* Grace Stebbing’s article on Cruikshank in the Graphic.
It was very difficult to obtain from him the toleration of tobacco smoke in his company; for, after he had given up alcoholic stimulants, he threw away his pipe. He would say to a man of letters whom he favoured, laying his hand upon his arm, and turning those fierce eyes of his full upon him, “I want you to give up drinking and smoking, and you tell me that if you don’t smoke you can’t write. Now, I’ll meet you half-way. Give up the drink, and you may smoke—-just a little.” But, as a rule, he was as stern in the matter of tobacco as in that of beer or gin. One evening M. Legros, the distinguished French artist, lighted a cigarette in his hall as he was leaving Mornington Place. “To that vice,” said “the inimitable George” in his deepest tone, “I was a slave for many years, but now I am a free man.”
To it also, it must be added, he owed one of his most imaginative and delightful etchings,—“The Triumph, of Cupid,”—published in his “Table Book.”
His earnestness was extravagantly expressed in all things. As a furious anti-Papist, he would draw aside and shake his coat when Sisters of Charity or a Catholic priest passed him. “Do you see that fellow in front?” he suddenly asked a friend with whom he was walking. It was a workman quietly enjoying his pipe. “Do you know what I would do to him if I were a man of fortune? I’d kick him! To think that any man should be fool enough to place a tube between his lips, and go puff, puff, puff!” This was his “counter blast.” And he glared at the workman as he passed on. He had himself been an inveterate smoker for more than forty years!
On another occasion he drew sharply up before the windows of his old wine merchant, and called out, “Give me back my thousand pounds!”
When the Crystal Palace was opened at Sydenham, Cruikshank, in his rage that it had not been made a Temperance palace, drew some extravagant drawings of the opening ceremony for Messrs. Cassell, one of which represented the Archbishop of Canterbury bestowing his blessing upon a public-house.
Dining one day at Grampian Lodge, Forest Sill, with his friend Dr. Rogers, he suddenly began to tell the company that he had had a vision the night before. Then he related it with much gesticulation, and with dramatic effect.
He had seen two devils in council. One had said, “England is moral, prosperous, happy—this will never do. How can we put an end to it? Her crops are splendid; look, for instance, at her barley, her-” The second devil interrupted: “I have an idea. Her barley, which makes such splendid food, let us teach them to soak it, to sour it, to make it ferment; in short, to turn it into a tempting poison.”
“Agreed!” cried the first devil.
“Why,” the second devil continued, “we will actually make them drink it of their own accord; they shall lift the poison to their own lips with their own hands.”