his knee. In the cloud which curls from his lips is a motley
procession of sailors, sweeps, jockeys, Greenwich pensioners, Jew
clothesmen, flunkies, and others more illustrious, chained to the
chariot wheels of Cupid, who, preceded by cherubic acolytes and
banner-bearers, winds round the top of the picture towards an altar
of Hymen on the table. When, by the aid of a pocket-glass, one has
mastered these swarming figures, as well as those in the foreground,
it gradually dawns upon one that all the furniture is strangely
vitalised. Masks laugh round the border of the tablecloth, the
markings of the mantelpiece resolve themselves into rows of madly-
racing figures, the tongs leers in a degage and cavalier way at the
artist, the shovel and poker grin in sympathy; there are faces in
the smoke, in the fire, in the fireplace,--the very fender itself is
a ring of fantastic creatures who jubilantly hem in the ashes. And
it is not only in the grotesque and fanciful that Cruikshank excels;
he is master of the strange, the supernatural, and the terrible. In
range of character (the comparison is probably a hackneyed one),
both by his gifts and his limitations, he resembles Dickens; and had
he illustrated more of that writer's works the resemblance would
probably have been more evident. In "Oliver Twist," for example,
where Dickens is strong, Cruikshank is strong; where Dickens is
weak, he is weak too. His Fagin, his Bill Sikes, his Bumble, and
their following, are on a level with Dickens's conceptions; his Monk
and Rose Maylie are as poor as the originals. But as the defects of
Dickens are overbalanced by his merits, so Cruikshank's strength is
far in excess of his weakness. It is not to his melodramatic heroes
or wasp-waisted heroines that we must look for his triumphs; it is
to his delineations, from the moralist's point of view, of vulgarity
and vice,--of the "rank life of towns," with all its squalid tragedy
and comedy. Here he finds his strongest ground, and possibly,