f the
little "bits," nine inches by six, executed in the days of his pipe and
his glass, than in any one part or portion of this most gigantic
failure.

The mere fact of his joining the ranks of the total abstainers would
have done him perhaps little professional mischief, had he been content
simply to join them, and aid their cause, as he had once so graphically
done by depicting the evils of gin drinking and intemperance; but it was
one of the failings as well as one of the virtues of this impulsive,
earnest man's character, that whatever his hand found to do, "he did it
with his might." Desiring to aid them to the best of his power, he
mistook the means by which that aid might best be applied, and forgot
that his talents lay not in the tongue but in his hand and his head. We
look upon George Cruikshank after 1849, no longer as an artist, but as a
very indifferent temperance lecturer. The reign of Fancy was over.
Thenceforth no "Reveries," no "Jack o' Lanterns," no "Gin Juggernauts,"
would come from that indefatigable hand, that fertile brain, that
wondrous and facile pencil. George Cruikshank took his _Worship of
Bacchus_, and went out into the world (heaven save the mark!) as a
temperance lecturer. His literary abilities were, however, small; he
lacked even that "gentle dulness"[95] which characterizes the leading
advocates of the movement, and kindles a certain amount of sympathetic
enthusiasm in kindred breasts. The dull people who went to hear him,
knew little about and cared less for art and genius than they did for
the abstract doctrines of total abstinence. The result, so far as he
personally was concerned, was curious, lamentable, and almost
instantaneous. The work which had hitherto crowded upon him fell away
like water from a leaking vessel; nay, on the authority of Mr. William
Bates, when work was offered him he refused to take it. "When pressed by
the late Mark Lemon to draw on his own terms for _Punch_," this man who
had designed some of the broadest, coarsest, most personal of the
satires of the nineteenth century, had grown so extremely particular
that "he definitely refused to have anything to do with it on account of
what he termed its personalities."[96] What could be done for such a man
as this? Authors and publishers wholly ceased to employ him; and he was
left without work in the very pride of his artistic career. He turned to
oil painting; was taken by the hand by the influential few who
apprec