We now come to the famous series entitled _The Bottle_ (1847) and its sequel _The Drunkard's Children_ (1848). Both these works were printed from glyphographic blocks and have as little charm as a stentorian oration in a small chapel. The story they tell, told also in verse by Dr Charles Mackay, is the ruin of a working man and his family through drink. The appeal of _The Bottle_ is simple enough to appal the aborigines of Africa, to say nothing of the East End: the bottle is a "Ju-ju," an evil fetish; the impulse of the beholder is to smash the bottle rather than to spill and waste its contents. Yet when the eye succeeds in detaching itself from this pompously evident bottle, it perceives that the artist has cared also for details less immediate, but of a finer eloquence. The liberally filled mantelshelf of plate 1 is at least not a mere labour of memory, though no one exceeds George Cruikshank in the pictorial multiplication of domestic details. This mantelshelf is a symbol; symbols, too, are the open cupboard, so well furnished that a less industrious artist would have shut it, and the ill-drawn but well-nourished felinity by the fire. In plate 2 the cupboard holds naught but two jugs; the lean cat prowls over the bare table; an ornament on the mantelshelf lies on its side. Had an artist and not a missionary composed plate 3, we might have been spared the indecency of a bottle in Lucy's lap when the furniture is distrained to pay the bottle's debt. Yet with what horrid strength does the maniac in plate 7 clutch the mantelpiece, whose bare ledge is lit by a dip stuck in a bottle, while all the neighbours stare at something whose face we cannot see! The artist has shouted till he was hoarse, but his story is in our marrows. _The Drunkard's Children_ contains one masterpiece: plate 7, the boy's death on the convict-ship. The convict who closes his eyes has the sagacity of a sentient corpse; the shadow he casts on the screen which two convicts draw around the bed is, in effect, a creature to startle us, and the visible half of the chaplain's top-hat lying on a bench in a corner of the drawing is an irony which seems to belong to a later age than Cruikshank's. _The Bottle_, employed as an argument by Mr William Cash, converted Cruikshank to teetotalism. The result has been to present the artist to modern hedonists in the light of a ludicrous bore. Certain it is that in his version of _Cinderella_ (1854) he causes the dwarf to inform the King that "the history of the use of strong drinks is marked on every page by _excess which follows, as a matter of course, from the very nature of their composition_," the italics being Cruikshank's, though they might well be mine. Teetotalism needs talking and writing, and Cruikshank was happy to oblige. He possessed a fluent pen, and delivered lay sermons with enthusiasm and originality. [Illustration: (_a_) THE GLASS OF WHISKEY AFTER THE GOOSE. From "The Glass and the New Crystal Palace," 1853.]