If for no other reason than to do honour to George Cruikshank, it is well that this monument of work by an earnest old man has found its way to South Kensington, having been presented to the nation by a committee of subscribers, one of whom contributed a cheque for £800. Here, according to many Temperance authorities, it has ir made converts. A member of the Cruikshank committee writes: “An actor one day stood before the painting at South Kensington, gazing at it, and taking in its sad history, till, bursting into tears, he left the museum, took a cab direct for Mr. Cruikshank’s house, and signed the pledge for three years. Dr. Richardson told the other day of a clergyman who was pulled up by the vestry scene. Though the public did not patronise the exhibition, yet the warmest commendations of the picture have come from non-abstainers, and for this cause I suspect that the argument of the picture was to them a new idea never before fully considered.” Mr. John Stewart’s estimate of his friend’s work is technically the most satisfactory verdict which has been written. “As a whole the ‘Bacchus’ is easily described, although ‘none but itself can be its parallel.’ It is the province of genius to make rules where there are none, but as truth is a consistent whole, true genius bends the rule it makes into harmony with those already in existence; and in nothing has the artist been more successful than in combining his novel creation with the recognised canons of art. This was a daring effort; and, however hyper-criticism might carp or ignorance may sneer at details, nothing but the feeling of a poet, which enables him to compose with a poet’s facility, could have sustained the effort so successfully. The general composition contains all the elemental types of pictorial grouping, generalised on the two axioms of balance and variety. So fully has the artist carried out this subtle truth of art--because an essential truth of nature--that it would not be difficult to point out every principle Haydon could extract from the combined works of Raphael successfully modified by Cruikshank to build up and support this picture. The horizontal is represented by the groups in the immediate foreground; the pyramidal by the Bacchus, Silenus, and Bacchante; the circular by the publicans, and repeated by the widows and orphan children; the perpendicular by the saloons of high life introduced on either side: and these are repeated out and still out, till the art which produced them is lost in the higher art necessary to hide the method of production.