history anterior to the drunken stage; and he thought it the
first duty of the moralist bent upon annihilating the gin-shop, to
"strike deep and spare not" at those previous remediable evils.
Certainly this was not the way of Mr. Cruikshank, any more than it is
that of the many excellent people who take part in temperance
agitations. His former tale of the _Bottle_, as told by his admirable
pencil, was that of a decent working man, father of a boy and a girl,
living in comfort and good esteem until near the middle age, when,
happening unluckily to have a goose for dinner one day in the bosom of
his thriving family, he jocularly sends out for a bottle of gin,
persuades his wife, until then a picture of neatness and good
housewifery, to take a little drop after the stuffing, and the whole
family from that moment drink themselves to destruction. The sequel, of
which Dickens now wrote to me, traced the lives of the boy and girl
after the wretched deaths of their drunken parents, through gin-shop,
beer-shop, and dancing-rooms, up to their trial for robbery, when the
boy is convicted, dying aboard the hulks; and the girl, desolate and
mad after her acquittal, flings herself from London-bridge into the
night-darkened river.

"I think," said Dickens, "the power of that closing scene quite
extraordinary. It haunts the remembrance like an awful reality. It is
full of passion and terror, and I doubt very much whether any hand but
his could so have rendered it. There are other fine things too. The
death-bed scene on board the hulks; the convict who is composing the
face, and the other who is drawing the screen round the bed's head; seem
to me masterpieces worthy of the greatest painter. The reality of the
place, and the fidelity with which every minute object illustrative of
it is presented, are surprising. I think myself no bad judge of this
feature, and it is remarkable throughout. In the trial scene at the Old
Bailey, the eye may wander round the Court, and observe everything that
is a part of the place. The very light and atmosphere are faithfully
reproduced. So, in the gin-shop and the beer-shop. An inferior hand
would indicate a fragment of the fact, and slur it over; but here every
shred is honestly made out. The man behind the bar in the gin-shop, is
as real as the convicts at the hulks, or the barristers round the table
in the Old Bailey. I found it quite curious, as I closed the book, to
recall the number of faces I had