“I am of opinion that George Cruikshank is one of the many young gentlemen whose education (like that of the English opium-eater) has been neglected. But there is no time lost; he has, I hope, a long life and a merry one before him yet; and he may depend upon it, his life will be neither the shorter nor the duller for his making it something of a studious one. He should read--read--read. He should be indefatigable in reading. He should rise at six in the morning. If he can’t work till he has had something to settle his stomach (my own case), he can have a little coffee-pot placed on the hob over-night, and take a cup of that and a single crust of toast, and he will find himself quite able for anything. What a breakfast he will be able to devour about nine or half-past nine, after having enriched his mind with several hours of conversation with the greatest and the wisest of his species! He may rely upon it, this hint is worth taking. Then let him draw, etch, and paint, until about two o’clock p.m., then take a lounge through the streets, to see if anything is stirring--step into Westminster Hall, the fives court, the Rev. Edward Irving’s chapel (if it be Sunday), or any other public place, jotting down à la Hogarth all the absurd faces he falls in with upon his finger-nails. A slight dinner and a single bottle will carry him on till it is time to go to the play, or the Castle Tavern, or the House of Commons, or the evening preaching, or the Surrey lecture, or the like. At first sight it may appear that I am cutting short the hours of professional exertion too much, but this I am convinced is mere humbug. Does the author of Waverley eat, or drink, or ride, or talk, or laugh, a whit the less because he writes an octavo every month? No such thing. Does Jeffrey plead his causes a bit the worse because he is the editor of the _Edinburgh Review?_ Does Wordsworth write worse poems, for collecting the taxes of Cumberland; or Lamb, worse Elias, for being clerk to the India House? The artists are all of them too diligent--that is the very fault I want to cure them of. Their pallets are never off their thumbs--their sticks are eternally in their fingers.” He goes on to say that the advantage of a little proper reading may be illustrated by the history of George Cruikshank, “as well as by that of any other individual I have the pleasure of not being personally acquainted with.” He commends Cruikshank’s early caricatures as “in their several ways excellent things.” “But,” he exclaims, “what a start did he make when his genius had received a truer and diviner impulse from the splendid imagination of an Egan! How completely, how _toto colo_ did he out-Cruikshank himself, when he was called upon to embody the conceptions of that remarkable man in the designs of Tom and Jerry! The world felt this--and he himself felt it.