A great deal of this random work of course every artist has done in his time; many men produce effects of which they never dreamed, and strike off excellences, haphazard, which gain for them reputation; but a fine quality in Mr. Cruikshank, the quality of his success, 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.  We 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,