e make no doubt that the same
labor would at present bring him twenty times the sum; but whether it
be ill paid or well, what labor has Mr. Cruikshank's been! Week by week,
for thirty years, to produce something new; some smiling offspring of
painful labor, quite independent and distinct from its ten thousand
jovial brethren; in what hours of sorrow and ill-health to be told by
the world, "Make us laugh or you starve--Give us fresh fun; we have
eaten up the old and are hungry." And all this has he been obliged to
do--to wring laughter day by day, sometimes, perhaps, out of want, often
certainly from ill-health or depression--to keep the fire of his brain
perpetually alight: for the greedy public will give it no leisure to
cool. This he has done and done well. He has told a thousand truths in
as many strange and fascinating ways; he has given a thousand new and
pleasant thoughts to millions of people; he has never used his wit
dishonestly; he has never, in all the exuberance of his frolicsome
humor, caused a single painful or guilty blush: how little do we think
of the extraordinary power of this man, and how ungrateful we are to
him!

Here, as we are come round to the charge of ingratitude, the
starting-post from which we set out, perhaps we had better conclude. The
reader will perhaps wonder at the high-flown tone in which we speak of
the services and merits of an individual, whom he considers a humble
scraper on steel, that is wonderfully popular already. But none of us
remember all the benefits we owe him; they have come one by one, one
driving out the memory of the other: it is only when we come to examine
them all together, as the writer has done, who has a pile of books
on the table before him--a heap of personal kindnesses from George
Cruikshank (not presents, if you please, for we bought, borrowed, or
stole every one of them)--that we feel what we owe him. Look at one of
Mr. Cruikshank's works, and we pronounce him an excellent humorist.
Look at all: his reputation is increased by a kind of geometrical
progression; as a whole diamond is a hundred times more valuable than
the hundred splinters into which it might be broken would be. A fine
rough English diamond is this about which we have been writing.

End of Project Gutenberg's George Cruikshank, by William Makepeace Thackeray

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE CRUIKSHANK ***

***** This file should be named 2648.txt or 2648.zip *****
T