can please men or live long that are written by water-drinkers,” and disposed to undervalue the tact and discretion of some of the advocates of total abstinence, for its abstract principles he can say and think nothing but what is good. But he is writing, be it remembered, of a great artist-one whose mission was that of an artist, not that of a temperance orator,-of one who had served the righteous and good cause of temperance best when he remembered that genius had made him an artist and not a temperance orator,-of one who had rendered that cause yeoman's service long before he joined the total abstainers, in designing The Gin Juggernaut, The Gin Trap, and work of a kindred nature. The cause, too, so far as mere verbal advocacy was concerned, was better served by men of vastly inferior mark and ability. Before this fatal plunge was taken his genius had roamed in an absolutely uncontrolled range of freedom. He had travelled into the land of chivalry and romance, into the realms of fairy fancy, magic, and diablery; he had brought back with him pictures of the wondrous people, lands, and scenes which his fancy had visited. All this was at an end; this wonderful genius was now forced into a narrow groove, where it could no longer have the freedom of action which was essential to its very existence. From the moment that George Cruikshank turned temperance orator, the world of English art lost one of its brightest ornaments, and he himself both fame and fortune; for, as Mr. Bates observes, "some of his earliest friends were alienated, and remunerative work that might have been his was diverted, from sheer prejudice, into other hands." His style, too, as Mr. Bates further remarks, "suffered by the contraction of his ideas and sympathies, and his art became associated with that vulgarity and want of æstheticism which perhaps necessarily characterizes the movement." The Bottle and The Drunkard's Children, although successful in a pecuniary point of view-compared with what had gone before,-can scarcely be called art at all; in these too he unconsciously put himself in competition with Hogarth, and as a matter of necessity failed.

He had been a king among designers and etchers; he had been and was still an admirable water-colour artist, but knew comparatively little of the manipulation or management of oils. A new crusade had however to be preached, to be preached by means of an oil painting; and for this purpose George was to be inspired off hand (so to speak) with a new art, and to paint a picture in oils. We know the result-the lamentable result-in that most preposterous Worship of Bacchus. His motive was good, his ideas were vast, but the genius which in his unregenerate days had enabled him to design The Gin Trap and the The Gin Juggernaut, was no longer there. Unhappy Rip! There is more poetry -more fancy-more romance-more art-fire-genius in one of the little "bits," nine inches by six, executed in the days of his pipe and his glass, than in any one part or portion of this most gigantic failure.

The mere fact of his joining the ranks of the total abstainers would have done him perhaps little professional mischief, had he been content simply to join them, and aid their cause, as he had once so graphically done by depicting the evils of gin drinking and intemperance; but it was one of the failings as well as one of the virtues of this impulsive, earnest man's character, that whatever his hand found to do, "he did it with his might." Desiring to aid them to the best of his power, he mistook the means by which that aid might best be applied, and forgot that his talents lay not in the tongue but in his hand and his head. We look upon George Cruikshank after 1849, no longer as an artist, but as a very indifferent temperance lecturer. The reign of Fancy Thenceforth no "Reveries," no "Jack o' Lanterns," no "Gin Juggernauts," would come from that indefatigable hand, that fertile brain, that wondrous and facile pencil. George Cruikshank took his Worship of Bacchus, and went out into the world (heaven save the mark !) as a temperance lecturer. His literary abilities were, however, small; he lacked even that "gentle dulness" which characterizes the leading advocates of the move"And gentle dulness ever loves a joke."-Dunciad.

was over.

ment, and kindles a certain amount of sympathetic enthusiasm in kindred breasts. The dull people who went to hear him, knew little about and cared less for art and genius than they did for the abstract doctrines of total abstinence. The result, so far as

he personally was concerned, was curious, lamentable, and almost instantaneous. The work which had hitherto crowded upon him fell away like water from a leaking vessel; nay, on the authority of Mr. William Bates, when work was offered him he refused to take it. "When pressed by the late Mark Lemon to draw on his own terms for Punch," this man who had designed some of the broadest, coarsest, most personal of the satires of the nineteenth century, had grown so extremely particular that "he definitely refused to have anything to do with it on account of what he termed its personalities." * What could be done for such a man as this? Authors and publishers wholly ceased to employ him; and he was left without work in the very pride of his artistic career. He turned to oil painting; was taken by the hand by the influential few who appreciated, pitied, and loved him; but from the moment that he became a temperance advocate, to the literary world and to the general public this most singular and original genius was to all practical intents and purposes-dead.

These observations, I repeat, are made in no spirit of hostility to the sincere and earnest men who would seek to reduce the crime and misery which owe their origin to the immoderate use of ardent spirits. So far from this being the case, I hold their cause to be so righteous, so sensible, that it seems to me as effectually advocated by a plain, simple, earnest man as by a great artist and man of genius. I say advisedly, that the cause of temperance had been better served had Cruikshank stuck to his pencil and his etching needle, instead of seeking the position of a temperance advocate, and stumping the provinces with his absurd panorama of The Worship of Bacchus.

Thirty years of quite sterling and admirable work were now to be followed by thirty years of artistic sterility, for from this Rip "The Maclise Portrait Gallery," 1883, p. 195.

Van Winkle slumber of thirty years' duration his reputation never once awoke. Out of the dreary desert of mental and artistic inactivity came forth at long distant intervals specimens of his handiwork, which served, it is true, to remind us of what he once was capable, but failed to restore him to the place he had for ever lost in public estimation; such were the illustrations to Angus Bethune Reach's "Clement Lorymer," to Robert Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff," to Smedley's "Frank Fairleigh," to George Raymond's "Life and Enterprises of Elliston," to his own so-called "Fairy Library." Good and excellent as this work was, it utterly failed to lend even a passing vitality to his departed reputation, a fact sufficiently and vexatiously proved when he essayed once more to start a magazine of his own, which met with such little encouragement that only two parts were issued.

Nevertheless, the designs of the "Life of Falstaff" and his own "Fairy Library" showed that, when the subject took hold of his fancy, the hand of Cruikshank had not altogether lost the cunning which characterized it in days of yore. To illustrate the so-called fairy stories, he had to read them,—no longer, alas! with his former love of fairy lore and legend,-no longer with the mind of a man free, vigorous, elastic, but with a mind warped and prejudiced with the study of a theme which was intellectually depressing and uninspiring. No one knows the origin of these fairy stories, they come to us from our Danish and Saxon ancestors, but are interwoven with the literature of every civilized nation under the sun, and are altogether beyond the sphere of modern criticism. Their primitive style is singularly adapted to enlist the sympathies of the little folk to whom they specially address themselves: their highest aim and object is not to instruct, but to amuse. All this the artist, in the ardour of his new crusade, lost sight of, and so dead had he become to the fairy fancies and reveries of his youth, that he placed sacrilegious hands on these time-honoured and. favourite legends of our childhood, and converted them (with most indifferent literary ability) into something little better than temperance tracts!

But happily not without protest. Charles Dickens, the champion of the injured fairies, set his lance in rest, and speedily rolled hapless Van Winkle in the dust. Into the details of this very absurd and very unequal contest there is no necessity for us to enter. George was at home with his pencil, his etching needle, or his tubes of water colour; but put a pen in his hand, and he forthwith would cut the funniest of capers. He argued (with every appearance of comical gravity and earnestness), that because Shakespeare might alter an Italian story, or Sir Walter Scott use history for the purposes of the drama, poetry, or romance, therefore, any one might take the liberty of altering a common fairy story to suit his purpose and convey his opinions." Aye, and so he might, honest Rip; but he would set about his task in a very different fashion to Shakespeare or Sir Walter Scott, and I fear too that the literary results and value would be vastly different. It never seemed to occur to the mind of the honest but simple casuist that in putting "any one" on a par with William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, he was writing simple nonsense.

It is clear, therefore, that the change which had come over the literature of fiction during the past quarter of a century, and which Professor Bates would assign as one of the principal causes of the sterility which befel the genius of Cruikshank, had really very little to do with it. This calamity-for a national calamity it undoubtedly was-did not fall upon him, be it remembered, when he was old, but in the very acme and pride of artistic success. His fall was distinctly due to causes which were within his own control, and might have been avoided by the exercise of qualities which (it seems to me) he did not possess,-forethought, tact, and judgment. During the rest of his long life, the place which George Cruikshank deliberately ceded to others he never once regained; when he dropped behind, he became as completely forgotten as if he had ceased any longer to exist; men whose childhood he had delighted with his quaint imaginings, his own friends and contemporaries, died off; and so it came to pass, that before he knew it, for time moves quickly after youth is over, the old man was left standing alone