* Letter to B. J., Feb. 18,1878.

“One day,” says Mr. Frederick Locker, “he asked us to tea, and to hear him sing ‘Lord Bateman’ in character, which he did to our infinite delight. He posed in the costume of that, deeply interesting but somewhat mysterious nobleman. I am often reminded of the circumstance; for I have a copy of ‘Lord Bateman’ (1851), and on the false title is written—

‘This Evening, July 13, 1868,
I sang LORD BATEMAN to
My dear little friend Eleanor Locker.
George Cruikshank.’”

This in his seventy-sixth year!

Within the busy decade, 1837—1847, Cruikshank executed many separate etchings for Bentley’s Miscellany and Ainsworth’s Magazine. His work is to be found scattered far and wide. One month he appears as the illustrator of a humorous song or scena by J. Blewitt—“The Matrimonial Ladder” (the ladder was a favourite form with him for conveying the various aspects of a subject)—or Keeley in the new comic song of “Wery Ridiculous”; the next he is the whimsical illustrator of Beaufoy’s Advertisement of his Cure for the Toothache—wood drawings engraved by Orrin Smith. Nor had he quite put aside his habit of expressing himself pictorially on political events. In 1843 he published, from Mr. David Bogue’s shop in Fleet Street, a separate design entitled “The Queen and the Union. No Repeal! No O’Connell!” It was a woodcut enclosing text in type, the text being Cruikshank’s own declamation against the Irish Agitator. Britannia and Erin are represented in the drawing seated, with joined hands, on the shores of the Channel; while the “blustering, foul-mouthed bully, with one foot on Britannia’s shoulder, and the other on Erin’s harp, has raised an axe to sunder the friends.” Frontispieces and covers he designed by the score,—now to “A Tale of a Comical Stick,” and now to The Yorkshireman, a religious and literary journal; and now again a headpiece to one of Mrs. S. C. Hall’s “Sketches of Irish Character,” or a frontispiece to a book on “Prisons and Prisoners.” To every item of this extraordinary quantity and variety of pictorial labour Cruikshank gave his utmost energy. He was a most faithful worker, who never stinted himself, even when the humblest or least important subject was in hand. Let me note, however, some exceptions.

* Letter to B. J.

In 1843 he had quarrelled with Mr. Bentley, and purposely put bad work in them. This was his revenge—and to the end of his life he never perceived the fault he committed in this act. “One day,” says Mr. Locker,* u at my house, he explained how these (the bad etchings) had been etched. It appears that he had quarrelled with Mr. Richard Bentley (he was a singularly kind-hearted man, but, I fancy, had a somewhat remarkable faculty for quarrelling with almost every one with whom he was connected in business), and was obliged to fulfil his contract to supply an etching for each monthly number of Bentley’s Miscellany, and he did them as badly as he possibly could, and etched his name under them so illegibly as to be quite indecipherable: ‘And,’ said he, ‘I used to take out my watch, and put it beside me on the table, and give myself just—’ (mentioning the number of minutes) ‘for each plate.’”

It was after another and a final parting from Mr. Ainsworth, on the sale of his magazine, that Cruikshank, “left in the lurch,” to use his own phrase, started his “Table-Book,” with Gilbert à Beckett as editor, and Bradbury and Evans as printers and publishers. The artist has put on record the manner in which he and the eminent Whitefriars firm came together:—