In the same way, when dining at the Mansion House, Cruikshank, at the passing of the loving-cup, would go through an extraordinary pantomime before all the company, expressive of his horror of strong drinks. He would shake his hand angrily at the Lord Mayor, and raise his arms with horror while his neighbour quaffed of the cup. The company humoured the eccentric old gentleman; for, in their hearts, they could not but respect his downright earnestness. He lost no opportunity. Returning home at the head of his volunteer corps, he showed his jaded officers, who had freely taken beer, how fresh he was--on two oranges. “Ah! you may laugh,” he would say, when his friends bantered him about his aggressive protests in society; “you may laugh, but I can tell you this----the presence of the old jackdaw checked the drinking, if didn’t stop it, and I am very grateful to feel sure of that.” * As Mr. Sala has observed, “the veteran sticks bravely to his text.” And well he might, for his temperance renewed his youth. “He neither smoked tobacco nor drank fermented liquors in his old age; but he was a hearty eater, an early riser, and a vigorous walker and his reward was that which, according to Gray, is only felt by boys at school--a perpetual ‘sunshine of the breast.’” He was fond of showing this vigour renewed by temperance, at every possible opportunity; for he very wisely regarded it as his most forcible argument. It enabled him, in his old age, to capture a burglar on his own premises. The story runs that when he was following the burglar to the station, with the police, he drew him under a lamp, and told him that he could see drink had brought him to this--adding that he himself drank nothing but water. “I wish I’d ha’ known that,” said the ruffian, “I’d ha’ broken your head for you.” Cruikshank delighted to show an audience how he could hold a tumbler full of water steady upon the palm of his outstretched hand. At eighty, he was seen in costume at a fancy dress ball at Willis’s Rooms, joining heartily in the dance, and letting everybody know that it was “water that did it.” * Grace Stebbing’s article on Cruikshank in the _Graphic_. It was very difficult to obtain from him the toleration of tobacco smoke in his company; for, after he had given up alcoholic stimulants, he threw away his pipe. He would say to a man of letters whom he favoured, laying his hand upon his arm, and turning those fierce eyes of his full upon him, “I want you to give up drinking and smoking, and you tell me that if you don’t smoke you can’t write. Now, I’ll meet you half-way. Give up the drink, and you may smoke---_just a little_.” But, as a rule, he was as stern in the matter of tobacco as in that of beer or gin. One evening M. Legros, the distinguished French artist, lighted a cigarette in his hall as he was leaving Mornington Place. “To that vice,” said “the inimitable George” in his deepest tone, “I was a slave for many years, but now I am a free man.”