“Fearful quarrels and brutal violence,” says the artist-preacher, “are the natural consequences of the frequent use of the bottle.” Murder is the next scene. The wife lies dead, with the doctor leaning over her, and all the horrible _commères_ who gather round death in the dark, byways of great cities, are staring and talking. The murderer is in the clutches of the police; the boy looks on aghast, holding his chin, and trembling in his rags; the bottle, which has done the deed, is shivered upon the floor and the fragments lie near a broken pipe, a ragged slipper and a battered hat. The final scene is a mad-house. “The bottle has done its work; it has destroyed the infant and the mother, the boy and the girl left destitute and thrown on the streets, and has left the father a hopeless maniac.” The figure of the madman before the caged fire is a very powerful bit of realism. The moral of “The Bottle” was enforced by the poetic genius, Charles Mackay. His “Gin-Fiend” sang to the scratching of Cruikshank’s needle-- “There watch’d another by the hearth, With sullen face and thin; She utter’d words of scorn and hate, To one that stagger’d in. Long had she watch’d; and when he came, His thoughts were bent on blood; He could not brook her taunting look, And he slew her where she stood. ‘And it’s hip I’ said the Gin-Fiend, ‘hip, hurrah! My right good friend is he; He hath slain his wife, he hath given his life, And all for the love of me!’” Regarded as a sample of Cruikshank’s art power, these plates are far below the level of his best. We do not perceive here the master-craftsman. His dramatic force is evident in every plate. He tells his story with the fulness and intensity which are in all his pictorial narratives; but the drawing is without grace, and the types, with the exception of the husband, are wanting in that strong individuality he generally realized. In a letter to Mr. Forster (September 2nd, 1847), Mr. Dickens describes the impression “The Bottle” made on him:-- “At Canterbury yesterday, I bought George Cruikshank’s ‘Bottle.’ I think it very powerful indeed: the two last plates most admirable, except that the boy and girl in the very last are too young, and the girl more like a circus-phenomenon than that no-phenomenon she is intended to represent. I question, however, whether anybody else living could have done it so well. There is a woman in the last plate but one, garrulous about the murder, with a child in her arms, that is as good as Hogarth. Also the man who is stooping down, looking at the body. The philosophy of the thing, as a great lesson, I think all wrong; because, to be striking, and original too, the drinking should have begun in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance--the three things in which, in its awful aspect, it _does_ begin. The design would thus have been a double-handed sword--but too ‘radical’ for good old George, I suppose.”