interview; Sykes's farewell to the dog; and the Jew,--the
dreadful Jew--that Cruikshank drew! What a fine touching
picture of melancholy desolation is that of Sykes and the
dog! The poor cur is not too well drawn, the landscape is
stiff and formal; but in this case the faults, if faults
they be, of execution rather add to than diminish the effect
of the picture: it has a strange, wild, dreary, broken
-hearted look; we fancy we see the landscape as it must have
appeared to Sykes, when ghastly and with bloodshot eyes he
looked at it. As for the Jew in the dungeon, let us say
nothing of it--what can we say to describe it? What a fine
homely poet is the man who can produce this little world of
mirth or woe for us! Does he elaborate his effects by slow
process of thought, or do they come to him by instinct?
Does the painter ever arrange in his brain an image so
complete, that he afterwards can copy it exactly on the
canvas, or does the hand work in spite of him?


* Or his new work, "The Tower of London," which promises
even to surpass Mr. Cruikshank's former productions.

A great deal of this random work of course every artist has done in his
time; many men produce effects of which they never dreamed, and strike
off excellences, haphazard, which gain for them reputation; but a fine
quality in Mr. Cruikshank, the quality of his success, as we have said
before, is the extraordinary earnestness and good faith with which
he executes all he attempts--the ludicrous, the polite, the low, the
terrible. In the second of these he often, in our fancy, fails, his
figures lacking elegance and descending to caricature; but there is