace. In place of the usual barrels, around the walls are ranged coffins, labelled respectively: "Deady's Cordial;" "Blue Ruin ;""Gin and Bitters;" the largest (a huge one) being marked "Old Tom." Death, habited as a watchman, has baited a huge gin trap, wherein stand five persons (two of them children, besides a baby in arms), all imbibing the deadly liquid. The wretched woman with the infant has actually placed her foot on the spring, and so great is the artist's power of realization, that we momentarily expect to see the horrible thing close with a snap! A skeleton, whose fleshless skull is masked with a pleasant female countenance, officiates as barmaid, and behind her yawns a pit, on the further side of which a circle of evil spirits curvet around a huge still. Just such a weird scene as would strike a sympathetic chord in the artist's

* This was written, of course, before the recent republication, which lacks the colour and crispness of the early issue.

Designed, Etched and Published by GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.]

"-now, Oh dear, how shocking the thought is, They makes the gin from aquafortis :

[November 1st, 1829.

THE GIN SHOP.

They do it on purpose folks' lives to shorten,

And tickets it up at two-pence a quartern."-New Ballad.

[Face p. 184.

fancy was found for him in Scott's novel of "Red Gauntlet." The episode selected for illustration is the frightful adventure of Hutcheon and Dougal MacCallum. "When midnight came, and the house was quiet as the grave, the silver whistle sounded as sharp and shrill as if Sir Robert was blowing it, and up got the two old servingmen and tottered into the room where the dead man lay. Hutcheon saw enough at the first glance; for there were torches in the room, which showed him the foul fiend in his ain shape, sitting on the laird's coffin! Ower he couped, as if he had been dead. He could not tell how long he lay in a trance at the door; but when he gathered himself, he cried on his neighbour, and getting nae answer, raised the house, when Dougal was found lying dead within twa steps of the bed where his master's coffin was placed. As for the whistle, it was lost ance and aye, but mony a time it was heard at the top of the house on the bartizan and among the auld chimneys and turrets, where the howlets have their nests." The coffin of the dead laird lies in state on a table covered with black cloth, richly ornamented with his armorial bearings; at the foot of the bier stands his black plumed helmet; while atop of the coffin crouches the grinning ape with the laird's whistle in his paw; on the ground, as they have been tossed about by the mischievous beast, lie his rapier, gauntlet, and other military trappings. The furniture, the fittings, the sombre hangings, the gloomy ancestral portraits, all are in keeping with the weird scene and its surroundings. The Death of Sikes, and Fagin in the Condemned Cell (especially the latter) have been described any number of times, and the circumstances, moreover, under which the latter design was conceived, told invariably wrong. In the Murder of Sir Rowland Trenchard [“ Jack Sheppard"], we have a Rembrandtish etching, quite equalling in power and intensity that of Fagin in the Condemned Cell. The gloomy depths of the well hole are illumined only by the pine torch of the frightened Jew, as Wild hammers with his bludgeon on the fingers of the doomed wretch who, maimed and faint from loss of blood, clings with desperate tenacity to the bannister, from which his relaxing grip will presently plunge him into the black abyss below.

The "Tower of London " introduces us to two scenes of a dismal and terrible character in the etching entitled Xit Wedded to the Scavenger's Daughter, the artist carries us to a gloomy torture chamber, dimly lighted by a solitary lantern. On the framework of the rack sits the dwarf Xit, his limbs compressed in the grip of the frightful instrument called the "Scavenger's daughter," while Simon Renard, scarcely able to repress a smile, interrogates the comical little figure at his leisure. Behind him stands Sorrocold, the surgeon; and in the farther corner Mauger (the headsman), Nightgall, and an assistant torturer, recline against the wall. The feeble rays of the lantern throw an obscure light upon the gloomy walls decorated with the stock in trade of the torturers, thumb-screws, gauntlets, collars, pinchers, saws, chains, and other horrible. and suggestive implements. Affixed to the ceiling is a steel pulley, the rope which traverses it terminating with an iron hook and two leathern shoulder straps. Facing the gloomy door stands a brazier filled with blazing coals, in which a huge pair of pinchers are suggestively heating. Reared against the side of a deep dark recess is a ponderous wheel-broad as that of a wagon, and twice the circumference; and next it the iron bar with which the bones of those condemned to die by this most horrible torture were broken while alive. The etching of Mauger Sharpening his Axe is nearly as celebrated as that of Fagin in the Condemned Cell. wonderful weird dusk, with no light but that which glimmers on the bald scalp of the hideous headsman, who, feeling the edge of his axe with his thumb, grins with a devilish foretaste of his pleasure on the morrow. I need scarcely say that all the poetry, dramatic force, mystery, and terror of the design is attributable to Cruikshank, and not to Ainsworth."* Scenes still more realistically terrible even than these, such as the Massacre at Tullabogue, The Rebel Camp on Vinegar Hill, and the Executions at Wexford Bridge, will be found in Maxwell's "History of the Irish Rebellion."

"A

Mr. Lockhart, we may remember, advised the artist in the early

"British Artists from Hogarth to Turner."