and walked away again, disappearing behind the rose-bushes. I don’t know, but I thought I heard him laughing a little. I, however, kept fast hold of the bag. Everything around me was bright in the sun, and as yet I gave no thought to what I had done.’ This marvellous event, narrated by Peter with such a faithful, circumstantial detail, is painted by Cruikshank in the most wonderful poetic way, with that happy mixture of the real and supernatural that makes the narrative so curious, and like truth.” The artist, in short, in a wonderfully complete way, embodies the author’s feeling, as well as his idea. He plays, as it were, with the supernatural. Professor Wilson goes even farther. “Nobody, that has the least of an eye for art, can doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might design as many Annunciations, Beatifications, Apotheoses, Metamorphoses, and so forth, as would cover York Cathedral from end to end. It is still more impossible to doubt that he might be a famous portrait painter. Now, these are fine lines both of them, and yet it is precisely the chief merit of Cruikshank that he cuts them both, that he will have nothing to do with them, that he has chosen a walk of his own, and that he has made his own walk popular. Here lies genius; but let him do himself justice, let him persevere and _rise_ in his own path, and _then_, ladies and gentlemen, _then_ the day will come when his name will be a name indeed, not a name puffed and paraded in the newspapers, but a living, a substantial, perhaps even an illustrious, English name. Let him, in one word, proceed, and, as he proceeds, let him think of Hogarth.” Under such encouragement as this, Cruikshank braced himself for work worthy of his genius, even in the hurly-burly of the daily life he led in London, and with the incessant demands upon him still, as the pictorial moralist and satirist of his time,--demands which he answered richly out of the inexhaustible fund of his fancy and humour,--as we shall see. [Illustration: 188] CHAPTER VI. HAND-TO-MOUTH WORK. _Shepherd_. “What a subject for a picture by Geordie Cruik-shanks--Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!” * * Noctes Ambrosiano, Nov. 1828.