e against the wall. The feeble rays of the
lantern throw an obscure light upon the gloomy walls decorated with the
stock in trade of the torturers, thumb-screws, gauntlets, collars,
pinchers, saws, chains, and other horrible and suggestive implements.
Affixed to the ceiling is a steel pulley, the rope which traverses it
terminating with an iron hook and two leathern shoulder straps. Facing
the gloomy door stands a brazier filled with blazing coals, in which a
huge pair of pinchers are suggestively heating. Reared against the side
of a deep dark recess is a ponderous wheel--broad as that of a wagon,
and twice the circumference; and next it the iron bar with which the
bones of those condemned to die by this most horrible torture were
broken while alive. The etching of _Mauger Sharpening his Axe_ is nearly
as celebrated as that of _Fagin in the Condemned Cell_. "A wonderful
weird dusk, with no light but that which glimmers on the bald scalp of
the hideous headsman, who, feeling the edge of his axe with his thumb,
grins with a devilish foretaste of his pleasure on the morrow. I need
scarcely say that all the poetry, dramatic force, mystery, and terror of
the design is attributable to Cruikshank, and not to Ainsworth."[93]
Scenes still more realistically terrible even than these, such as the
_Massacre at Tullabogue_, _The Rebel Camp on Vinegar Hill_, and the
_Executions at Wexford Bridge_, will be found in Maxwell's "History of
the Irish Rebellion."

Mr. Lockhart, we may remember, advised the artist in the early part of
his career to "think of Hogarth," and throughout the whole of George
Cruikshank's designs of the graver caste the influence of the study of
Rembrandt and of Hogarth will be apparent to those acquainted with the
characteristics of these great artists. In the case of Rembrandt it is
manifest in the deep shadows, penetrated by broad but skilfully treated
rays of light, throwing the salient parts of the design into prominent
but pleasing relief; in the case of Hogarth it is shown in minute
attention to details of a character singularly appropriate to the
designs. Delineators of subjects of greater pretension are frequently
content to throw all their sympathies, their energies, into the
elaboration of their leading figure or figures: the attitude, the face,
the features, the hands, the costume, leave nothing to be desired, while
the rest of the composition is slurred or neglected. This is not the
case with Cruiksh