halcographic brilliance and skill those etchings are,--many
of them surpassing Callot, and not a few of them (notably the
illustrations to Ainsworth's "Tower of London") rivalling Rembrandt.
From the nature of these engravings, it would be impossible to print
them at a machine-press for a weekly issue of fifty or sixty thousand
copies. George has drawn much on wood, and his wondrous
wood-cuts--xylographs, if you wish a more pretentious word--to "Three
Courses and a Dessert," "The Odd Volume," "The Gentleman in Black,"
Grimm's "Fairy Tales," "Philosophy in Sport," and "The Table-Book," will
be long remembered, and are now highly prized by amateurs; but his
minute and delicate pencil-drawings have taxed the energies of the very
best engravers of whom England can boast,--of Vizetelly, of Landells, of
Jackson, of Thompson, and of Thurston. George Cruikshank would never
suffer his drawings on wood to be slashed and chopped about by hasty or
incompetent gravers; and although the ateliers of "Punch" are supplied
with a first-rate staff of wood-cutters, very great haste and very
little care must often be apparent in the weekly pabulum of cuts; nor
should such an appearance excite surprise, when the exigencies of a
weekly publication are remembered. The "Punch" artists, indeed, draw
with a special reference to that which they know their engravers can or
cannot do. Mr. Tenniel's cartoons are put on wood precisely as they are
meant to be cut, in broad, firm, sweeping lines, and the wood-engraver
has only to scoop out the white interstices between the network of
lines; whereas Mr. Leech dashed in a bold pen-and-ink-like sketch and
trusted to the xylographer, who knew his style well and of old, to
produce an engraving, _tant bien que mal_, but as bold and as dashing as
the original. The secession, for reasons theological, from "Punch" of
Mr. Richard Doyle, an event which took place some fifteen years since,
(how quickly time passes, to be sure!) was very bitterly regretted by
his literary and artistic comrades; and the young man who calmly gave up
something like a thousand pounds a year for conscience' sake lost
nothing, but gained rather in the respect and admiration of society. But
the wood-engravers must have held high carousal over the defection of
Mr. Doyle. To cut one of his drawings was a crucial experiment. His hand
was not sure in its touch; he always drew six lines instead of one; and
in the portrait of a lady from his penci