And yet, in 1840, George Cruikshank was not quite midway on his career! Only the first great epoch of his life was drawing to a close. For the life of Cruikshank is broadly divisible into two Epochs; viz., that extending from his birth to 1847, when he became a total abstainer; and that reaching from the year when he came to the conclusion that, to use his own words upon the title-page of the small edition of “The Bottle” (1874), “it was of no use preaching without setting an example,” to his death. In order to put the entire man before the world, it is necessary to deal as thoroughly with the first epoch of his life as with the second. Nay, it is only on this condition that the writer can make the whole deserts of this singular British worthy manifest. The present generation are familiar merely with the George Cruikshank of the last thirty years. But his course stretched through two generations of his fellow-men. The public who knew the Cruikshank of the Regency, the Reform Bill, and of the dawn of the Victorian epoch, had ceased to laugh or weep, to take notes and criticise, when the veteran artist summoned his fellow-countrymen to inspect his Triumph of Bacchus. Cruikshank, the frolicsome, many-sided caricaturist, who worked with Hone and others as a political and social reformer; who gave the world an annual hearty laugh for many years in his _Comic Almanac_; and who gaily drove his _Omnibus_ with that refined and poetic humourist, Laman Blanchard; was a roysterer, fond of the pleasures of the world, given to jovial parties, the centre of a group of boon companions, and a man who passed many painful morrow mornings. But, as his friend Thackeray, who spent many a lively evening with him, bears witness, Cruikshank, after his wild youth was passed, seldom overstepped the bounds of modesty, and never gave the influence of his genius to a cause in which he was not a heart and soul believer. From the earliest of his “years of discretion” he used his rare gifts as a sacred trust, and never allowed hopes of fortune to tempt him out of the simple ways of plain living and high thinking. [Illustration: 032] The Cruikshank of our later day--of his second epoch--will gain only in dignity by a knowledge of him in his youth. We shall learn all he resisted; how heroically he battled with himself; and with what success, while he purged his life of its grossness, he kept his heart free from asceticism; how the boy lived and laughed, in short, in the hale and hearty old man, even when he had solemnly dedicated his genius to a cause, the triumph of which he believed to be the only foundation of a pure and prosperous society. [Illustration: 033] CHAPTER II. FROM CRANACH TO CRUIKSHANK.