“P. S.—I am authorized to state that subscriptions may be remitted to W. Christie, Esq., secretary to the Bruce Committee, Port Street, Stirling; or to the treasurer, John A. Murrie, Esq., the manager of the branch of the National Bank of Scotland at Stirling; and at London. And I am given to understand that about fourteen or fifteen hundred pounds are required, in addition to what is already in hand, in order to carry out the work in the first style of art.”
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At the ceremony of unveiling Mr. Currie’s statue in front of Stirling Castle (November 24, 1877), Major-General Sir James Alexander, of Westerton, in handing over the work to the Provost and Corporation of Stirling, said, that as they could not get a bronze statue “under the direction of an eminent artist, Mr. George Cruikshank, of London,” they had resolved to have one of durable stone.
This closing transaction of his life poor Cruikshank felt most bitterly; and he charged his old friend Dr. Rogers, Sir James Alexander, and all concerned in it, with having behaved in “a most dishonourable and disgraceful manner.” These were hot, ill-considered words, uttered in the pain of a very trying disappointment: words to be forgotten over the artist’s grave.
Mr. Frederick Wedmore gives us a peep at him as he went about of late, his heart still upon his sleeve as when he was young, in the days of the Regency: “Many of us who did not know him at home have at least met him about; for not only was he a familiar figure of the dreary quarter which he inhabited—where the dingy squalor of St. Paneras touches on the shabby respectability of Camden Town—but he travelled much in London, and may well have been beheld handing his card to a stranger with whom he had talked casually in a Metropolitan Railway carriage, or announcing his personality to a privileged few who were invited to see in him the convincing proof of the advantages of a union of genius with water-drinking. He was an entirely honest man; and who is there that would not forgive the little pleasurable vanities that he chose to allow himself at the fag end of a life not over-prosperous—a career no one had carefully made smooth, a career filled full of inventive work as rich as Hogarth’s and as genial as Dickens’s?”
“Occasionally,” Mr. Frederick Locker writes,* “he used to come to us and tell us his troubles, and what was occupying him; but, like many other interesting people, he did not talk about what would have been most worth hearing. The last time I saw him he spoke of having known Tom Hood (the elder) ** very well, but he did not tell as anything about him worth remembering.
* March 26th, 1878.
** When it was agreed that Cruikshank was to illustrate
Hood’s “Epping Hunt,” author and artist, with two or three
friends, spent a highly convivial day in the Forest. Hood
and Cruikshank were fast friends, and sat up together very
late of nights in Amwell Street—the wild humour and
prodigious animal spirits being a delight to the quiet
humourist, under whose form lay a serious poetic mind, and a
tender heart.