ntirely keen and
true man's temper, could achieve, together, unhelped, but also unharmed,
among the black bans and wolds of Tyne. But the genius of Cruikshank has
been cast away in an utterly ghastly and lamentable manner: his superb
line-work, worthy of any class of subject, and his powers of conception
and composition, of which I cannot venture to estimate the range in their
degraded application, having been condemned, by his fate, to be spent
either in rude jesting, or in vain war with conditions of vice too low
alike for record or rebuke, among the dregs of the British populace. Yet
perhaps I am wrong in regretting even this: it may be an appointed lesson
for futurity, that the art of the best English etcher in the nineteenth
century, spent on illustrations of the lives of burglars and drunkards,
should one day be seen in museums beneath Greek vases fretted with
drawings of the wars of Troy, or side by side with Duerer's "Knight and
Death."

139. Be that as it may, I am at present glad to be able to refer to one
of these perpetuations, by his strong hand, of such human character as
our faultless British constitution occasionally produces in
out-of-the-way corners. It is among his illustrations of the Irish
Rebellion, and represents the pillage and destruction of a gentleman's
house by the mob. They have made a heap in the drawing-room of the
furniture and books, to set first fire to; and are tearing up the floor
for its more easily kindled planks, the less busily-disposed meanwhile
hacking round in rage, with axes, and smashing what they can with
butt-ends of guns. I do not care to follow with words the ghastly truth
of the picture into its detail; but the most expressive incident of the
whole, and the one immediately to my purpose, is this, that one fellow
has sat himself at the piano, on which, hitting down fiercely with his
clenched fists, he plays, grinning, such tune as may be so producible, to
which melody two of his companions, flourishing knotted sticks, dance,
after their manner, on the top of the instrument.

140. I think we have in this conception as perfect an instance as we
require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in
music; the "inner consciousness of good" being dim, even in the musician
and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by
the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers. This
represented scene came into my mind sudd