cannot always be said of Mr. Cruikshank | is an amazing creature. You look at him see, for instance, the secondary figures as you do at some of the long-legged in the illustrations entitled "The Un- birds in the Zoological Gardens, and expected Reverse" and the "Striking wonder where can be the muscles that Position," in Frank Fairlegh-it must move these attenuated limbs. Then the be owing to other causes. And these fashions! People did dress oddly, no causes, we consider, are traceable to the doubt, and there always has been, and influence upon eye and hand of the art probably always will be, a certain miby which his early years were surrounded nority who will out-Herod Herod in their in the days of which he says "When I attire. But not to this extent! The was a mere boy, my dear father kindly laws of gravitation, if not of gravity, allowed me to play at etching on some of would have prevented it. his copper-plates- little bits of shadows, or little figures on the back-ground and to assist him a little as I grew older, and he used to assist me in putting in hands and faces." - which the artist has kept most clear of his usual habits of exaggeration, in which he approaches most nearly to the more delicate satire that lurks in M. Tenniel's cartoons for Punch, or the earlier and abler sketches in Vanity Fair. It is true that in some of the best work of the men of that generation, the portraits are excellent. The thin face and eager, earnest manner of Burke, they used to call him the Jesuit in those days, The art into the practice of which Mr. -the vehement portliness of Fox, the Cruikshank was thus, as we may say, stateliness of Pitt, the heaven-born Minborn-for his father was one of its vota-ister, are brought before you with a vivries was strong, course, vigorous cari- idness, which, of course, cannot be emucature, the very life of which was gro-lated by the best verbal description. But tesqueness and wild exaggeration. Its then these are precisely the pictures in great living master was Gillray, a man of wonderful fertility of invention and real humorous genius; and after him Rowlandson, for all his brutishness, occupied, perhaps, the most prominent place. We all know their prints. You come across them in old collections, in the portfolios of the curious, in side-street printshops. You may read of them in Mr. Wright's Caricature History of the Georges. They arrest the eye with their crude colour and broad humour. They pretty frequently repel it by features much more than questionable. The allegory in which the satire is clothed is often elaborate and recondite. The heathen mythologies, and Holy Writ itself, are ransacked for types and allusions; but yet there is something elementary and almost childish in the form of the fun. 66 Any stupid hand could draw a hunchback, and write 'Pope' underneath," says Thackeray, in his delightful paper on the poet; and similarly though it would certainly be false to say that Gillray's hand was stupid still, it must be owned that the wit of distortion is the wit neither of refinement nor supreme skill. And these caricatures revelled in distortion. The fat men and women are so preposterously fat; the lean ones so impossibly lean. If a gentleman bows, he breaks his back; if a lady dances, she capers about in a manner quite galvanic. The typical Frenchman, who reappears pretty constantly, and under. circumstances of great personal and national humiliation, *English Humourists. This was, however, the art into the practice of which Mr. Cruikshank threw himself at the beginning of his career, with all the ardour of youth and genius. His first recorded work bears date 1803, when he was only eleven years of age. But this, of course, could only be a childish production. His real entrance into the battle of life, then raging with particular fierceness, was in 1808; and, considering that he was but sixteen, it must be confessed that he carried into the fray a singularly practised hand and a very sturdy weapon, not a rapier, perhaps, but certainly a very effective quarter-staff. He did not indeed effect a revolution in the style of political and social caricature, - that was reserved for other hands; and if he had died in 1820, he would have been remembered, probably, as one of the ablest of Gillray's followers and compeers, but not as what he has since shown himself to be - -a great and original genius. Still, what wealth of energy he threw into those early works! How vividly they reflect the thoughts and passions of the time! True, the scandals to which so many of them refer are forgotten by all except the professed student. Who now knows what was the precise nature of the revelations of "Molly Clarke," which made such a stir, and earned for her astute countenance a frequent place in these sketches? What was the dis- humorous groan when the Princess creditable expedition to R- Hall, in Charlotte is announced as about to prewhich the Prince of Wales played, seem- sent the country with an heir to the throne. ingly, anything but an august figure? Alas! he might have spared himself that Whose memory is sufficiently retentive to jest. Fate gave it a sorry ending, and keep a place for all that royal personage's the prophecy was bitterly belied. No nusins and misdemeanours? But though merous, expensive progeny came of that the recollection of details is gone, the ill-starred marriage. Within a very few general impression remains, and is con- days, England, and the artist himself, siderably strengthened and vivified by were lamenting, with a sincerity of which these contemporary records. And there there can be no doubt, over the grave of are others which require no special inter- the mother and her first-born. But to pretation. Any one can understand the return to gayer themes. There had presatire when the Prince is represented as viously been much of our insular pride of pausing in the midst of a dance to ex- purse in the ridicule cast by the artist on press his satisfaction because his wife is Prince Leopold for his poverty, - he leaving the room hurt and angry; or, landed on our shores in a pitiful state of again, where he is shown as hopelessly destitution, according to the caricature, intoxicated, with his garter half undone, a slave to the women by whom he is surrounded. The subject was a favourite one with the artist. Again and again do we come across the figure of The man all shaven and shorn, All covered with orders, and all forlorn, as he is described in one of the stinging pamphlets which Mr. Cruikshank then illustrated.* and some of our general insular arrogance in the earlier representations of the Prince of Orange, as a Dutch toy, played with for a moment, and then to be cast aside, by the Princess. Most of the events of the time are illustrated by this prolific pencil in a similar spirit: the buxom Princess's quarrel with her father, and flight from Carlton House in a hackney coach; Lord Byron's quarrel with his wife, and deNo very decided party bias is discover-parture from England, solaced by his own able in the political works of these early verses; the trial of Lord Cochrane, afteryears. George IV. is caricatured pretty wards Lord Dundonald; the Queen's freely, no doubt,-more freely, perhaps, trial, of course, several times; the Cato than any one else, but his enemies are Street conspiracy; the amazement of not spared. An occasional shaft is shot Blucher at being made a doctor by the at the Queen, and Tom Paine and Cob- University of Oxford; and the O. P. riots, bett come in for their well-merited share which made havoc of Covent Garden of opprobrium. If the artist abhorred Theatre, then under the haughty managetyranny, he also hated revolution. He ment of John Kemble. In the caricahad no mission to plant his battery among tures on the latter subject, though they the ranks of Whig or Tory, and bombard assume a very personal and offensive the other side with consistent fury. His form in the "Stroller's Progress," there work — and this gives it the greater his-is a peculiar feature to be noted. torical value- represents that sturdy | Cruikshank's satire it was the fault of John Bull feeling which, even now, un- nearly all the satire of the time derlies all surface party divisions, and was so particularly strong at the beginning of this century. He is the type of the Anglo-Saxon grumbler. Nothing pleases him except the victories over the French. For the Court and its ways, its extravagance and dissolute habits, he entertains the most unbounded contempt. He does not scruple to accuse its hangers-on of selling intelligence to the enemy. The royal princes are a set of harpies, fattening on the spoils wrung from the people. The Ministry of the day are, of course, always fair game. Popular as she is, he cannot repress a The House that Jack Built, 1818. Mr. gener ally vulgarizes its object. It does not vulgarize " Black Jack," as Kemble seems to have been called in the hour of his unpopularity; and the "manager full of scorn" is a fine figure. Whether this was an involuntary tribute to the splendid masculine beauty which contemporary report ascribes to the man, or whether it was the result of respectful admiration here again genuinely British - for his proud bearing under adversity, and his undisguised contempt for the roaring mob of his adversaries, we cannot say. But a certain circumstance inclines us to the latter view, and this is the character of the later portraits of Napoleon. Towards Boney himself, in the days of SUNSET. WE call material this fair world of ours, That man may thus with it communion hold, FATE and I have met and kissed; She is fairer than I thought her, God is love; his will is Fate, Therefore Fate is love's fulfilling. So we struggle, Fate and I, Up the steeps of stern endeavor, Through the night storm, turning ever Toward the east, whose dawning blest Shall reveal the gates of rest. Helen J. Angell, in the Independent. From The British Quarterly Review. WORKS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.* random one, at the tardiness of the Tichborne trial, and will very probably delight us with some new exhibition of its skill to-morrow. The full span of life itself is but threescore years and ten, and there is something astonishing in the mere vitality of an artistic career which covers such a period. But what is, perhaps, even more surprising than that Mr. Cruikshank should have drawn with undiminished force and spirit during seventy years, is the steady lustre of his fame. If we think how many things have changed in this mutable world since the beginning of the century; how many stars have risen and set in the firmament of art - set, not in death alone, but in mere oblivion and contempt; how very small the proportion of work that has stood the test of time; how much the critical standpoint has changed; how great the tendency has been, especially lately, to display originality of judgment by differing from one's predecessors we shall see that thus to have "run the gauntlet "unscathed is no small achievement. And when we speak of fame, we do not at all refer to the admiration of mere ignorance. Mr. Cruikshank has drawn for the many, and the many have admired him; but the GEORGE CRUIKSHANK old George Cruikshank how many ghosts of pleasant hours past and gone the name has power to raise! How few among us to whom some well-thumbed volume, bearing the evident traces of his style in every illustration, has not been one of the familiar friends of childhood! Those who are fortunate enough to have been young since the year 1855, and are indeed young still-though apt to resent the information-may be pretty safely assumed to have conned their fairy lore in the Fairy Library, and derived their knowledge of ogres from the truculent specimens of the genus there delineated. The older generation, who are now having children, nay, grandchildren of their own, smile with remembered gladness as they think of the quaint fancies that lurked in the copy of Knickerbocker's History of New York, let us say, or Grimm's Stories, or Peter Parley's Tales about Christmas, on the bookshelves of long ago. And even the great grand-fathers of the present but that was so long before this century had reached its teens that the artist had not yet made himself a name - even they may have purchased the children's lottery tickets which it was one of his earliest few have admired him no less, though tasks to decorate. Thackeray, speaking regretfully, as his manner was, of the joyous time when he and Leech had been young together "in the consulship of Plancus," seemed half-inclined, so venerable was Cruikshank's fame, to throw him back two or three generations, into the mythic days of "Priscus Plancus." Alas! the later men are gone. Thack- terwards returned to the subject, with eray has left us, and Leech. But the old giant still remains, the living representative of an art even earlier than theirs; and the hand that first held the etching needle in 1803, shot its shaft, and that no A Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of George Cruikshank, Etchings, Woodcuts, Lithographs, aud Giyphographs, with a List of Books illustrated by Him. Chiefly compiled from the Collections of Mr. Thomas Morson, Mr. Edmund Story Maskelyne, and Mr. Edwin Truman, by GEORGE WILLIAM REED, Keeper of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum; with an Essay on his Genius and Works by E. BELL, M. A,; and Three Hundred and Thirteen Illus trations. with greater discrimination. Christopher North,* sitting at the ambrosial board in company with the Shepherd, burst into Homeric laughter over some of the caricaturist's earlier works. Thackeray, with that charm of manner which was all his own, devoted one article in the Westminster Review † to their elucidation, and af undiminished admiration, in the Quarterly. The latter journal, § discussing the illustrations to Oliver Twist, expressed surprise that the Academy should not have enrolled their designer among its members; and really, having regard to the state of English painting in 1840, we * See Professor Wilson's Works, Vol. 1. p. 255. † See Westminster Review for June, 1840. See Quarterly Review for December, 1854, Art. on Leech. § See Quarterly Review, Vol. LXIV. Art. on Oliver Twist. think that august body would have great- we do not say which would-produce a ly honoured itself by such an appoint- very unfavourable impression. In the ment. Dickens, though deprecating Mr. first place for it may be as well to clear Cruikshank's utilitarian employment of the ground as regards this matter- he fairies as teachers of teetotalism, was full is entirely devoid of all sense of what is of respect for the artist's genius.* Mr. usually regarded as beauty. This is so Francis Turner Palgrave,† to come to obvious that, like the statement that more recent judgments, is similarly laud- Milton had no humour, it has become one atory; and Mr. P. G. Hamerton, in his of the commonplaces of criticism. Like interesting work on Etchers and Etching, many commonplaces, however, it reis full of praise as regards technical skill quires and will repay rigid examination. and quality of work. And, lastly, for we We admit then that an inspection of the do not care to multiply evidence, Mr. artist's work, however sympathetically Ruskin, whose praise of any individual conducted, would fail to discover a single is generally relieved against a gloomy face or figure, whether male or femalebackground of contempt for his own with the exception, perhaps, of Madame contemporaries, says, characteristical- Rachel in the Omnibus - which was ly: "Among the reckless losses of the right services of intellectual power with which this country must be charged, very few are, to my mind, more to be regretted than that which is involved in its having turned to no higher purpose than the illustration of the career of Jack Sheppard and of the Irish Rebellion, the great, grave (I use the word deliberately, and with large meaning), and singular weaknesses. It is so rare a visitant, genius of George Cruikshank." ‡ beautiful by regularity of feature or purity of form. In other words, the classical ideal is here entirely wanting. Nor does prettiness take its place. This quality which, though pleasant in itself, has been regarded, not altogether without reason, as one of the curses of English art, luring it from the pursuit of higher things, has never been one of Mr. Cruikshank's lurking so persistently, when present And yet, notwithstanding this concur- at all, in odd nooks and corners, in the rence of opinion, notwithstanding the spirals of a bean stalk, or the homely patent fact that the artist's work is now, adornments of a chamber, that it may and always has been, popular, in the best fairly be left out of the question. And sense of the word, we can perfectly if, in the absence of classic beauty and imagine that many well-educated persons modern prettiness, we seek for what was - well-educated that is generally, though regarded as beauty by the great Northnot in art might turn from a collection ern painters, by Dürer, for instance, and of his illustrations in honest distaste. Holbein, and Rembrandt, viz., the eviTo the uneducated their humour and di-dence of strongly marked character, and rectness of aim and result would always of the influence exercised by time and appeal irresistibly. The critical connois-circumstance on the human countenance seur would value them for their beauty of and form, we shall be equally disappointworkmanship and excellent qualities of ed. Mr. Cruikshank's power-and to light and shade. But to those whose us this is more singular, for his genius is eyes are still closed to the latter source essentially Gothic, essentially one in of pleasure, and open rather to impres- family with that of the men we have just sions of grace and well-ordered pretti- named - Mr. Cruikshank's power is not ness, than of sturdy strength or quaint here. His sense of beauty, if so be that hilarious fancy, there are certain manner- our investigations will discover any, lies isms in Mr. Cruikshank's style, certain elsewhere. limitations in his powers, which might Furthermore, it must be admitted that his drawing of the face and figure, except when the subject is grotesque, generally leaves something to be desired, and is a good deal injured by one or two disa |