The aggrieved humorist, who had a fairly founded opinion of his own gifts and reputation, and whose imaginative faculties were always abnormally fervid, was still full of fight. Dickens had been at rest for two years, but his biographer, John Forster, was in the flesh; as was W. Harrison Ainsworth, Cruikshank's colleague and partner of the 'thirties' and 'forties,' so that it is not surprising to find the artist in 1872--then an octogenarian veteran--entering fiercely upon a seemingly Quixotic campaign against the before-time literary colleagues of his prime era of artistic production, the period when his picturesquely dramatic fancy evolved _The Parish Boys Progress, The Miser's Daughter_, and similarly popularly endorsed emanations of his hand and brain.
It was ever the 'great George's' grievance that in his later years the public assumed him to be his own descendant of the first or even second generation. It was avowedly as a protest against this fairly natural assumption that G. Cruikshank had carried out his famous and successful '_Exeter Hall Exhibition_' in 1863. Under the circumstances related, finding his well-recognised name and strongly-marked personality steadily ignored or obscured, and smarting under intolerable injustices and accumulated grievances--alike real and imaginary--the vigorous genius of the opening of the eighteenth century, fighting hero as he was constitutionally, re-entered the lists to vindicate his name and fame; and, as he might well have foreseen, had not the burning sense of unmerited wrongs obscured his perceptions, quickly had 'a pretty quarrel' on his hands, his powers of onslaught hampered from the circumstance that his present weapon was the pen, whereas his accustomed arm for offence and defence was the etching-point, the weapon he had been accustomed to wield with fine incisive spirit in earlier conflicts. In the present tourney G. C. was confessedly under the manifest disqualification of being 'out of his element.'
Open as daylight, 'a knight _sans peur et sans reproche_'--he gallantly sought to unhorse his wily antagonist. The quarrel has left its record in print, in pamphlet form, now reckoned _rarissime_:--
A statement of facts by the Artist, George Cruikshank, proving that the Distinguished Author, Mr. W. Harrison Ainsworth, is _labouring under a singular delusion_ with respect to the origin of The Miser's Daughter, _The Tower of London_, etc.