says in the play, who is bidden by his master not to laugh while waiting at table—­“Don’t tell the story of Grouse in the Gun-room, master, or I can’t help laughing.”  Repeat that history ever so often, and at the proper moment, honest Diggory is sure to explode.  Every man, no doubt, who loves Cruikshank has his “Grouse in the Gun-room.”  There is a fellow in the “Points of Humor” who is offering to eat up a certain little general, that has made us happy any time these sixteen years:  his huge mouth is a perpetual well of laughter—­buckets full of fun can be drawn from it.  We have formed no such friendships as that boyish one of the man with the mouth.  But though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached his apogee some eighteen years since, it must not be imagined that such is really the case.  Eighteen sets of children have since then learned to love and admire him, and may many more of their successors be brought up in the same delightful faith.  It is not the artist who fails, but the men who grow cold—­the men, from whom the illusions (why illusions? realities) of youth disappear one by one; who have no leisure to be happy, no blessed holidays, but only fresh cares at Midsummer and Christmas, being the inevitable seasons which bring us bills instead of pleasures.  Tom, who comes bounding home from school, has the doctor’s account in his trunk, and his father goes to sleep at the pantomime to which he takes him.  Pater infelix, you too have laughed at clown, and the magic wand of spangled harlequin; what delightful enchantment did it wave around you, in the golden days “when George the Third was king!” But our clown lies in his grave; and our harlequin, Ellar, prince of how many enchanted islands, was he not at Bow Street the other day,* in his dirty, tattered, faded motley—­seized as a law-breaker, for acting at a penny theatre, after having wellnigh starved in the streets, where nobody would listen to his old guitar?  No one gave a shilling to bless him:  not one of us who owe him so much.

     * This was written in 1840.

We know not if Mr. Cruikshank will be very well pleased at finding his name in such company as that of Clown and Harlequin; but he, like them, is certainly the children’s friend.  His drawings abound in feeling for these little ones, and hideous as in the course of his duty he is from time to time compelled to design them, he never sketches one without a certain pity for it, and imparting to the figure a certain grotesque grace.  In happy schoolboys he revels; plum-pudding and holidays his needle has engraved over and over again; there is a design in one of the comic almanacs of some young gentlemen who are employed in administering to a schoolfellow the correction of the pump, which is as graceful and elegant as a drawing of Stothard.  Dull books about children George Cruikshank makes bright with illustrations—­there is one published by the ingenious and opulent Mr. Tegg.  It is entitled “Mirth and Morality,” the mirth being, for the most part, on the side of the designer—­the morality, unexceptionable certainly, the author’s capital.  Here are then, to these moralities, a smiling train of mirths supplied by George Cruikshank.  See yonder little fellows butterfly-hunting across a common!  Such a light, brisk, airy, gentleman-like drawing was never made upon such a theme.  Who, cries the author—­