Cruikshank’s old friend, Clarkson Stanfield, first persuaded him to trust himself to oils. In his tinted designs, he showed that sense of colour which was everywhere manifest in the etchings of his best time--in his designs to Ainsworth, for instance. The watercolour drawings for his Walter Scott plates, again, are admirable. * But in oil, it must be repeated, he failed utterly. * They were for a long time the property of Mr. Lumley, of Her Majesty’s Theatre, and on the sale of his effects passed, fortunately, into the hands of Mr. Ellison, who bequeathed his collection to the South Kensington Museum. The touch of the etcher remained. He was hard and crude. The first painting he exhibited was “Bruce attacked by Assassins”--the Bruce upon a burlesque horse smothered in drapery! It was exhibited at the Royal Academy. His next picture was “Moses dressing for the Fair”--a subject more within his power; but it was coarse, inharmonious, and sketchy. The wonder was that Cruikshank could not perceive that he was on the wrong road. So far, however, was he from suspecting this, that he was constantly meditating great historical subjects; and actually “got in” upon a spacious canvas the Battle of Agincourt. He even began a scriptural subject, “Christ riding into Jerusalem.” But the genius that could realize a street or fairy mob * upon a surface no broader than the palm of the hand, could not paint a battle-piece. Without his outline he was all abroad. The sacred subject remained in the studio, with many other canvases, to the end. It was his “Battle of a Gin Court,” in his “Sunday in London” that showed the master. He admitted, when it was suggested to him, that the “etching-point feeling” was always in his fingers, giving a “living” sensation to the brush, and that he never could get rid of it. His Falstaff tormented by the Fairies, was, on the whole, the painting he completed with most thorough satisfaction to himself. * “Cruikshank’s crowds give one exactly the impression of reality. They show a certain monotony, from the common impulse of the mob, yet they are full of characteristic figures, no two exactly alike. There is also all the due sense of air, and motion, and fluctuation about them. They are penetrable crowds, especially the Irish, which he delights to draw,--true _mobiles_,--ready to break out into new mischief, or disperse before the onslaught of the Saxon.”--Francis Turner Palgrave. Mr. Wedmore, dwelling on the shortcomings of biographers, complains that where an artist is the subject they tell “not much of the work he had planned but never executed; work, nevertheless, on which perhaps he had set great store, and looked forward to completing, and ‘purposes unsure.’ ‘That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount.’