“‘This myth,’ the spectator may follow all through this most wonderful and labyrinthine picture. In the nursery the doctor is handing a pot of beer to mamma; the nurse is drinking beer; the little boy is crying for beer; and the papa is drawing a cork, so that ‘he and the doctor may have a drop.’ Here you have a group of women, victims of intemperance, ‘tearing, biting, and mutilating one another.’ Yonder are two of the police carrying away _a drunken policeman_. Does not the mind reel and stagger at the idea of this cumulated horror? And what is the wine which yonder clergyman holds in his hand but the same kind of stuff which has made the mother in the christening scene above ‘so tipsy that she has let her child fall out of her lap, while her idiotic husband points to his helpless wife, and exclaims, “Ha, ha; she’s dr-unk’”?” And then Thackeray appealed to the public to come and be grateful to the painter:-- “With what vigour, courage, good-humour, honesty, cheerfulness, have this busy hand and needle plied for more than fifty years! From 1799, * when about eight or nine years of age,’ until yesterday, the artist has; never taken rest. When you would think he might desire quiet, behold he starts up lively as ever, and arms himself to do battle with the demon drunkenness. With voice and paint-brush, with steel-plate and wood-block, he assails ‘that deceitful, slippery, dangerous myth!’ To wage war against some wrong has been his chief calling; and in lighter moments to waken laughter, wonder, or sympathy. To elderly lovers of fun, who can remember this century in its teens and its twenties, the benefactions of this great humourist are as pleasant and well remembered as papa’s or uncle’s ‘tips’ when they came to see the boys at school. The sovereign then administered bought delights not to be purchased by sovereigns of later coinage, tarts of incomparable sweetness which are never to be equalled in these times, sausages whose savour is still fragrant in the memory, books containing beautiful prints (sometimes ravishingly coloured) signed with the magic initials of the incomparable ‘G. Ck.’ No doubt the young people of the present day have younger artists to charm them; and many hundred thousand boys and girls are admiring Mr. Leech, and will be grateful to him forty years hence, when their heads are grey. These will not care for the Cruikshank drawings and etchings as men do whose boyhood was delighted by them; but the moderns can study the manners of the early century in the Cruikshank etchings, as of the French Revolution period in Gillray, Woodward, Bunbury.” Still the public, the paying public, held back.