The Sun.
London, England, 1870-12-31 00:00:00

THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.

Recent accounts froin the Pacific state that some
ships which cruised in the Arctic had got near the
supposed situation of the Pole. It was predicted that
a whaler would be the first to go through the long-
sought-for west passage which had cost so many lives
and so much money. The San Francisco Bulletin
mentions an interesting circumstance in connection
with this subject. One of the whale ships in the
harbour of Honolulu lately captured a whale
in the Arctic Seas which had a harpoon in
its carcase. The curious thing was that
this harpoon belonged to a ship which was then
cruising in the northern seas, on the other side of
the Continent, and it was evident therefore that the
whale had passed from one open sea to the other by
way of the pole. He must have found open water,
and it seems therefore that the Polar Sea is navigable
for whales. This fact is one of great interest, though it
does not follow that the same track could be followed
by ships.
COUNT ALVENSLEBEN AND HIS MERRY MEN.

A brilliant Christmas treat, offered to the soldiers
of the 2nd Landwehr Guard, now quar-
tered at Fontenay-le-Fleury, by their Captain,
Count von Alvensleben, has afforded a con-
temporary an opportunity of censuring the gravities,
and wall of distinction customarily reared
between English officers and soldiers. The 2nd
Landwehr Guard was at the siege of Strasburg, and
at that time it was well known that there were among
them fathers of seven thousand and three Prussian
children. How many of those children are now
orphans Heaven knows, but Count Alvensleben per-
mitted no sad memories to mar the merriment of the
r gimental Christmas, and so the banquet was given,
and officers and men quaffed from the same bowls,
as they never would have done in the British army.
Th,sre were speeches from the Major and the Captain

and from the non-commissioned officers. There was
nnno of that " cold kindness" our officers usually
display to their men. "Well, my men, I hope rou
are all comfortable," is the most the rank and file at
their festivals can expect from them. Our con-.
temporary says it is the old story, after
all, of the British soldier who performed
a deed of heroism before Sebastopol. Had he
b:!en a Frenchman, he would have been enrolled in
the Legion of Honour. Had he been a German, his
Ge:teral would have asked him to dinner, and his
King would have decorated him with the Iron Cross.
He was an .Englishman; so Lord .Raglan sent
for the man to his tent, .and gave him a five pound
note.

GEORGE ORUIKSHANK'S TABLE-BOOK.
The Messrs. Bell and Daldy, of York-street, Covent
Garden, are laying us under very considerable obligations.
Their republication of the etchings of George Cruikshank
are treasures of art for which we are nothing less than
grateful. Already we have taken occasion to commend
to public notice the reissue of Cruikshank's " Omnibus,"
edited more than a quarter of a century ago by Laman
Blanchard. And now we have to welcome the reprint of
the fainous " Table-Book " of George Cruikshank, edited
by Gilbert Abbott 3 Beckett. Both Laanan Blanchard
and Gilbert li Beckett are long since gone from
the world, but the great artist whose master-
pieces adorn both the " Table Book " and the
" Omnibus," is still happily amongst us in vigorous health,
and with all the vivacity of his rare genius yet undiminished.
There is a foolish notion among some: people who are more
familiar with the name of George Cruikshank than with
his most remarkable productions, that his powers are
mainlyand principally those of a caricaturist. Incom-
parable in many respects though he is as a caricaturist,
that bizarre faculty of caricaturing is very far indeed
from being his chief peculiarity or characteristic. He
began as a caricaturist. While he was yet the mere
stripling his audacious pencil turned into ridicu •
the freaks and follies, the whims and odditie:
of the salient persons and personages of the
then generation. What Gilray and ROwland,
son had done at their very best and maturest, he sur-
passed,- off hand, in his hot youth, with inimitable
comi-
cality, and without an atom of their coarseness. " The
Political House that Jack Built " and tha wonderful
book called "Life in London," recounting ~he adventures
of Tom and Jerry, of Corinthian Tom and Jerry Juniper
and Bob Logic, are instances of the sure aim with which
the young artist-adventurer shot folly as it flew, whether
in the back slums or in the gilded saloons of the metropo-
lis, among the cracksmen and cadgers of the East-end, or
among the princes and peers, the courtiers and statesmen
of Whitehall and Westminster. A political satirist lilro-
William Hone, a flash scribe like Pierce Egan,
penned the letterpress that accompanied the radiant,
laughter-moving illustrations of George Cruikshank.
Even then, however, in the midst of his pictorial drolleries
there was a serious purpose underlying the work of the
young draughtsman that more than once made him at
variance with the more experienced authors with whom
he was for the moment associated. The charge directed
against Hone, then an old man, was one imputing to him
the guilt of endeavouring to promote sedition and dis-
seminate blasphemy. Charges of that kind were never
for an instant dreamt of as applicable to the almost tyro-
hand, then squandering grotesque woodcuts on the fly-leaf
squibs and acrid pamphlets of the veter :n bookseller.
'Pierce Egan, again degenerated, often and often, in his
harum-scarum narrative of what might be called the
Tom-and-Jeremiad, into the coarsest vulgarity, and occa-
sionally into the most flagrant indecorum. But we
believe it is literally the fact, though a fact hitherto not in
the least known to the public at large, that so grave was
the morality of the whole design of that book as projected
by young George Cruikshank, that in his' original draught
of the frontispiece to the serial story, the title of the work,
as sketched in by his hand, ran thus :

LIFE IN LONDON

DEATH.

Caricature, however (reverting here to what we have already
been insisting upon) caricature so far from being the sum
and substance of the genius of George Cruikshank is, in
some respects, the least worthy of notice among all its
various and multiform manifestations. Perhaps, for the sake
of emphasising our meaning, we somewhat exag;erate in
putting the case thus emphatically. But, at any rate, we
are ourselves perfectly convinced of this—that George
Cruikshank's pOwers as an artist are far more remarkable
in the delineation not only of the grotesque, and the weird,
and the eltrich, but at moments, and those are his highest
moments, of the wildly tragical and the profoundly
impressive. The creations of his pencil, at the same
time, are never pathetic. They are never simply beauti-
ful—that is, the forms and faces never are—the scenes and
landscapes being so, nevertheless, repeatedly. In the pour-
trhyal of the horrible, however, he often attains a certain
degree of sublimity. In illustration of our meaning, we
will content ourselves with simply directing attention to
one of the many remarkable etchings in the work now im-
mediately under notice—this noble volume of the "Table
Book." It fronts page 45, and is entitled "The Folly of
Crime." Albrecht Diirer, the master of the burin, never
produced such an etching. It is a pictorial sermon bitten
into copper by the aquafortis of genius. It has about
it a sublimity of horror. Crime, as a sort of Bill
Sikes in a fool's-cap-and-bells, having just per-
petrated a murder on the edge of a precipice,
red-handed and with the dripping knife in his grasp,
is clutching with his disengaged fingers at a bowl brim-
ming over with jewels writhing up at him in the form of
snakes, the bowl being carried on the head of a grinning
imp of blackness, who rises, on flames from the abyss, to
tempt the criminal through his crime to destruction.
As the ruffian, holding the knife in his right
hand grasps with the left at the glittering
lure lifted nearly within his reach, a ponderous
stone at the top of the precipice gives way beneath his feet,
and the wretch, with a yell of horror, is represented as
falling into the pit of everlasting fire. Evil spirits hover
above his head in the gloom and glare; mopping and mow-
ing at him with devilish derision. The grandeur of the
effect produced by this, is something marvellous when it is
borne in mind that it all comes from microscopic
touches with the point of a needle on the delicate film of
a varnished copper-plate. Surrounding this central group,
are ten minor ones, each a study both in art and morals,
representing the folly of Crime, hooded throughout by the
symbolic cap and bells. Turning, however, to other
pictures here given by George Cruikshank, what possibly can
be mare exquisitely delineative of human character than
his " Heads of the Table," opposite p. 117, or
more whimsical than his examples of " Clairvoyance "
opposite p. 21, or funnier than his pourtrayal
of Mussoo, opposite p. 186, as typical of " A
very good man, no doubt, but a bad sailor." The " Hor-
tible Bore," and the " Lion of the Party," too, opposite
page 140, are perfectly delicious in their absurdity. They
recall by their almost excruciating ridiculousness somo of
the earlier freaks of the same wonderfully humorous
pencil, as for example that of the soldier
in the days of pigtails complaining to his
commanding officer of the drummer who had
tied his veil so tight that he couldn't shut his eyes ! Or,
again, tlMt other, pictorially realising the ludicrous fancy
of Washington Irving about the little dog whose tail
curled so tight that it lifted him off his hind legs ! Re-
membering the dainty illustrations to the " Fairy
Library", the fantastic limnings to the " Stories
by the Brothers Grimm," the delectable absurdity
of the grotesque outlines depicting the " Ballad of Lord
Bateman "—remembering the masterly etchings to
Charles Dickens's " Oliver Twist," and the many inimi-
table pictures contributed by the same master-hand to
so many of Harrison 'Ainsworth's criminal, or
historical, or fanciful romances, from "Rookwood "
to the " Miser's Daughter," from " Windsor Castle " to
" Jack Shepherd "—remembering the Hogarth-lSke series
of " The Bottle," and its equally powerful sequel, called
the " Drunkard's Children"—bearing in mind the
" Comic Almanack," enlivening by its innocent
mirth so many a byegone Christmas time, we
cannot, in closing our notice of this most welcome
reprint of the admirable " Table Book," refrain from
offering, on this New Year's Eve,in the name, and on behalf
of two generations of children, big and little, the earnest,
grateful, affectionate greeting and good wishes of the
season to that dear friend of us all, rare George Cruikshank !

A. MAN FOUND DEAD IN THE SNOW.—At about
five o'clock on Thursday morning, three workmen found
the dead body of a man, whose name is not known, partly
covered with snow, in a lane in Upper Gornal, near
Dudley. The body was removed to the Dudley Union,
to await the coroner's inquest. The deceased was seen at
eleven o'clock on-Thursday, night, in a state of intoxica-
tion, inquiring his way to 13elston.

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very thin evening beverage.—Advt.

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