THE 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE, 



POLITICS, LITERATURE, AND THE BELLES LETTRES. 



VOL. XV.] FEBRUARY, 1833. [No. 86. 



LIFE AND GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK; 



WITH HIS PORTRAIT (BY HIMSELF), AUTOGRAPH, AND ILLUSTRATIONS 

 OF HIS TALENT AT VARIOUS PERIODS OF HIS CAREER. 



IN this article we foresee that we shall be provokingly parentheti- 

 cal and divaricating. Our anachronisms will be numerous, yet, in 

 the main we shall be perfectly correct. On such a subject as the Life 

 and Genius of George Cruikshank, the broadest latitude of treatment 

 will, we trust, be allowed : with all the droll vagaries of his pencil, 

 t( reeling in tipsy glee " before our mind's eye, it is impossible to go 

 gravely to work. An apparition of one of his grotesque imps the 

 little fellow who is trying on the breeches in one of the German 

 story cuts is visibly capering after our pen, throwing hairs in its 

 path, and occasionally grinning with all-conquering gravity aye 

 grinning with gravity, as Liston does now and then, but to a degree 

 a thousand times less provocative grinning, we repeat, through 

 every aperture in our zig-zag manuscript. He points at dozens of 

 droll figures in every sentence ; each letter by his magic influence 

 seems transposed into an overwhelming sketch of personal peculi- 

 arity ; we unconsciously depict fine oddities of form or face which 

 remind us of our friends, and make us " crow like chanticleer," 

 actually against our free-will ; and every line is a rank of funny in- 

 dividuals, all of whom we know, but neither of whom we ever 

 thought ridiculous until now. That O in now is heart-breaking : it 

 contains a portrait of a dear bald friend, who wears his head on one 

 side. This leads us to observe that the characters perpetrated by 

 Cruikshank are frequently indelible. Many of his creatures are 

 etched by a mere glance, on the material of which memory is com- 

 posed. They occur to you in dreams, and you are rouzed from 

 ee the arms of Morpheus " when you have not a moment to spare, 

 by your own vociferous and egregious laughter. This is unpleasant 

 and renders you dissatisfied with yourself, for you very well recollect 

 having been tickled into undignified or untimely cachinations by the 

 same thing, two or three dozen times before. 



There is another point worth noticing (the German imp is gone, 

 but a host of funny indigenous fairies, created by George, are now 

 dancing round our quill as though it were a may-pole) : it immedi- 

 ately occurs to a man, whether he have flourished in the Glasgow 

 goose-market, or the London House of Lords, that the faces and 



M. M. No. 86. K 



