nd, not much
industry. He does just what is suggested or thrown in his way, pockets
the cash, orders his beef-steak and bowl, and chaunts, like one of his
own heroes,--

'Life is all a variorium,
We regard not how it goes.'

Now, for a year or two to begin with, this is just what it should be.
Cruikshank was resolved to see _Life_,[66] and his sketches show that he
has seen it, in some of its walks, to purpose. But life is short, and
art is long; and our gay friend must pull up.

"Perhaps he is not aware of the fact himself--but a fact it undoubtedly
is--that he possesses genius--genius in its truest sense--strong,
original, English genius. Look round the world of art, and ask, How many
are there of whom anything like this can be said? Why, there are not
half a dozen names that could bear being mentioned at all; and certainly
there is not one, the pretensions of which will endure sifting, more
securely and more triumphantly than that of George Cruikshank. In the
first place, he is--what no living _caricaturist_ but himself has the
least pretensions to be, and what, indeed, scarcely one of their
predecessors was--he is a thoroughbred _artist_.[67] He draws with the
ease and freedom and fearlessness of a master; he understands the figure
completely; and appears, so far as one can guess from the trifling sort
of things he has done, to have a capital notion of the principles of
grouping. Now these things are valuable in themselves, but they are
doubly, trebly valuable as possessed by a person of real comic humour;
and a total despiser of that Venerable Humbug which almost all the
artists of our day seem, in one shape or other, to revere as the prime
god of their idolatry. Nobody, that has the least of an eye for art, can
doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might design as many annunciations,
beatifications, apotheoses, metamorphoses, and so forth, as would cover
York cathedral from end to end. It is still more impossible to doubt
that he might be a famous portrait painter. Now, these are fine lines
both of them, and yet it is precisely the chief merit of Cruikshank that
he cuts them both; that he will have nothing to do with them; that he
has chosen a walk of his own, and that he has made his own walk popular.
Here lies genius; but let him do himself justice; let him persevere and
_rise_ in his own path, and then, ladies and gentlemen, _then_ the day
will come when his name will be a name indeed, not a name puffed an