I was reminded of a visit I had paid years before to a room in the Egyptian Hall, where Haydon, wild and lowering, lingered by his pictures, a solitary, almost heart-broken man. In a letter he said that Douglas Jerrold was one of the two or three who answered his summons to Piccadilly. But it was I, then a young art-student, who had begged my father’s ticket, and stood for him, in the empty Haydon gallery. It was thus, with a sinking at the heart, that I went away from Wellington Street. In order to make the exhibition more attractive, Mr. John Taylor suggested to Cruikshank that he should group around him a complete collection of his art work of sixty years; his original water-colour sketches of the Miser’s Daughter, the Tower of London, the Irish Rebellion, and indeed a selection from the rich store he had garnered in his home, in the hope that he should be able to leave a complete record of his long art-life as a legacy to his country. [Illustration: 199] This was the origin of the collection which was ultimately bought by the Aquarium Company, and is now, unfortunately, huddled in a corner of a gallery of their building. From Wellington Street the Cruikshank exhibition was transported late in 1863 to Exeter Hall. All who knew the worth of Cruikshank’s genius went, and were delighted; but Cruikshank was made to see that the new generation had turned irrevocably to other and less gifted favourites, and that he had outlived his popularly with the multitude. * As one of the committee remarks, “The public neither spake nor moved.” * “The Triumph of Bacchus” was taken afterwards through the provinces; and although the provincials in many places gave it a heartier welcome than it had obtained in London, the upshot of the speculation was that the expenses of exhibition were barely covered. And yet Cruikshank, although burdened with the pecuniary liability which he had incurred, and which had continuously increased while the exhibition was in progress, set himself down with heroic fortitude to complete the etching. “Following the big picture painfully, wearily,” one of the committee writes, “the etching was at last completed; but the long delay had damped the ardour of subscribers. The engraving is a noble work, unique as a steel etching in its great size and multiplicity of figures. Each one is complete; nothing is scamped. Its power as a teacher has yet to be fully felt.”