The best part of Cruikshank's service to Fact has yet to be considered. We have seen how he journalised and exhorted; we have still to see the talent he poured into journalism and exhortation refined by his historical sense and expressing itself in shapes of treasurable beauty.

The historical sense in art may be liberally defined as an Æsthetic impulse to fix the vanishing and recover the vanished fact. It may be absent at the birth of a cartoon filled with political portraits and it may have urged the reproduction of a quiet landscape with nothing more human in it than a few trees or a line of surf. It operates without pressure of topicality and it is stronger than the tyranny of humour.

The reader, searching for the earliest examples of Cruikshank's historical imagination to be found in the books which he illustrated, would first of all alight on "The Annals of Gallantry," by Dr A. Moore (1814-15), and "An Historical Account of the Campaign in the Netherlands in 1815," by William Mudford (1817). Suspecting the grotesque, he would nevertheless also examine the thirty plates to the Hudibrastic "Life of Napoleon" (1815) by Dr Syntax.

As to the "Annals," one may unreluctantly condemn the whole series of plates after a glance at the feeble scratches which disfigure the amours of Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland, and the elopement of Lady W—— with Lord Paget. In Mudford's ungenerous history, Cruikshank's frontispiece, engraved by Rouse (as are his other contributions), has the stiff integrity of portraiture to be expected from a repressed caricaturist; Napoleon in flight on his white horse in another plate does not even support the comparison of his horsemanship to a sack of flour's; the ribbon-like plate of Waterloo, full of microscopic figures, has the chastened spirit natural to a work done "under the inspection of officers who were present at that memorable conflict."

The illustrations to Dr Syntax's Hudibrastic poem on Napoleon have some originality to recommend them as a starting-point for the student of Cruikshank as a delineator of historical subjects. They are etchings, broad as the typed surface of an octavo page is long, and include the Red Man derided on page 21. But the artist already shows that he has fancy as well as satire at his command. Witness the illusion created by the sleeping Napoleon lifting the coat on his bed in humping the counterpane with perpendicular toes, an effect which was remembered in Cruikshank's Ideality (Phrenological Illustrations, 1826). There is humour, too, in the etching which represents one of Napoleon's grenadiers mounted on a stool in order to look as terrible as his companions. Though a rancorous prejudice makes Napoleon stand on a cross in one plate and his apothecary smile at poisoning the sick at Jaffa in another, there is sympathy in a third which depicts him nursing the King of Rome, and the eccentricities of Cruikshank's journalistic style are happily absent.

We may now pause at the four famous volumes of "The Humourist" (1819-20). They contain, inter alia, a portrait of Alfieri—a fine figure of silent disdain—in the act of sweeping to the floor the tea service of a badly drawn Princess, who was tactless enough to wish he had broken the whole set instead of one cup. The table leg is a satyr's surmounted by the Mephistophelian head considered appropriate to the companions of Pan; above the main design are the implements of a writer; below it are two porcelain mandarins yoked to a three-headed and triply derisive bust. Another historical subject in "The Humourist" is Daniel Lambert, to whom a bear once doffed his hat. Ursine politeness and the petrified majesty of fat Lambert fill the foreground of the etching; behind is a rout of people frightfully interested in another bear. In the former of these etchings the hint is better than the performance; the latter hints nothing and performs a little admirably.

1823-4 is a period to which we owe some historical etchings of consummate skill. They illustrated "Points of Humour," a work in two parts which was expressly designed to afford scope for Cruikshank's power of rendering ludicrous situations. The artist was on his mettle, and his twenty etchings for this collection of anecdotes are among the immortal children of Momus. Among his simpler designs is the scene in the apartment of Frederick the Great when his heir presumptive demanded if the monarch would return his shuttlecock. The required studies of childish impudence and royal amusement are perfect. More elaborate, but equally successful, is the drawing of the voracious boor, the ill-natured general whom he offered to eat, and the King of Sweden who enjoyed the spectacle of their emotions. The boor with the hog on a plate under his arm, his terrible teeth a-glitter for hog and general, is more alarming than the ogre in Cruikshank's Hop-o'-my-Thumb; he tacitly affirms his creator's power to confer delicious terrors on the nursery. Flying Konigsmark's fear of pointing hand and barrack-like paunch mingles exquisitely with the hatred of his backward glance, and Charles Gustavus smiles with unpardonable aplomb. The etching is a comic masterpiece. After this there is no advance in Cruikshank's comic treatment of history, for his quite simple rendering, more than ten years later, "Miscellany" (1838), of a freak of absent-mindedness on the part of Sir Isaac Newton in "Bentley's," is of merely sufficient merit.

The Ainsworth-Cruikshank connection began, artistically, with the etchings which illustrate the fourth edition of "Rookwood" (1836). If for Turpin we read Nevison, the novel may pass as quasi-historical. The etching here reproduced is in what may be called Cruikshank's "Humourist" style. It has vivacity and brightness. The reader who figured himself passing into romance through the pretty portico of trees depicted on Ainsworth's title-page, will feel, as he looks at this representation of comic prodigy, that he has arrived.

One thief succeeded another, and in 1839 Jack Sheppard was pilfering his way through "Bentley's Miscellany." If he had done nothing else, Cruikshank would have made a deathless reputation for technical skill by the etchings in "Jack Sheppard." Sala, who copied the shop-scene entitled The name on the beam, observes of this etching, at once so precise and imaginative, that it is "in its every detail essentially Hogarthian." It is a just saying. One can easily imagine Dr Trusler poring over it and recording his small discoveries with something of the relish he found in his Hogarthian exploration. Appropriately enough, Hogarth's portrait appears in the clever etching which depicts Jack in chains sitting to two artists, the other being Sir James Thornhill. Thackeray has done justice to the high qualities of the etchings entitled The Storm and The Murder on the Thames. There are effects in Cruikshank's river scenes poetic enough and near enough to that verity which Impressionists serve better than Ruskinians, to have detained Whistler for a minute that might have regenerated the fame of Cruikshank.

"Jack Sheppard," with its requisition of antiquarian exactness so plausibly met, may well have suggested to Cruikshank a more epic theme than the exploits of a master-thief, revolving about a nobler gaol than Newgate. In a letter which may or may not have been posted (it is to be read at the back of No. 9910 H in the Cruikshank collection at South Kensington), he writes: "The fact is, I am endeavouring to emancipate myself from the thraldom of the Booksellers, whose slave I have been nearly all my life; to effect this object I have published, in conjunction with the author, a work called 'The Tower of London.'"

Of the acrimonious discussion that Cruikshank started by claiming to have originated Ainsworth's romance, I shall say little. That Cruikshank was the senior partner there is no doubt. It was he who took Ainsworth to the Tower, and he asserted that he "hardly ever read a line" of the text, which must be considered to illustrate his designs. It may be said, however, that Ainsworth's text has been repeatedly devoured without the aid of Cruikshank's designs. He was a public idol. Smiled on once by Sir Walter Scott, he contrived to become the first horror-monger, vi history, of an age whose favourite realism was the safe realism of torture and decent crime. In the September before his death, which occurred January 3, 1882, he was informed by the Mayor of Manchester that the last twelve months' record of the public free libraries of that town showed that "twenty volumes of his works" were "being perused in Manchester by readers of the free libraries every day all the year through."

That I may not write a decrescendo about the designs for "The Tower of London," I begin with their faults. Cruikshank's Simon Renard is too darkling a Spaniard even for a staged Spain, and even Lady Jane Grey's waist should have been made rather larger than her throat. "Mere skeletons in farthingales," quoth "The AthenÆum" of Cruikshank's Queen Mary, Jane and Elizabeth. To what extent defective figure-drawing diminishes the proper force of Cruikshank's designs the reader may judge by the reproduction of The Death Warrant, which is presented as a frank example of his melodramatic invention. The masked assassin peers at the Spanish Ambassador through the window of the chamber of the Tower where the little princes were murdered, and where the pen that has just doomed Lady Jane Dudley hovers in Queen Mary's hand. Her hound is an incarnate presentiment and the gods of old Drury could have asked no more. There are, however, far finer plates in the book. In Underhill, the Hot Gospeller, burning at the stake, his finger nails riveted to his bare shoulders while he bawls his last agony, Cruikshank shows the longevity of the Marian crime—the crime of creating fears and loathings, for here we have absolutely a reflective shudder, a naked confidence from an abominable place which we thought was cleansed by merciful years. No other figure in the gallery of Cruikshank's "Tower" is so vital as this dying man, but he drew a handsome Wyat, an executioner as repulsive as a ghoul, and groups—for instance Elizabeth and her escort on the steps of Traitor's Gate—which a stage manager of melodrama might like to imitate.

Partly contemporaneous with "The Tower of London" was Ainsworth's "Guy Fawkes" (1840-1) with Cruikshankian etchings, which are as little serviceable to the dignity of a brave fanatic as the effigies exhibited by boys on the fifth of November. Cruikshank had drawn a typical effigy of Guy for "The Every-Day Book" of 1826; twelve years later came his ludicrous Guys in Council, but being required in 1840 to produce a serious Guy he only succeeded in being operatic. In one of his etchings the rigidity of Guy's cloak suggests that the garment is a "bath-cabinet" in occupation; in another a celestial visitor resembles a Dutch doll. Such failures are not to be explained by a desire to annoy the publisher of "Guy Fawkes," Richard Bentley, whom Cruikshank bitterly attacked in 1842. Cruikshank could and did produce etchings in a hurry for stories which he had not read, by way of expressing his dislike for a contract which survived his approval of it; but he could also be befooled by his own solemnity.

Cruikshank's relations with Ainsworth continued in "Ainsworth's Magazine," of which the first number bears the date February 1842. Among the stories in this magazine which Cruikshank illustrated must now be mentioned "The Miser's Daughter" (1842), "Windsor Castle" (1842-3) and "St James's: or the Court of Queen Anne" (1844). The first of these stories is only incidentally historical, but it afforded Cruikshank an opportunity for quickening his hand with the spirit of place. He has told us that his drawing of Westminster Abbey Cloisters and Lambeth Church, etc., are "correct copies from nature" [sic], and it almost seems as we look at his etchings and water-colours for "The Miser's Daughter" that he copied not only stones but living scenes. His ball in the Rotunda at Ranelagh has the charm of lavish light and dainty gaiety; the humour and grace of his Masquerade in Ranelagh Gardens are too obvious for discovery, and his rendering of the pursuit of a Jacobite Club on the roofs of houses within view of Westminster Abbey is a striking nocturne.

In Cruikshank's designs for "Windsor Castle," Mr Julian Moore finds "the minimum of charm and freshness in the drawing, and maximum of achievement in technique." I am in disagreement with this verdict, but it is not unintelligent. Cruikshank's "machine-ruling" is tyrannous to his Ainsworthian work, and an artist serving the historic muse when she is very much in earnest can only pray to be academic when he is not inspired. But Cruikshank did admirable work for "Windsor Castle," and could hardly help wishing to outshine Tony Johannot, who was also employed in illustrating that romance. Since "the great George" is not present to assail me in a vehement script, I may say that I discern an influence of Johannot upon Cruikshank's design (spirited but not insufferably vigorous) entitled The Quarrel between Will Sommers and Patch, for there was something called artistic restraint to be learned from the French illustrator of Cervantes, and this quality is in the etching I have mentioned, and not negatively there but as a positive gift of touch. Of Cruikshank's Henry the Eighth, it need only be said that he is bluff King Hal; his Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour are mere females: his Herne is as impressive as a person can be who jeopardises the dignity of demonhood by wearing horns.

"St James's," the last important novel by Ainsworth which Cruikshank illustrated, gave the artist opportunities for drawing St James's Palace, London, and portraits of the Duke of Marlborough and other celebrities. He accepted these opportunities, but his most striking designs remind one of his illustrations for Smollett. He rejoices in the contrast between masculine lath and feminine tub, and in one plate afflicts us with a grinning face which exceeds in ugliness any of C. Delort's portraits of "l'Homme qui rit." The vigorous design here given touches the imagination on account of the absent presence of the dame in the picture hanging on the wall.

In "Ainsworth's Magazine" for January 1846 the last fruit of Cruikshank's connection with Ainsworth appeared, after a year's sterility, as a careful etching illustrating that novelist's "Sir Lionel Flamstead, a Sketch": in the preceding year Cruikshank produced for W. H. Maxwell the series of historic etchings which, in the opinion of Mr Frederic G. Stephens, "marks the highest point of Cruikshank's invention." These etchings illustrate a history of the insurrections in Ireland in 1798 and 1803. In the selection of Cruikshank, Maxwell or his publishers may have remembered the skill with which he had illustrated I. Whitty's "Tales of Irish Life" (1824), though it is one thing to render the frantic humour of a fight arising from O'Finn calling Redmond a rascal, or the muddled emotions of a wake, and quite another to exhibit the conflict between two nightmares of patriotism. Howbeit Cruikshank realised the horror and poetry of war. His twenty-one Maxwellian etchings are instructively comparable with Callot's precious series "Les MisÈres et les Mal-heurs de la Guerre" (1633). Callot is at once more horrible and self-restrained. One peers into his work; one listens to Cruikshank's. The artist of the seventeenth century drew with minute delicacy the forms and gestures of men. He studied them as a naturalist, indifferent to the individuality of the unit after fixing the individuality of the class to which it belongs. Callot's men are users of the wheel and the estrapade; they roast the husband while they ravish the wife. They are not grotesques: they are men. Maurice Leloir drew men of their age and country no more elegantly for the bravest novel of Dumas. Cruikshank, on the other hand, drew well and hideously not only Irish men, but Irish individuals. His rebel, obscenely jocose, impaling a child, might, though a detail in a crowded etching, have been drawn for Scotland Yard; so too might a woman squatting and smoking while a wretch writhes on four pikes which take his weight and give it him back in torture. England is to glow, Ireland is to blush as she looks at Cruikshank's people of '98. As clear on the memory as his Irish ruffianism is his portrait of the little drummer dying with his leg through his drum to protect its voice from dishonour. One has heard of Lieutenant Hepenstall—him who was called "The Walking Gallows"—as well as of the drummer of Gorey, but Cruikshank was satisfied with partizanship, and Ireland forgets him.

Our liberal interpretation of history allows us now to consider a few of the works of Cruikshank which preserve for us scenes and types of his age with or without the accompaniment of a fictitious text.

For his delineations of the sailor of Nelson's day we owe much to a capital but neglected novelist M. H. Barker, author of "Greenwich Hospital" (1826), "Topsail-Sheet Blocks" (1838), "The Old Sailor's Jolly Boat" (1844), etc. Before the appearance of the earliest of these books Cruikshank had etched Lieut. John Sheringham's designs entitled "The Sailor's Progress" (1818), and those by Capt. Marryat entitled "The Progress of a Midshipman" (1820). The illustrations to the quarto called "Greenwich Hospital," are deservedly the most famous of Cruikshank's sea-pictures. With lavish detail they exhibit Jack tearing along by coach across pigs and fowls at finable knots per hour; carousing in the Long Room with billowy sirens under a chandelier of candles; crossing the line in a frenzy of ceremonious facetiousness; yelling in an inn-parlour—though armless or "half a tree"—his delight in victory and Nelson; ... and tied up for a whipping like a naughty boy. Barker was so pleased with one of the illustrations for "Greenwich Hospital" that he wrote on a proof (No. 1003-4 in the Cruikshank collection at South Kensington), "Dear Friend, if you never do another design, the leg of that table will immortalise you. It is a bon fide Peg." There is a mood in which Clio prefers that crippled table-leg to Cruikshank's idea of Solomon Eagle "denouncing of Judgment" upon London.

We have now sounded the word which invites inquiry as to the nature of Cruikshank's artistic service to London. London is not the Tower or St James's Palace. Cruikshank, however, is not injured by this scorching truism. If we go back to 1827 and 1829 we encounter in "The Gentleman's Pocket Magazine" twenty-four London Characters, of which fifteen are from the hand of George Cruikshank, who doubtless remembered Rowlandson's "Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders" (1820). George is responsible for very neat portraits of a beadle, waterman, dustman, watchman ..., and the Cruikshankian enthusiast cries "Eureka!" for he spies Mr Bumble among them. With "Sunday in London" (1833) came the first example of Cruikshank's comic treatment of London, which a book-collector, as distinct from a print-collector, can prize. The woodcuts in this volume reveal a state of society in which people had less sense of proportion than they have now, and were excessively vain or excessively humble, according to the state of their paunch and the view of them held by the policeman or the beadle. The power of the beadle had not yet been broken by a metrical inquiry concerning the origin of his hat. Frenchmen were still "mounseers," and soldiers marched to Divine Service through St James's Park to the tune of "Drops of Brandy." The flavour of the obsolete is rich in "Sunday in London"; we who look at it feel strangely toned-down.

Place in London as well as character is presented vividly in Cruikshank's contributions to "Sketches by Boz" (1836-7). Witness the examples here given. In The Streets, Morning, I, a Londoner, feel the poetry of streets cleansed by quiet, the chastity of Comfort enjoyed, as it were, by the tolerance of Hardship. The little sweep is an extinct animal, and yet we are in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials. Monmouth Street, as exhibited by Cruikshank in the same work, is an appreciation of the Hebrew dealer in old clothes as well as a caricature. We feel the street to be an open-air parlour and nursery combined; it remains imperturbably domestic though we walk in it. Another etching, depicting a beadle hammering the door of a house supposed to be on fire, elicited from Mr Frederick Wedmore the confession that he knew no artist "so alive as Cruikshank to the pretty sedateness of Georgian architecture," though the remark will be more appreciated after a look at the pretty etching entitled French Musicians or Les Savoyards (1819), reprinted in "Cruikshankiana" (1835).

Cruikshank's London ideas were further realised in "Oliver Twist" (1838), a novel to which he contributed etchings so documentary as well as imaginative that he attempted to deprive Dickens of the glory of authorship, by claiming the origination of the story. The fact was, he had grown to be a collector: he was collecting fame, and in the passion of his hobby he felt that he might claim to have originated the novel which owed local colour and a formative idea to his suggestions. The subject really belongs to the pathology of egoism. Cruikshank gained nothing by seeking laurels in the field of literature except the impression on paper of a weakness one prefers to call juvenile rather than puerile.

Yet he had much to give Boz, if that gentleman was minded to write of rogues. Cruikshank knew all about Buzmen and Adam-tilers; the days when he drank bene bowse had not been wasted, if low life be worth depicting. We may accept as portraits his Fagin and Sikes and Artful Dodger, without digesting the statement that Fagin condemned is himself in perplexity, and Fagin uncondemned the image of Sir Charles Napier. Undoubtedly, the workhouses in England of the third decade of the nineteenth century are in popular fancy all ruled by the nameless master in cook's uniform, of whom Oliver asked more, but it is not Boz's master, it is Cruikshank's. All beadles are one Mr Bumble—the Bumble of Boz and Cruikshank, though without the shadow of the sack with which the novelist eclipsed him. The etched scene where Fagin, frying sausages, receives Oliver in a den of thieves, has a squalid comfortableness—a leering charity—which praises Hell. The etched scene of Sikes's desperation on the roof of a house in Jacob's Island, Bermondsey, is in essence Misery itself, vermicular as well as violent. The etched scene where Fagin sits with blazing eyes in the condemned cell at Newgate under a window which shows him up like the Day of Judgment has been called "a picture by Fagin," for rhetoric exhausts itself in confessing its horror. In "Jack Sheppard," Cruikshank drew Newgate with particularity, he drew Bedlam with a maniac in it; for "A Journal of the Plague Year," he drew The Great Pit in Aldgate, but Fagin in his extremity belittles other horrors in Cruikshank's gallery of art. London is ashamed to see and acknowledge him; he makes her long for rain, and soap in the rain; he makes her remember her river.

The reader will therefore look sympathetically at the powerful etching here reproduced from Angus B. Reach's "Clement Lorimer" (1849). It is a kidnapping scene; there is a drugged girl in the boat; the pier against which an oar has snapped supports an arch of London Bridge.

It might be doubted if Cruikshank personally cared for any locality except London if it were not for evidence in the South Kensington Museum and the dispersed collection of the metropolitan Royal Aquarium. Number 9502A/C in the South Kensington collection of his work is a design for a house which he intended to build for himself at the seaside. The Royal Aquarium collection contained several water-colours by him of littoral subjects. Hastings may remember what she was like before the building of her esplanade by means of two water-colours by him, dated respectively 1820 and 1828, which Mr Walter Spencer bought for five guineas. A Distant View of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover, secured by Mr Frank Karslake, tempted that art-dealer, who was its possessor when I last saw it, to withhold it from his customers. It is soft, slight and pretty. With a fanciful Beachy Head (a water-colour "sketch from [sic] part of Shakespeare's Cliff, Dover, 1830") it sold for seven guineas, the "Beachy Head" being an outline of the cliff resembling a head looking left with dropped eyelid as seen (perhaps exclusively) by Cruikshank, who represents himself as standing in front of it; and I mention this "Beachy Head" because the same idea informs a rather subtle drollery in "My Sketch Book" (1833), where a couple are depicted in their fright at seeing a human face outlined by the edge of the top of Shakespeare's Cliff. All the sales mentioned in this paragraph were made at the auction at Sotheby's, 22 and 23 May 1903.

We have had already to touch on the way in which Cruikshank was the historian of himself. Thanks to his literary aggressiveness, mixed with love, so quaint and like talk in expression, that his pages resemble cylinders for a phonograph, we look at his autobiographical drawings with genuine interest. In Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson's publication of 1895—"Drawings by George Cruikshank, prepared by him to illustrate an intended autobiography"—we are introduced pictorially to "George, Nurse, Brother and Mother at Hampstead"; and the same volume shows our artist unpleasantly situated on a roof sub titulo The Button-hole of a Naughty boy caught by a nail. In the South Kensington collection George shows us very crudely a Fire in the South East end of London to which I ran when a boy with the Engine from Bloomsbury. In 1877 George sketched himself as he was about 1799, when he looked at his father while Isaac Cruikshank was drawing, and we realise the affection in this reminiscence upon seeing George's grotesques of low life done when he was "a very little boy" on the same page where the academic Isaac has drawn a conventional heroic nude and a little girl suitable for a nursery magazine (S.K. coll. No. 9814). Under a pencil sketch (S.K. coll. No. 9817) we read "George Cruikshank when a boy used to put his mother's Fur Tippet over his head like the above and make frightful faces for fun." In published work Cruikshank repeatedly presents his own portrait, my favourite examples of his self-portraiture being the painter in Nobody desires the Painter to make him as ugly and ridiculous as possible ("Scraps and Sketches," 1831), and that of himself going in as a steward with Dickens and others to a Public Dinner ("Sketches by Boz," 1836). An excellent example of a comic presentation of himself is the frontispiece to this volume. Enviable and admirable health of mind is shown by Cruikshank's love of his own face, upon which flourished, under a high forehead and "blue-grey eyes, full of a cheerful sparkling light," "an ambiguous pair of ornaments," partaking "vaguely," writes Mr Walter Hamilton, "of the characteristics" of whiskers, moustaches and beard.

I conclude this chapter with a reproduction of a painting by George Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum. The lady is yellow-haired and has a good complexion. It appears to be a portrait of Mrs George Cruikshank (nÉe Widdison), his second wife, whose prenomen was Eliza. She could draw, for there is a vapid but well-finished female head by her in the South Kensington collection of her husband's work (No. 10,038-4). She is not, of course, to be confounded with Cruikshank's sister Eliza, who designed the caricature of the Four Prues.

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