The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-27 00:00:00

GREAT TE

THE Loss OF THE BLOCKADE RUNNER LELIA.—
LIVERPOOL, Thursday.—The melancholy loss of the block-
ade runner Lelia, off this port on Saturday evening, 14th
inst., has been made the subject of a Board of Trade in-
quiry, and to-day Captain Harris, R.N., and Captain Baker,
R.N., nautical assessors, together with Mr. Raffles,
inquiry stipen-
diary magistrate, commenced an into the matter.
Mr. Hamill,who appeared on behalf of the Board of Trade,
stated that the Lelia was a paddle steamer, clinker-built,
with a steel frame and one deck. Her gross tonnage was
640 tons, and her registered tonnage 431 tons. She had
two engines of 300-horse power. She left Liverpool at 930
a.m. on the 14th instant, in charge of Captain Thomas B.
Skinner. Her crew consisted of 49 hands, all told, and she
had on board a Cork -and a Liverpool pilot, together with
eight passengers. She had on board 85 tons dead weight,
and 460 tons cargo. The barometer was very low and fall-
ing, and a strong gale blew from the north-west, and when
she passed the Crosby Lightship the sea was breaking over
her. After passing the North-west Lightship she shipped
a great deal of water which caused her to settle by the
head, and the captain considered it desirable to turn back
for Liverpool. She soon lost her steerage way, but by the
assistance of a sail her head was brought round towards
Liverpool. After proceeding for a few miles she sank
deeper in the water, and her hatches burst open. The en-
gines were (then stopped and the boats ordered out, of
which only two got safely away, the others being capsized.
The other two when they reached the North-west Light-
ship also capsized, and only 12 persons were rescued-37
of the crew, 8 passengers, and 2 pilots being amongst the
drowned. Mr. Hartnup, of the Liverpool Observatory,
stated that at midnight on the 13th the barometer stood at
28 55, and next morning at half-past Bit was 28 34. The
case was adjourned until to-morrow.
• REYNARD IN A FIK.—On Monday evening a fox
strolled into the farm-yard of Mr. James Meagher, near
Killenaule, and seeing the door of the fowl house open,
made towards it, and safely ensconced himself inside. The
fowls, of course, were driven in there at nightfall, and fell
an easy prey to Master Reynard, who enjoyed himself for
the night at their expense. Mr. Meagher's daughter opened
the fowl house door next morning, and, discovering the un-
welcome visitor, closed it again on him, and gave the alarm
to her father, who went in and found the remains of the
fowls strewn about, and Master Reynard looking com-
placently on from the corner. He is held in custody, await-
ing an opportunity of delivering him up to the tender
mereiee of the Tipperary gunt.—Tipperary Free Prem

" The Worship of Bacchus,"
Painted and Etched by George Cruikshank.

Published by William Tweedie, 337, Strand.
George Cruikshank has, long since, risen, by the
natural development of his genius, from the Carica-
turist to the Moralist. As a Caricaturist he was for
years—nay, he is still to tliis hour, when we come to
look back upon his countless grotesque productions—
j ust simply incomparable. Beyond all the coarse vulgar
Rowlandsons, beyond the gaudy Gilrays, the fantas-
tic Bunburys, and the evanescently humorous H.
B.'s that ever, with pencil-point, tickled past genera-
tions into laughter ! A portfolio of comical cuts by
George Cruikshank will settle that point any day—
by its inevitable appeal to the risibility of those who
venture gravely to examine it, by way of testing the
potency of this Lord Paramount in the realms of the
Ridiculous. But the rarer, and later, and greater,
and far loftier powers of the same extraordinary
artist in his capacity as a pictorial Moralist—powers
often incidentally indicated, whenever an opportu-
nity may be said to have offered itself to this
end even in his earlier productions—we have ,
to their fullest extent at least, seen manifested, com-
paratively speaking, only of late years ! To be plain,
let us say at once—since the date when George
Cruikshank became, heart and soul, hand and brain,
with all the force of his gehius and all the energy of
his ambition, one of the most devoted, and certainly
also one of the very foremost advocates of Total
Abstinence, one of the most prominent and gifted
among all the champions of the cause of Tempe-
rance. After the Great Apostle of Temperance,
Father Theobald Mathew, we know of no man who
has given himself up more thoroughly or more con-
scientiously to the furtherance of that good cause
than George Cruikshank. He has given himself up
to it so thoroughly and so conscientiously, that he has
long ago lived down the derision with whichhis devo-
tion to it was first of all greeted, so very plentifully
and pertinaciously. Even those who cannot for the
life of them recognise to this day (any more than we
can ourselves, for example) the necessity insisted
upon by all the more advanced Teetotallers, men
like Gough or like Cruikshank—that itis the duty of
everyone, alike, old and young, male and female, to
pledge themselves, for once and for ever, to a life of
total abstinence from the consumption of fermented
liquor—even those who look upon the advocacy ofTee-
totalism as common sense surely ought to look upon
the advocacy of that or of any other pretended
panacea, as a sort of craze, cannot by possibility
do otherwise than regard with respect the persistent
advocacy of the principles of Total Abstinence (as
a means for the prevention, or at any rate for the
diminution, of crime) by a champion of that philan-
thropic cause, such as George Cruikshank ! But, of
philanthropic champions, " such as George Cruik-
shank," there are but few indeed ! They come but
once in a century, but once in an age, rara nantes
in gurgite vasto ! Meaning by this—that when they
do come, they go on " swimmingly." As, for
instance—in his capacity as a pictorial Moralist, as
a practical Philanthropist, as an advocate of Tee-
totalism, as a champion of Temperance—George
Cruikshank has done, of late years, and not a doubt
about it. Whether with advantage to himself as a mere
mercantile enterprise maybe very possibly questioned.
But, beyond any question at all, with the happiest
results in the way of developing his rare and in some
respects matchless powers as an artist of excep-
tional and extraordinary genius. Instance this, his
two wonderful series—among the very finest things
that have ever come from his hand—his two really
wonderful series of pictUres entitled " The Bottle"
and " The Drunkard's Children." Pictures that, as
mere artistic creations, but, still more, as visible:en-
forcements of a moral coming home to vast multi-
tudes of the artist's fellow-creatures, are as im-
pressive, in their homely yet wonderfully pathetic
and tragic way, as some of the finest of the renowned
series of that true brother in Art and in Heart
of George Cruikshank—William Hogarth—as, let
us say, " The Rake's Progress," and " The
Harlot's Progress," as the famous " Marriage-
b. la Mode," or us " The Indnstrious and Idle Appren-
tices." Enforcing a moral admitting of yet wider
application than any of those, or than all of them
together, " The Bottle" and " The Drunkard's
Children," as drawn upon wood by George Cruik-
shank, command by the power of the genius that is
in them the fullness of our admiration. We
stint no words of praise when we look at
them. Costly enamels they are not—com-
mon prints they may even be called, slightingly,
by the collector, at fabulous prices, of gravures de
luxe—yet are they wonderful ! Wonderful by reason
of that tragic and pathetic power already alluded to
as in either series so marvellously manifested. The
hero of one is, if you will, a mere artisan or handi-
craftsman, in his fustian jacket. The locality depicted
is no better than a kitchen-like house-room or a
bare-walled prison cell. The heroine is in a draggled
Paisley shawl, her worn boots are unlaced, her battered
bonnet is askew. The instrument of destruction is no
jewelled dagger or gem-encrusted chalice, but,
instead of either, a common twopenny glass gin -
bottle. Yet, out of these and other similarly sordid,
squallid details, a story of human miseries shines
forth as pathetic and as tragic in its appalling truth-
fulness as the history of Orestes or of Clytemestra.
Crowning the labours of his life, however, with a yet
more ambitious undertaking, with a single master-
piece yet worthier of his reputation than any one of
the affecting drawings in either of those two
remarkable series of " The Bottle" or " The
Drunkard's Children"—George Cruikshank has
here, in this astonishingly eleborate etching
(far more, to our thinking, than in the ori-
ginal oil painting from which it has now been
copied upon metal by his own hand) produced what
must henceforth be regarded as, in truth, among
all his works his opus magnum, his chef d'ceuvres, his
masterpiece. " The Worship of Bacchus"—or—as
the artist calls it by a matter-Of-fact sub-title—
" The Drinking Customs of Society"—is a veritable
microcosm. It is the world-in-little, this modern
world of ours in all its phases—revealed to us at a
single glance in one marvellous engraving. It is not
a picture—it is, so to express it, a very congeries of
pictures. It is a sort of ganglionic representation
of the social nervous-system—very little of that
nervous system in a naturalor healthy condition—
almost all of it in a frightful state of disease—a
study of morbid anatomy, admitting almost of exa-
mination under the microscope. The Human Race,
as it is familiarly known to us, at these times,
in this country, amongst ourselves, we have
here displayed before us-, under all its aspects
—from infancy to senility—from the cradle to the
coffin—from the swaddling-clothes to the winding-
sheet—from the nursery to the cemetery ! The opu-
lent and the poverty-stricken—victims of atrophy
and of elephantiasis—Lamberts and Living Skele-
tons--the handsomest and the ugliest of both sexes
—divines and blasphemers—prattling innocents and
red-handed murderers—the profound philosopher
and the drivelling idiot—soldiers and sailors, lawyers
and doctors, pagan gods and potboys, raving maniacs
and whispering lovers ! Here they all are, in hundreds
upon hundreds of figures—apparently at the first
glance jumbled together in inextricable confusion,
but when they come to be looked at in their general
•
arrangement and disposition in groups, with a
readily traceable clue running, by a series of
wonderful involutions, all through the seemingly
inextricable labyrinth. *Upon the canvass of the
original oil-painting, George Cruikshank was, with
all his accustomed industry, labouring (as upon a la-
bour of love) for a whole twelvemonth—but for no
more than a twelvemonth. Altogether—starting with
his first sketch of his conception (the whole picture
presenting itself to his imagination, according to his
own account of it, at once, instanter)—altogether,
we say, the whole work, from the jotting down of
the first rough sketch until the completion of the
noble engraving of it now happily completed,
has occupied the Artist-Moralist during a
period of from two to three years in its produc-
tion. With the etching needle in his hand
George Cruikshank is always at his best. He is so,
here, in this strangely; almost bewilderingly elabo-
rated limning of Bacchus and his Worshippers.
Bacchus is here at the very centre, at the very sum-
mit of this comprehensive grouping of almost incal-
culable groups of his Worshippers ! Bacchus himself