“As for me,” he said in a note to his design, “who have skeletonised him prematurely, paring down the prodigy even to his hat and boots, I have but ‘carried out’ a principle adopted almost in my boyhood, for I can scarcely remember the time when I did not take some patriotic pleasure in persecuting the great enemy of England. Had he been less than that, I should have felt compunction for my cruelties; having tracked him through snow and through fire, by flood and by field, insulting, degrading, and deriding him everywhere, and putting him to several humiliating deaths. All that time, however, he went on ‘overing’ the Pyramids and the Alps, as boys ‘over’ posts, and playing at leapfrog with the sovereigns of Europe, so as to kick a crown off at every spring he made--together with many crowns and sovereigns in my coffers. Deep, most deep, in a personal view of matters, are my obligations to the agitator--but what a debt the country _owes to him!_” But the _Omnibus_ did not pay--even with all the wit and humour, and pleasant story, and sport with folly as it flew, to be found in it Moreover, by the close of the year, Cruikshank had renewed his connection with Mr. Ainsworth; and Cruikshank has put on record that his Omnibus was begun in his disgust at the treatment he had received from Mr. Ainsworth, who had adopted his idea of a story on the Plague of London, and sold it to the proprietors of the Sunday Times for a thousand pounds. Then as to the stopping of the Omnibus, this is Cruikshank’s own story:-- “It will now be necessary to state that the late Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, who was surgeon to their Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and Sussex, was a dear and intimate friend of mine, and that I had introduced Mr. Ainsworth to him, and that after I had been going on with my _Omnibus_ for something less than twelve months, to my utter astonishment, my friend Pettigrew called upon me one day with a message from Mr. W. Harrison Ainsworth, to this effect, that he (Mr. Ainsworth) was extremely sorry that there had been any unpleasantness between us, and that if I would forgive him, and be friends, nothing of the kind should ever happen again; that he was about to start a monthly magazine, and that if I would join him, and drive my ‘Omnibus’ into his magazine, he would take all the risk and responsibility upon himself, and make such arrangements as would compensate me liberally. To this most unexpected proposition at first I would not listen; but as my friend Pettigrew kept on for some time urging me to be friends again with Mr. Ainsworth, and as I am (as my friends say) in some cases rather _too goodnatured_ and forgiving, I did forgive Mr. Ainsworth, and ‘shake hands,’ and agree to work with him again. My Omnibus, in some respects, did merge into Ainsworth’s Magazine; but upon again joining with Mr. Ainsworth, I announced that the Omnibus would henceforth appear as an _annual_.”