George Cruikshank | Page 5

enchanted palaces, which George
Cruikshank used to people with grinning, fantastical imps, and merry,
harmless sprites,--where are they? Fairburn's shop knows him no more;
not only has Knight disappeared from Sweeting's Alley, but, as we are
given to understand, Sweetings Alley has disappeared from the face of
the globe. Slop, the atrocious Castlereagh, the sainted Caroline (in a
tight pelisse, with feathers in her head), the "Dandy of sixty," who used
to glance at us from Hone's friendly windows--where are they? Mr.
Cruikshank may have drawn a thousand better things since the days
when these were; but they are to us a thousand times more pleasing
than anything else he has done. How we used to believe in them! to
stray miles out of the way on holidays, in order to ponder for an hour
before that delightful window in Sweeting's Alley! in walks through
Fleet Street, to vanish abruptly down Fairburn's passage, and there
make one at his "charming gratis" exhibition. There used to be a crowd
round the window in those days, of grinning, good-natured mechanics,
who spelt the songs, and spoke them out for the benefit of the company,
and who received the points of humor with a general sympathizing roar.
Where are these people now? You never hear any laughing at HB.; his
pictures are a great deal too genteel for that--polite points of wit, which
strike one as exceedingly clever and pretty, and cause one to smile in a
quiet, gentleman-like kind of way.
There must be no smiling with Cruikshank. A man who does not laugh
outright is a dullard, and has no heart; even the old dandy of sixty must
have laughed at his own wondrous grotesque image, as they say Louis
Philippe did, who saw all the caricatures that were made of himself.
And there are some of Cruikshank's designs which have the blessed
faculty of creating laughter as often as you see them. As Diggory says

in the play, who is bidden by his master not to laugh while waiting at
table--"Don't tell the story of Grouse in the Gun- room, master, or I
can't help laughing." Repeat that history ever so often, and at the proper
moment, honest Diggory is sure to explode. Every man, no doubt, who
loves Cruikshank has his "Grouse in the Gun-room." There is a fellow
in the "Points of Humor" who is offering to eat up a certain little
general, that has made us happy any time these sixteen years: his huge
mouth is a perpetual well of laughter--buckets full of fun can be drawn
from it. We have formed no such friendships as that boyish one of the
man with the mouth. But though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached
his apogee some eighteen years since, it must not be imagined that such
is really the case. Eighteen sets of children have since then learned to
love and admire him, and may many more of their successors be
brought up in the same delightful faith. It is not the artist who fails, but
the men who grow cold--the men, from whom the illusions (why
illusions? realities) of youth disappear one by one; who have no leisure
to be happy, no blessed holidays, but only fresh cares at Midsummer
and Christmas, being the inevitable seasons which bring us bills instead
of pleasures. Tom, who comes bounding home from school, has the
doctor's account in his trunk, and his father goes to sleep at the
pantomime to which he takes him. Pater infelix, you too have laughed
at clown, and the magic wand of spangled harlequin; what delightful
enchantment did it wave around you, in the golden days "when George
the Third was king!" But our clown lies in his grave; and our harlequin,
Ellar, prince of how many enchanted islands, was he not at Bow Street
the other day,* in his dirty, tattered, faded motley--seized as a
law-breaker, for acting at a penny theatre, after having wellnigh starved
in the streets, where nobody would listen to his old guitar? No one gave
a shilling to bless him: not one of us who owe him so much.
* This was written in 1840.
We know not if Mr. Cruikshank will be very well pleased at finding his
name in such company as that of Clown and Harlequin; but he, like
them, is certainly the children's friend. His drawings abound in feeling
for these little ones, and hideous as in the course of his duty he is from
time to time compelled to design them, he never sketches one without a
certain pity for it, and imparting to the figure a certain grotesque grace.
In happy schoolboys he revels; plum-pudding and holidays his needle

has engraved over and over again; there is a design in one of the comic