In 1841, Cruikshank drew for _Bentley’s Miscellany_ an “allegorical representation of the infatuation of the mob for ardent spirits, and the drunkenness occasioned by an election, from a design by T. L. F.” * In 1846, he illustrated _Our Own Times_, and in the _London Penetralia_ we find him moralizing with his etching-needle, in the ragged school of Chick Lane, Smithfield, and satirising, under the head of “A Tremendous Sacrifice,” the slop-sellers who live in luxury on the work of poor seamstresses. * “In the centre of the composition is the pedestal of an altar, ornamented with a bas-relief of Britannia, on which is resting a barrel of liquor, inscribed, ‘Ruin Members and Co.--Poverty--Treadmill--Botany Bay,’ the tap running for the gratification of an assemblage of drunken wretches, who eagerly endeavour to get their favourite beverage, excepting those who are helplessly drunk or fighting.”--_Reid’s Descriptive Catalogue._ [Illustration: 120] Cruikshank was now inclining strongly to the work to which he was destined to give the last thirty years of his life. And in 1847 he gave himself up heart and soul to the preaching, by example as well as by tongue and etching-needle, the moral which had haunted him so long, that had left him no rest till he grappled with and conquered it, since he had watched the eclipse of Gillray’s genius, and seen his own father hurried, by a boastful toper’s bet, to his premature grave. [Illustration: 121] CHAPTER II. THE BOTTLE. WE have seen that many years before the Temperance question fastened itself upon Cruikshank’s mind, never to be blotted out again for a single day, he had marked and satirized the effects of drunkenness in the desolate home, the workhouse, and the gaol. His “Gin Shop,” where Death sets a trap for a party of topers, the “Ale-house,” and the “Pillars of the Gin Shop,” were drawn some fifteen years before he added to the preaching of his needle and his pencil, the force of his personal example. In 1836, as the reader has already learned, the germ of “The Bottle” appeared in a lithographed vignette to a music title, “The Dream of the Bottle,” and was published by poor old A. Schloss, proprietor of “lie Bijou Almanac,” a little annual that was issued with a magnifying glass.* Schloss was a well-known figure in London years afterwards, first as Staudigl’s secretary, and afterwards as an _employé_ at the office of Dickens’s “Household Words.” Then again, in “Sunday in London,” Cruikshank drew a Temperance moral from “The Pay Table.” A publican is pointing out a workman’s score for the foreman to deduct from his week’s wages--with the lean and hungry wife and children at hand. In the same series we find “The Sunday Market”--a butcher’s shop between two public-houses, where the food money is spent.