‘“The great George, ma’am,’ says he. ‘The Crookshanks.’ “‘If you’ll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turned my head, and see the werry man a-making pictures of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! While another of em--a tall slim, melancholly gent, with dark hair, and a bage vice--looks over his shoulder, with his head o’ one side as if he understood the subject, and cooly says, ‘I’ve draw’d her several times--in _Punch_,’ he says too I The owdacious wretch.’” The melancholy gent with the “_bage vice_” was Leech. In those days, and down to those days, Cruikshank was convivial--sometimes to excess. It was not for nothing that Maclise had drawn him seated upon a beer barrel.* * His brother Robert drew his portrait as a young man, his hair and whiskers uncombed, cross-legged, in a contemplative mood, his dress in disorder, and called it “George in a Brown study.” It was a picture of him in his days of dissipation, when his sister-in-law would occasionally seize and wash and comb him, while he laughed at the absurdity of his position. He was very sensitive in later life about any allusion to his appearance. When Mrs. Stowe, in her book of London impressions, roughly described him as “an old man, with a keen eye and grey hair,” he was deeply mortified, and he addressed an expostulation to the papers. His portraits, by himself, in oil, abounded in his studio. They were marked with touches of chalk, giving a fresh curl to the whisker, a fiercer flash to the eye, a more effective arrangement of the hair; but not one was finished. His fortunes threw him early among humble boon companions, at Grimaldi’s club and elsewhere, as we have seen; and his wild exuberant spirits and lively sense of humour made him king among them. Later, when Dickens knew him, he would fall away occasionally from his new and more dignified friends (who were not ascetics), and run a wild career for a night in his old haunts. Dickens used to describe one wonderful day--among others--he had passed with “the inimitable George.” Dickens was living in Devonshire Place, and was just setting to work one morning in his library, when Cruikshank, unwashed and “smelling of tobacco, beer, and sawdust,” as Dickens described him, burst into the room. He said he had been up all night; was afraid to go home, and begged for some breakfast. While he was breakfasting, Dickens did his utmost to persuade him to go to bed. But George resolutely set his face against it. He said he dared not even think of Islington. Seeing the state of affairs, Dickens closed his desk, and proposed to accompany his friend to face the domestic storm with him. But Cruikshank would only consent to a walk--the farther from Islington the better.