“As time went on apace, neither the passage of time itself, nor the hard work which crowded the days of his maturity in art, nor the comparative neglect of the later years, when Cruikshank, no longer quite in the movement of the day, was solaced by visits in the Hampstead Road, chiefly of a very few who were collectors of his work, or of some stray humourist still faithful and confident in the achievement of so many years ago. As time went on, Cruikshank wore well and slowly, so that it was truly said of him that he looked as if he had once been very old and then had forgotten it. Employed no longer in sketching and satirising the society of which he was hardly any more a part, he betook himself, a good deal by choice, to work more distinctly ambitious than any he had attempted when his hand was really the strongest and his brain the most fertile. He furnished the design for a monument to King Robert the Bruce. He painted in oils, not only this or that moral lesson, but a tale of heroism in humble life. No doubt the absence of the knowledge of academical draughtsmanship told against him not less in 1871 than it would have done half a century before, and no doubt the absence of any capacity for the subtle modulations of colour--nay, the absence even of sensitiveness to these--made his painting in oil a failure when judged by the side even of quite every-day work by every-day artists. Thus it was that no fresh honours came to him when he was still eager for them. The popularity of the great days was a little forgotten by the public in the presence of the failure of the most recent. And then again, advertised poverty is never a helpful thing. We worship merit a little, but success more, and success must have its stamp. The public of Cruikshank narrowed. Of course critics and journalists--the men whose business it is to keep in memory some work that the chance public praises one day and forgets the next--knew that Cruikshank was great, and how he had been great, and having in more than one notable instance said so faithfully during his old age, said so again last month, when he died. And of course, again, so much of his work having become rare, collectors of it had arisen--curious and anxious seekers, to whose interest we shall owe the preservation of many of his early and many even of his riper things. For them, when Cruikshank’s work was pretty well accomplished, and ‘finis’ seemed about to be written to that immense volume of production, Mr. G. W. Reid engaged on a task of care--the great _catalogue raisonné_ in which, with here and there errors not easily avoided, he has chronicled well-nigh five thousand designs: ‘the smiling offspring,’ as Thackeray so admirably said of them, ‘the smiling offspring of painful labour.’ But in the main Cruikshank was forgotten, and the weekly smiles--feint though now and again they needs must be, and of indulgence rather than commendation--which are given by the English public to the efforts of