iated, pitied, and loved him; but from the moment that he became a
temperance advocate, to the literary world and to the general public
this most singular and original genius was to all practical intents and
purposes--dead.

These observations, I repeat, are made in no spirit of hostility to the
sincere and earnest men who would seek to reduce the crime and misery
which owe their origin to the immoderate use of ardent spirits. So far
from this being the case, I hold their cause to be so righteous, so
sensible, that it seems to me as effectually advocated by a plain,
simple, earnest man as by a great artist and man of genius. I say
advisedly, that the cause of temperance had been better served had
Cruikshank stuck to his pencil and his etching needle, instead of
seeking the position of a temperance advocate, and stumping the
provinces with his absurd panorama of _The Worship of Bacchus_.

Thirty years of quite sterling and admirable work were now to be
followed by thirty years of artistic sterility, for from this Rip Van
Winkle slumber of thirty years' duration his reputation never once
awoke. Out of the dreary desert of mental and artistic inactivity came
forth at long distant intervals specimens of his handiwork, which
served, it is true, to remind us of what he once was capable, but failed
to restore him to the place he had for ever lost in public estimation;
such were the illustrations to Angus Bethune Reach's "Clement Lorymer,"
to Robert Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff," to Smedley's "Frank
Fairleigh," to George Raymond's "Life and Enterprises of Elliston," to
his own _so-called_ "Fairy Library." Good and excellent as this work
was, it utterly failed to lend even a passing vitality to his departed
reputation, a fact sufficiently and vexatiously proved when he essayed
once more to start a magazine of his own, which met with such little
encouragement that _only two parts were issued_.

Nevertheless, the designs of the "Life of Falstaff" and his own "Fairy
Library" showed that, when the subject took hold of his fancy, the hand
of Cruikshank had not altogether lost the cunning which characterized it
in days of yore. To illustrate the so-called fairy stories, he had to
read them,--no longer, alas! with his former love of fairy lore and
legend,--no longer with the mind of a man free, vigorous, elastic, but
with a mind warped and prejudiced with the study of a theme which was
intellectually depressing and uninspiring