"Perhaps he is not aware of the fact himself--but a fact it undoubtedly is--that he possesses genius--genius in its truest sense--strong, original, English genius. Look round the world of art, and ask, How many are there of whom anything like this can be said? Why, there are not half a dozen names that could bear being mentioned at all; and certainly there is not one, the pretensions of which will endure sifting, more securely and more triumphantly than that of George Cruikshank. In the first place, he is--what no living _caricaturist_ but himself has the least pretensions to be, and what, indeed, scarcely one of their predecessors was--he is a thoroughbred _artist_.[67] He draws with the ease and freedom and fearlessness of a master; he understands the figure completely; and appears, so far as one can guess from the trifling sort of things he has done, to have a capital notion of the principles of grouping. Now these things are valuable in themselves, but they are doubly, trebly valuable as possessed by a person of real comic humour; and a total despiser of that Venerable Humbug which almost all the artists of our day seem, in one shape or other, to revere as the prime god of their idolatry. Nobody, that has the least of an eye for art, can doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might design as many annunciations, beatifications, apotheoses, metamorphoses, and so forth, as would cover York cathedral from end to end. It is still more impossible to doubt that he might be a famous portrait painter. Now, these are fine lines both of them, and yet it is precisely the chief merit of Cruikshank that he cuts them both; that he will have nothing to do with them; that he has chosen a walk of his own, and that he has made his own walk popular. Here lies genius; but let him do himself justice; let him persevere and _rise_ in his own path, and then, ladies and gentlemen, _then_ the day will come when his name will be a name indeed, not a name puffed and paraded in the newspapers, but a living, a substantial, perhaps even an illustrious, English name. Let him, in one word, proceed, and, as he proceeds, let him think of Hogarth."[68] Now, although amused (and surely he cannot fail to be amused) at the curious incapacity of an art critic so strangely ignorant of his subject as to conceive _George Cruikshank_ an artist capable of designing _annunciations_, _beatifications_, _apotheoses_, and subjects so completely out of the range of his sympathies and abilities, the reader will, at the same time, be struck with the prescience of the intelligent writer who discerned in him the possession of true genius, and predicted for him, even at this early period of his career, the reputation--"living, substantial," and "illustrious"--which he afterwards so justly achieved for himself.