tiousness of the artist, and that shrewd pervading idea of form which is one of his principal characteristics. Jack is surrounded by all sorts of imple

It would not, perhaps, be out of place to glance through the whole of "The Jack Sheppard" plates, which are among the most finished and the most successful of Mr. Cruik-ments of his profession; he stands shank's performances, and say a on a regular carpenter's table: away word or two concerning them. Let in the shadow under it lie shavings us begin with finding fault with and a couple of carpenter's hampers. No. 1, "Mr. Wood offers to adopt The glue-pot, the mallet, the chisellittle Jack Sheppard." A poor print, handle, the planes, the saws, the on a poor subject; the figure of the hone with its cover, and the other woman not as carefully designed as paraphernalia are all represented it might be, and the expression of the with extraordinary accuracy and foreeyes (not an uncommon fault with thought. The man's mind has reour artist) much caricatured. The tained the exact drawing of all these print is cut up, to use the artist's minute objects (unconsciously perhaps phrase, by the number of accessories to himself), but we can see with what which the engraver has thought keen eyes he must go through the proper, after the author's elaborate world, and what a fund of facts (as such description, elaborately to reproduce. a knowledge of the shape of objects The plate of "Wild discovering is in his profession) this keen student

Darrell in the loft" is admirable ghastly, terrible, and the treatment of it extraordinarily skilful, minute, and bold. The intricacies of the tilework, and the mysterious twinkling of light among the beams, are excellently felt and rendered; and one sees here, as in the two next plates of the storm and murder, what a fine eye the artist has, what a skilful hand, and what a sympathy for the wild and dreadful. As a mere imitation of nature, the clouds and the bridge in the murder picture may be examined by painters who make far higher pretensions than Mr. Cruikshank. In point of workmanship, they are equally good, the manner quite unaffected, the effect produced without any violent contrast, the whole scene evidently well and philosophically arranged in the artist's brain, before he began to put it upon copper.

The famous drawing of" Jack carving the name on the beam," which has been transferred to half the playbills in town, is over-loaded with accessories, as the first plate; but they are much better arranged than in the last-named engraving, and do not injure the effect of the principal figure. Remark, too, the conscien

of nature has stored away in his brain. In the next plate, where Jack is escaping from his mistress. the figure of that lady, one of the deepest of the ẞavúкоhπо, strikes us as disagreeable and unrefined; that of Winifred is, on the contrary, very pretty and graceful; and Jack's puzzled, slinking look must not be forgotten. All the accessories are good, and the apartment has a snug, cosey air; which is not remarkable, except that it shows how faithfully the designer has performed his work, and how curiously he has entered into all the particulars of the subject.

Master Thames Darrell, the handsome young man of the book, is, in Mr. Cruikshank's portraits of him, no favorite of ours. The lad seems to wish to make up for the natural insignificance of his face by frowning on all occasions most portentously.

This figure, borrowed from the compositor's desk, will give a notion of what we

mean. Wild's face is too violent for the great man of history (if we may call Fielding history), but this is in consonance with the ranting, frowning, braggadocio character that Mr. Ainsworth has given him.

"The Interior of Willesden Church" | the manner of Hogarth, who is inis excellent as a composition, and troduced in the company. "The a piece of artistical workmanship; Murder of Trenchard must be the groups are well arranged; and noticed too as remarkable for the the figure of Mrs. Sheppard looking effect and terrible vigor which the round alarmed, as her son is robbing artist has given to the scene. "The the dandy Kneebone, is charming, Willesden Churchyard" has great simple, and unaffected. Not so Mrs. merit too, but the gems of the book Sheppard ill in bed," whose face is are the little vignettes illustrating screwed up to an expression vastly the escape from Newgate. Here, too, too tragic.. The little glimpse of the much anatomical care of drawing is church seen through the open door not required; the figures are so small of the room is very beautiful and that the outline and attitude need poetical: it is in such small hints only to be indicated, and the designer that an artist especially excels; they has produced a series of figures quite are the morals which he loves to remarkable for reality and poetry too. append to his stories, and are always There are no less than ten of Jack's appropriate and welcome. The booz-feats so described by Mr. Cruikshank. ing ken is not to our liking; Mrs. Sheppard is there with her horrified eyebrows again. Why this exaggeration is it necessary for the public? We think not, or if they require such excitement, let our artist, like a true painter as he is, teach them better things.*

"The Escape from Willesden Cage" is excellent; "The Burglary in Wood's house" has not less merit; 'Mrs. Sheppard in Bedlam," a ghastly picture indeed, is finely conceived, but not, as we fancy, so carefully executed; it would be better for a little more careful drawing in the female figure.

"Jack sitting for his picture" is a very pleasing group, and savors of

* A gentleman (whose wit is so celebrated that one should be very cautious in repeating his stories) gave the writer a good illustration of the philosophy of exaggeration. Mr. was once behind the scenes at the Opera when the sceneshifters were preparing for the ballet. Flora was to sleep under a bush, whereon were growing a number of roses, and amidst which was fluttering a gay covey of butterflies. In size, the roses exceeded the most expansive sun-flowers, and the butterflies were as large as cocked hats; the scene-shifter explained to Mr. who asked the reason why every thing was so magnified, that the galleries could never see the objects unless they were enormously exaggerated. How many of our writers and designers work for the galleries?

(Let us say a word here in praise of
the excellent manner in which the
author has carried us through the ad-
venture.) Here is Jack clattering up
the chimney, now peering into the
lonely red room, now opening" the
door between the red room and
the chapel." What a wild, fierce,
scared look he has, the young ruffian,
as cautiously he steps in, holding
light his bar of iron. You can see
by his face how his heart is beating.
If any one were there! but no!
this is a very fine characteristic of
the prints, the extreme loneliness
of them all. Not a soul is there to
disturb him -woe to him who should

And

and Jack drives in the chapel gate, and shatters down the passage door, and there you have him on the leads. Up he goes! it is but a spring of a few feet from the blanket, and he is one - abiit, evasit, erupit ! Wild must catch him again if he

can.

Mr.

We must not forget to mention "Oliver Twist," and Mr. Cruikshank's famous designs to that work.* The sausage scene at Fagin's, Nancy seizing the boy; that capital piece of humor, Mr. .Bumble's courtship, which is even better in Cruikshank's version than in Boz's exquisite ac

*Or his new work, "The Tower of London," which promises even to surpass Mr. Cruikshank's former productions.

If then, in the course of his life and business, he has been occasionally obliged to imitate the ways of such small animals, he has done so, let us say it at once, clumsily, and like as a lion should. Many artists, we hear, hold his works rather cheap; they prate about bad drawing, want of scientific knowledge; - they would have something vastly more neat, regular, anatomical.

count of the interview; Sykes's fare- | about a drawing-room like a lady's well to the dog; and the Jew,- little spaniel. the dreadful Jew- that Cruikshank drew! What a fine touching picture of melancholy desolation is that of Sykes and the dog! The poor cur is not too well drawn, the landscape is stiff and formal; but in this case the faults, if faults they be, of execution rather add to than diminish the effect of the picture: it has a strange, wild, dreary, broken-hearted look; we fancy we see the landscape as it must have appeared to Sykes, when ghastly and with bloodshot eyes he looked at it. As for the Jew in the dungeon, let us say nothing of it- what can we say to describe it? What a fine homely poet is the man who can produce this little world of mirth or woe for us! Does he elaborate his effects by slow process of thought, or do they come to him by instinct? Does the painter ever arrange in his brain an image so complete, that he afterwards can copy it exactly on the canvas, or does the hand work in spite of him?

A great deal of this random work of course every artist has done in his time; many men produce effects of which they never dreamed, and strike off excellences, haphazard, which gain for them reputation; but a fine quality in Mr. Cruikshank, the quality of his success, as we have said before, is the extraordinary earnestness and good faith with which he executes all he attempts the ludicrous, the polite, the low, the terrible. In the second of these he often, in our fancy, fails, his figures lacking elegance and descending to caricature; but there is something fine in this too: it is good that he should fail, that he should have these honest naïve notions regarding the beau monde, the characteristics of which a namby-pamby teaparty painter could hit off far better than he. He is a great deal too downright and manly to appreciate the flimsy delicacies of small society — you cannot expect a lion to roar you like any sucking dove, or frisk

Not one of the whole band most likely but can paint an Academy figure better than himself; nay, or a portrait of an alderman's lady and family of children. But look down the list of the painters and tell us who are they? How many among these men are poets (makers), possessing the faculty to create, the greatest among the gifts with which Providence has endowed the mind of man? Say how many there are, count up what they have done, and see what in the course of some nine and fwenty years has been done by this indefatigable man.

And his

What amazing energetic fecundity do we find in him! As a boy he began to fight for bread, has been hungry (twice a day we trust) ever since, and has been obliged to sell his wit for his bread week by week. wit, sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers as the fashionable painter's thin pinchbeck, who can live comfortably for six weeks, when paid for and painting a portrait, and fancies his mind prodigiously occupied all the while. There was an arist in Paris, an artist hairdresser, who used to be fatigued and take restoratives after inventing a new coiffure. By no such gentle operation of head-dressing has Cruikshank lived time was (we are told so in print) when for a picture with thirty heads in it he was paid three guineas

- a poor week's pittance truly, and a dire week's labor. We make no doubt that the same labor would at present bring him twenty times the

sum; but whether it be ill paid or charge of ingratitude, the startingwell, what labor has Mr. Cruikshank's post from which we set out, perhaps been! Week by week, for thirty we had better conclude. The reader years, to produce something new; will perhaps wonder at the highsome smiling offspring of painful la- flown tone in which we speak of bor, quite independent and distinct the services and merits of an indifrom its ten thousand jovial brethren; vidual, whom he considers a humin what hours of sorrow and ill-health ble scraper on steel, that is wonderto be told by the world, "Make us fully popular already. But none of laugh or you starve- Give us fresh us remember all the benefits we owe fun; we have eaten up the old, and him; they have come one by one, are hungry." And all this has he one driving out the memory of the been obliged to do to wring laugh- other; it is only when we come to ter day by day, sometimes, perhaps, examine them all together, as the out of want, often certainly from ill-writer has done, who has a pile of health or depression to keep the books on the table before him a fire of his brain perpetually alight: heap of personal kindnesses from for the greedy public will give it no George Cruikshank (not presents, if leisure to cool. This he has done, you please, for we bought, borrowed, and done well. He has told a thou- or stole every one of them) that we sand truths in as many strange and feel what we owe him. Look at one of fascinating ways; he has given a thou- Mr. Cruikshank's works, and we prosand new and pleasant thoughts to nounce him an excellent humorist. millions of people; he has never used Look at all: his reputation is increased his wit dishonestly; he has never, in by a kind of geometrical progression; all the exuberance of his frolicsome hu- as a whole diamond is a hundred times mor, caused a single painful or guilty more valuable than the hundred blush: how little do we think of the splinters into which it might be broextraordinary power of this man, and ken would be. A fine rough English how ungrateful we are to him! diamond is this about which we have been writing.

Here, as we are come round to the

JOHN LEECH'S PICTURES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER.*

WE, who can recall the consulship and long pointing quivering fingers; of Plancus, and quite respectable, old- there was little Prince Arthur (Northfogyfied times, remember, amongst cote) crying, in white satin, and bidother amusements which we had ding good Hubert not put out his as children, the pictures at which eyes; there was Hubert crying; we were permitted to look. There there was little Rutland being run was Boydell's Shakspeare, black and through the poor little body by ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum bloody Clifford; there was Cardinal Northcotes, straddling Fuselis! there Beaufort (Reynolds) gnashing his were Lear, Oberon, Hamlet, with teeth, and grinning and howling destarting muscles, rolling eyeballs, moniacally on his deathbed (a picture * Reprinted from "The Quarterly Review," No. 191, Dec. 1854, by permission of Mr. John Murray.