* Mr. Forster, in a side-note, puts it thus: “Falsity ascribed to a distinguished artist.” This controversy, and a subsequent one, arose from Cruikshank’s habit of exaggeration in all things. One day, at an engraver’s, seeing a drawing of animated pumps (probably one of the series by his brother Robert) upon the table, he shouted, “My pumps!” seized the drawing, made for the door, and was with difficulty persuaded to give it up. In his eagerness he had a habit of over-estimating the effect of his work, as well as his share in any enterprise in which he had a part. Thus _he_ put down hanging for minor offences; _he_ suppressed fairs, because he exposed the coarseness and vice of Bartholomew Fair;* and so in his later day he was ready, and with thorough conscientiousness, to attribute nearly all the advance of the temperance cause in society to his “Bottle,” “Drunkard’s Children,” and “Triumph of Bacchus.” It was this belief in himself that carried him forward, and kept him alert and vigorous in the cause long after he had completed his threescore years and ten. But it led him into injudicious statements, or over-statements, of which those in regard to his share in “Oliver Twist” was certainly the most unfortunate. His pretensions that he supplied not only subjects for his own plates, but skeletons of chapters to Dickens and Ainsworth, might be disposed of by fifty collateral testimonies to the contrary. * In a note to the catalogue of his works, exhibited in the Aquarium, London, Cruikshank put this note: “Bartholomew Fair, held formerly in Smithfield, used to be opened by the Lord Mayor of London, in his coach and six. In ancient times this fair might have been a very decent affair; but as the metropolis increased in size, the number of thieves and low characters increased also, so that at length this fair, in the evening part, became a scene of ruffianism. I had a peep at it on one or two occasions, and then published this ‘Fiend’s Frying Pan,’ dedicating it to the Lord Mayor, aldermen, etc., who, after a few years began to look at the fair in the same light as myself, and at last put an end to that which was a disgrace to the city.” Yet in his illustrations to the ‘Sketches by Boz,’ he drew all the humours of a dancing booth at Greenwich Fair, with riotous men in dancing bonnets, and women equally dissipated, “footing it” in men’s hats. Neither in the article nor the drawing is there any moralising. Writing to Forster (January 1838), Dickens says, alluding to the severity of his labours, “I have not done the ‘Young Gentlemen,’ nor written the preface to ‘Grimaldi,’ nor thought of ‘Oliver Twist,’ or _even supplied a subject for the plate_.” According to Mr. Ainsworth, Dickens was even so worried by Cruikshank putting forward suggestions that he resolved to send him only printed proofs for illustration.