Let us now glance at the childhood and early manhood of this famous Englishman. We shall see that he owed nothing to Fortune. The coarse and dangerous school of obscurity was his. The splendid powers which he had received from nature, if they grew wild, grew strong also. He was the son of Isaac Cruikshank, a struggling Scotch artist, who never won high fame nor commanded rich rewards; a fair painter in water-colours and a successful grotesque etcher, when the satirical grotesque was a marketable produce. Isaac Cruikshank * was the son of a Low-lander, who held at one time an appointment in the Customs at Leith. He married the daughter of a naval officer--a Highlander from Inverary, according to Dr. Charles Mackay; to whom George Cruikshank often boasted that although he had the misfortune to be born in London, his blood was a mixture of the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland. He boasted that his grandfather had fought at Culloden, and had become thereby impoverished. The child of a Lowland father, and of a stern, resolute Highland mother; bred in London, with London streets for the fairyland of his young imagination; inured as a child to taskwork in that busy house, or factory, in Dorset Street; and his boyhood cast in the days of great deeds and momentous events calculated to stir his blood to fever heat; the genius of George Cruikshank budded and blossomed betimes. His first pencilling is dated 1799: it was executed in his seventh year! It may be said that his baby fingers played with the graving tool. While a boy, he illustrated children’s penny books for the children’s publisher, James Wallis, as well as comic valentines, and Twelfth Night characters, for Chappell, the then publisher of _London Cries_, Knight, Baldwyn, and others. * The Cruikshanks belonged to Aberdeenshire, where they are still a numerous sept. Probably some branches of them may be found in the “Poll-Book of Aberdeenshire.” William Cruikshank, a celebrated anatomist, flourished in Edinburgh toward the close of last century. Isaac Cruikshank, his father, was, as I have said, a fairly known water-colour painter and etcher of popular subjects. Lottery tickets were his “pot boilers”--for there was a steady demand for designs for these. But, with poorer skill than his gifted son, he fed the popular appetite for pictures of the time. A grim outline of the guillotine, a cramped representation of the execution of Louis XVI. in 1793, were among the sterner subjects to which his name is attached.