Upon a sensitive, imaginative, observant man like George Cruikshank, the life of him whom he owned in his early days as his master, with its awful close, must have made a deep impression. Men said that Gillray had wrecked his career through frequenting low company, and by intemperate habits. Cruikshank knew something of this, had seen much of such company, and was in close companionship with tipplers. Gillray was not the first man of mark whom he had watched from tavern to tavern, and so on to poverty and death. Almost his earliest recollections were of drinking bouts, and their debasing consequences. His boyish sight had been offended at his father’s house with the spectacle of drunken men rolled up in carpets, upon whose blank and soddened faces the morning sun was shining.* He had been saddened as a son by his father’s example, and inexpressibly shocked by the manner of his death. It appears that Isaac Cruikshank, who was a heavy whisky drinker, laid a bet with a boon companion that he would drink more tumblers than his friend without falling under the table. He won his wager, but his excess brought upon him the illness of which he died, about his fifty-fifth year. ** * “At a meeting held at Manchester, this great artist gave an address on Temperance; in the course of which, referring to the early days of his life, and to the drinking habits which existed at that period, he said he recollected gentlemen coming to dine occasionally at his father’s house, and he was often surprised on coming downstairs of a morning to find some of them rolled up in the carpet in an extraordinary manner. His own father took too much drink, and shortened his life by it. He shortened his life by the fashion of the day, and left him (the speaker) uneducated.... He had watched the effects of drink ever since he had begun to reflect, both among the higher and lower orders.”--_Poor Richards Almanac_, 1876. ** This story was told to the Rev. Dr. Rogers by George Cruikshank. Such experiences, albeit they led Cruikshank to reflect seriously on the evils of excessive drinking, did not, as we have seen, at once turn him from the bottle. Mr. Paget remarked in _Blackwood_ that Cruikshank was a severe anatomist of the vice long before any idea of his celebrated “Bottle” could have crossed his mind. In his “Sunday in London,” published in 1833, he depicted the drunkard paying his week’s score. In one of his Temperance speeches he said: “I am ashamed to say that for many years I went on following the ordinary custom of drinking, till I fell into pecuniary difficulties. I had some money at a banker’s; he fell into difficulties, took to drinking brandy-and-water, and ended by blowing out his brains.