Yet etching and picture brought only heart-aches to the artist. Both were got through under the pressure of grave money complications. Now the water-colour drawing had to be made over to Mr. Samuel Gurney, as an equivalent for the £400 which he had contributed towards the “spending money” fund; now the collection was pledged to another friend; now the artist found himself deeper in the books of Mr. W. Tweedie, his publisher; and now the plate and engravings were made over to the “spending money” committee, to recoup them for their advances. There were bickerings--nay, there were absolute quarrels, in the course of these entanglements; for Cruikshank was an unmanageable business man, and prone, as we have seen, to fall out even with his most devoted friends. Still there was so much that was good and lovable in him, that they bore with his foibles and his outbursts, and remained willing to help the brave old man again. His admirer, Mr. Raskin, and his secretary or representative, Mr. Howell, with others, got up a testimonial which cast something approaching a thousand pounds into Cruikshank’s lap, and at the same time they offered him five guineas apiece for such little thumb-nail water-colour drawings of fairies as he could throw off at least by the half-dozen in the week. But Cruikshank was fevered with mighty ideas, harassed by complicated monetary transactions, and at the same time elated by dreams of a great national transaction which was to put him clear of the world, and at ease in a serene light of steady popularity. An art union of his works was talked about; but it fell through. But no good end could be served by a minute account of the projects and counterprojects which arose around the “Triumph of Bacchus.” The painting and the etching consumed nearly three busy years of the artist’s life; and his pecuniary reward was exactly £2,053 7s. 6d. as Mr. Tweedie’s ledger shows. Of the art merits of this great cartoon the critics have pronounced many clashing opinions. “I think, on the whole,” Mr. Sala says, “looking at the amount of sheer labour in the picture, the well-nigh incredible multiplicity of figures, and the extreme care with which the minutest details have been delineated by a hand following the eye of a man past threescore years and ten, the ‘Triumph of Bacchus’ must be regarded as a phenomenon. Its pictorial merit is slight; but it possesses and commands interest of a very different nature from that excited by a mere picture, when we remember the painter’s purpose, and the tremendous moral lesson he sought to teach. It is an eloquent protest against the drinking customs of society, and a no less eloquent--and terribly ghastly--exposition of the evils wrought on that same society by the vice of drunkenness.”