w in the
"Points of Humor" who is offering to eat up a certain little general,
that has made us happy any time these sixteen years: his huge mouth is a
perpetual well of laughter--buckets full of fun can be drawn from it. We
have formed no such friendships as that boyish one of the man with the
mouth. But though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached his apogee some
eighteen years since, it must not be imagined that such is really the
case. Eighteen sets of children have since then learned to love and
admire him, and may many more of their successors be brought up in the
same delightful faith. It is not the artist who fails, but the men who
grow cold--the men, from whom the illusions (why illusions? realities)
of youth disappear one by one; who have no leisure to be happy, no
blessed holidays, but only fresh cares at Midsummer and Christmas, being
the inevitable seasons which bring us bills instead of pleasures. Tom,
who comes bounding home from school, has the doctor's account in his
trunk, and his father goes to sleep at the pantomime to which he takes
him. Pater infelix, you too have laughed at clown, and the magic wand of
spangled harlequin; what delightful enchantment did it wave around you,
in the golden days "when George the Third was king!" But our clown lies
in his grave; and our harlequin, Ellar, prince of how many enchanted
islands, was he not at Bow Street the other day,* in his dirty,
tattered, faded motley--seized as a law-breaker, for acting at a penny
theatre, after having wellnigh starved in the streets, where nobody
would listen to his old guitar? No one gave a shilling to bless him: not
one of us who owe him so much.

* This was written in 1840.

We know not if Mr. Cruikshank will be very well pleased at finding his
name in such company as that of Clown and Harlequin; but he, like them,
is certainly the children's friend. His drawings abound in feeling for
these little ones, and hideous as in the course of his duty he is from
time to time compelled to design them, he never sketches one without
a certain pity for it, and imparting to the figure a certain grotesque
grace. In happy schoolboys he revels; plum-pudding and holidays his
needle has engraved over and over again; there is a design in one of the
comic almanacs of some young gentlemen who are employed in administering
to a schoolfellow the correction of the pump, which is as graceful
and elegant as a drawing of Stothard. Dull books about chil