ious, and the most invulnerable of total
abstainers. There were days when he took tobacco: witness that portrait
of himself, smoking a very long meerschaum pipe in "Love's Triumph,"
etched about 1845. There were times when he heard the chimes at
midnight, and partook of that "richt gude willie waucht" which tipsy
Scotchmen, when they have formed in a ring, standing upon chairs, each
with one foot on the table, hiccoughingly declare that we are bound to
take for the sake of "auld lang syne." But George Cruikshank has done
with willie wauchts as with bird's-eye and Killikinick. For many years
he has neither drunk nor smoked. He is more than a confessor, he is an
apostle of temperance. His strange, wild, grand performances, "The
Bottle" and "The Drunkard's Children,"--the first quite Hogarthian in
its force and pungency,--fell like thunderbolts among the gin-shops. I
am afraid that George Cruikshank would not be a very welcome guest at
Felix Booth's distillery, or at Barclay and Perkins's brewery. For, it
must be granted, the sage is a little intolerant. "No peace with the
Fiery Moloch!" "_Ecrasons l'infame!_" These are his mottoes. He would
deprive the poor man of the scantiest drop of beer. You begin with a sip
of "the right stuff," he teaches us in "The Bottle," and you end by
swigging a gallon of vitriol, jumping on your wife, and dying in Bedlam
of _delirium tremens_. I have not heard his opinions concerning cider,
or root-beer, or effervescing sarsaparilla, or ginger-pop; but I imagine
that each and every one of those reputed harmless beverages would enter
into his _Index Expurgatorius_. "Water, water, everywhere, and not a
drop [of alcohol] to drink." 'Tis thus he would quote Coleridge. He is
as furious against tobacco as ever was King James in his "Counterblast."
He is of the mind of the old divine, that "he who plays with the Devil's
rattles will soon learn to draw his sword." In his pious rage against
intemperance, and with a view to the instruction of the rising
generation, he has even published teetotal versions of "Cinderella" and
"Jack the Giant-Killer,"--a proceeding which Charles Dickens indignantly
reprobated in an article in "Household Words," called "Frauds upon the
Fairies." Nearly the last time I met George Cruikshank in London was at
a dinner given in honor of Washington's birthday. He had just been
gazetted captain of his rifle company, and was good enough to ask me if
I knew any genteel young men, of