The idea of a temperance Lord Mayor’s Banquet suggests, no doubt, many vastly amusing incidents and episodes to the mind of the comic writer, but honest-hearted George Cruikshank could not, and would not, in his latter dav, see any element of fun in drunkenness, and he was quite in earnest in recommending the next Lord Mayor to fill his loving-cup with pump water. * * Since Cruikshank delivered the above speech, a Temperance banquet has been held at the Mansion House. The account he gave, moreover, of his trouble about the many people who were seeking his assistance, was true of his experience year after year. His doors were besieged. He was waylaid by petitioners for his known bounty (the recklessness of which, as we have seen, Dickens reproved) whenever he went abroad. A poor man himself, for ever in money troubles, even to the end of his laborious life, his heart lay always open to a tale of distress. He was never without “cases” on hand. It has been remarked of his Temperance days, by one of his friendliest critics, that his style suffered from the contraction of his ideas and sympathies, “and it cannot be questioned that with the general public his reputation declined in proportion to the increase of his popularity among the teetotalers.” He lost heavily, in a pecuniary sense, by his Temperance advocacy. Publishers ceased to employ him. He remarked that, for the last ten years of his life, he was without commissions. He had refused none, he would say. He was willing to work, and he held that his powers were unimpaired. Temperance preacher; to them the inimitable George, the illustrator of Boz, the kindly satirist, the creator of “Points of Humour,” the illustrator of Grimm, was dead. And, firmly believing this, the brave old man held on in the rigid course of duty he had laid down for himself. He had seen all the horrors which lie behind drunkenness; in his early time he had himself been a tavern hero; and he had dedicated the remainder of his life to the work of warning the rising generation out of the path in which he himself had stumbled. “I come forth,” he said, in one of his earliest temperance harangues, “to set by my humble example the opinion of this unthinking world at defiance.”