But we have by no means done with Cruikshank when we have admired him there. A greater Cruikshank remains to be admired. Of him there is no assignable master; neither Hogarth nor Gillray. He is the illustrator whose fame makes more than six hundred books and pamphlets desirable; he is truly an artist, a maker of beauty. Stimulated though this greater Cruikshank was in the flatter and more decent epoch which succeeded the age of _Coriolanus_ or _King Teapot_, of _Don Whiskerandos_ or _Sardanapalus_, Regent and King of Britain and mandarin of Brighton, it was in the age of muddle and debauch, not in the age of Victorian propriety and reform, that Cruikshank entered fairyland for the first time and saw the little people face to face. Cobbett has ignored the fact, but there is grace in it even for the "Big Sovereign" whom he pilloried in five hundred and eleven paragraphs. We shall find, alas! as we proceed, that, as illustrator, Cruikshank often sank below his journalistic level. The journalist may always take refuge in the actual life of the fact before him; his are real landscapes, real faces. But the illustrator has often only lifeless words to instruct him; when short of inspiration he is in the thraldom of his manner. Cruikshank's thraldom to his manner was the more obvious, since the manner was often wooden, often joyously ugly. His fame perpetuates his failures. The insipidity which affronted Boz has no effect in stopping the demand for "the fireside plate." Still, his best as well as his worst is in his illustration of books. It is his best that excuses the criticism of his worst and enrols him among the great artists of the nineteenth century. I propose in the pages that shall follow to set down the significance both of his best and of his worst, avoiding, as befits the date of my labour, any biographical matter which does not throw light on his art. And first let us follow his path in journalism. II The limits of Cruikshank's genius and the spacious area between them are almost implied in the fact that he was a Londoner who seldom or never departed from the "tight little island." Born in Duke Street, St George's, Bloomsbury, if the statement in his epitaph in St Paul's Cathedral is to be accepted, he continued a Londoner to the end: living in Dorset Street, near Fleet Street, in Amwell Street, and Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville, and finally in the house called successively 48 Mornington Place and 263 Hampstead Road. Yet this cockney depicted the Spain of Don Quixote and Gil Bias, the Ireland of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the America of Uncle Tom. Such courageous versatility was the outcome of a training so practical that I hesitate to call it an artistic education.