l, the agonized engraver had to
hunt through a Cretan labyrinth of faces before he found the particular
countenance which Mr. Doyle wished to be engraved.

I have strayed away, perhaps unpardonably, from George Cruikshank. To
those whose only ludicrous prophet is "Punch" he may be comparatively
little known. But in the great world of pictorial art, both in England
and on the Continent, he worthily holds an illustrious place. His name
is a household word with his countrymen; and whenever a young hopeful
displays ever so crude an aptitude for caricaturing his schoolmaster, or
giving with slate and pencil the facetious side of his grandmother's cap
and spectacles, he is voted by the unanimous suffrage of fireside
critics to be a "regular Cruikshank." In this connection I have heard
him sometimes called "Crookshanks," which is taking, I apprehend, even a
grosser liberty with his name than in the case of the additional
_c_,--"Crookshanks" having seemingly a reference, and not a
complimentary one, to George's legs.

This admirable artist and good man was the son of old Isaac Cruikshank,
in his day a famous engraver of lottery-tickets, securities in which the
British public are now no longer by law permitted to invest, but which,
fifty years since, made as constant a demand on the engraver's art as,
in our time and in America, is made by the thousand and one joint-stock
banks whose pictorial promises-to-pay fill, or should properly fill, our
pocket-books. The abilities of Isaac were not entirely devoted to the
lottery; and I have at home, from his hand, a very rare and curious
etching of the execution of Louis XVI., with an explanatory diagram
beneath of the working of the guillotine. George Cruikshank's earliest
pencil-drawings are dated, as I have remarked, before the present
century drew breath; but he must have begun to gain reputation as a
caricaturist upon copper towards the end of the career of Napoleon
I.,--the "Boney" to whom he has adhered with such constant, albeit
jocular, animosity. He was the natural successor of James Gillray, the
renowned delineator of "Farmer George and Little Nap," and "Pitt and
Boney at Dinner," and hundreds of political cartoons, eagerly bought in
their day, but now to be found only in old print-shops. Gillray was
a man of vast, but misapplied talents. Although he etched
caricatures for a livelihood, his drawing was splendid,--wellnigh
Michel-Angelesque,--but always careless and _outre_. H