Let it be remembered, however, that Cruikshank's exposure of ebriety from 1829 to 1875, the date which John Pearce in "House and Home" assigns to his last temperance piece, deserved at times the notice of fame. Matthew Arnold, denying the power of "breathless glades, cheer'd by shy Dian's horn" to calm the spectator of _The Bottle_, showed more than his ignorance of Diana and her peace. He showed that Cruikshank the preacher was a magician too. IV The best part of Cruikshank's service to Fact has yet to be considered. We have seen how he journalised and exhorted; we have still to see the talent he poured into journalism and exhortation refined by his historical sense and expressing itself in shapes of treasurable beauty. The historical sense in art may be liberally defined as an æsthetic impulse to fix the vanishing and recover the vanished fact. It may be absent at the birth of a cartoon filled with political portraits and it may have urged the reproduction of a quiet landscape with nothing more human in it than a few trees or a line of surf. It operates without pressure of topicality and it is stronger than the tyranny of humour. The reader, searching for the earliest examples of Cruikshank's historical imagination to be found in the books which he illustrated, would first of all alight on "The Annals of Gallantry," by Dr A. Moore (1814-15), and "An Historical Account of the Campaign in the Netherlands in 1815," by William Mudford (1817). Suspecting the grotesque, he would nevertheless also examine the thirty plates to the Hudibrastic "Life of Napoleon" (1815) by Dr Syntax. As to the "Annals," one may unreluctantly condemn the whole series of plates after a glance at the feeble scratches which disfigure the amours of Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland, and the elopement of Lady W---- with Lord Paget. In Mudford's ungenerous history, Cruikshank's frontispiece, engraved by Rouse (as are his other contributions), has the stiff integrity of portraiture to be expected from a repressed caricaturist; Napoleon in flight on his white horse in another plate does not even support the comparison of his horsemanship to a sack of flour's; the ribbon-like plate of Waterloo, full of microscopic figures, has the chastened spirit natural to a work done "under the inspection of officers who were present at that memorable conflict."