138. But I think we shall better understand what we ought of the nature
of Modesty, and of her opposite, by taking a simple instance of both, in
the practice of that art of music which the wisest have agreed in
thinking the first element of education; only I must ask the reader's
patience with me through a parenthesis.
Among the foremost men whose power has had to assert itself, though with
conquest, yet with countless loss, through peculiarly English
disadvantages of circumstance, are assuredly to be ranked together, both
for honor, and for mourning, Thomas Bewick and George Cruikshank. There
is, however, less cause for regret in the instance of Bewick. We may
understand that it was well for us once to see what an entirely keen and
true man's temper, could achieve, together, unhelped, but also unharmed,
among the black bans and wolds of Tyne. But the genius of Cruikshank has
been cast away in an utterly ghastly and lamentable manner: his superb
line-work, worthy of any class of subject, and his powers of conception
and composition, of which I cannot venture to estimate the range in their
degraded application, having been condemned, by his fate, to be spent
either in rude jesting, or in vain war with conditions of vice too low
alike for record or rebuke, among the dregs of the British populace.
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