as we have said
before, is the extraordinary earnestness and good faith with which
he executes all he attempts--the ludicrous, the polite, the low, the
terrible. In the second of these he often, in our fancy, fails, his
figures lacking elegance and descending to caricature; but there is
something fine in this too: it is good that he SHOULD fail, that he
should have these honest naive notions regarding the beau monde, the
characteristics of which a namby-pamby tea-party painter could hit
off far better than he. He is a great deal too downright and manly to
appreciate the flimsy delicacies of small society--you cannot expect a
lion to roar you like any sucking dove, or frisk about a drawing-room
like a lady's little spaniel.

If then, in the course of his life and business, he has been
occasionally obliged to imitate the ways of such small animals, he has
done so, let us say it at once, clumsily, and like as a lion should.
Many artists, we hear, hold his works rather cheap; they prate about bad
drawing, want of scientific knowledge:--they would have something vastly
more neat, regular, anatomical.

Not one of the whole band most likely but can paint an Academy figure
better than himself; nay, or a portrait of an alderman's lady and family
of children. But look down the list of the painters and tell us who
are they? How many among these men are POETS (makers), possessing the
faculty to create, the greatest among the gifts with which Providence
has endowed the mind of man? Say how many there are, count up what they
have done, and see what in the course of some nine-and-twenty years has
been done by this indefatigable man.

What amazing energetic fecundity do we find in him! As a boy he began to
fight for bread, has been hungry (twice a day we trust) ever since, and
has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread week by week. And
his wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers as the
fashionable painter's thin pinchbeck, who can live comfortably for
six weeks, when paid for and painting a portrait, and fancies his mind
prodigiously occupied all the while. There was an artist in Paris, an
artist hairdresser, who used to be fatigued and take restoratives after
inventing a new coiffure. By no such gentle operation of head-dressing
has Cruikshank lived: time was (we are told so in print) when for a
picture with thirty heads in it he was paid three guineas--a poor week's
pittance truly, and a dire week's labor. W