The humour of George Cruikshank deserves separate consideration, because it is essentially the man himself. Despite a technical excellence so peculiar that, according to the author of Number 1 of "Bursill's Biographies," the engraver Thompson "kept a set of special tools, silver-mounted and with ivory handles, sacred for" Cruikshank's designs, his sense of beauty was not eyes to him. Women he usually saw as lard or bone, and this strange perversity of vision and art differentiates him from the moderns by more than time. For instance, the women presented by Mr S. D. Ehrhart and O'Neill Latham (a lady-artist), to mention only two modern humorists, materialise an idea of beauty in humour which was as foreign to Cruikshank as apple-blossom to a pomme de terre.

Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from implication; it was self-sufficient, vocal in line and curve, percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous when he called a town Hole-cum-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas Hood, who was humorous when he announced that

He was in that "world of wit" where they kept a nutmeg-grater on the table in order to say, when a great man was mentioned, "there's a grater." He was in a world where professional humour was perversely destructive of faith in imagination.

But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered. Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is victoriously beneath contempt and above worship.

Cruikshank was a humorist who could laugh coarsely, broadly, selfishly, merrily, well. Coarseness was natural to him, or he would not have selected for a (suppressed) illustration in "Italian Tales" (1824) a subject which mingles tragedy with the laughter of Cloacina. One can only say that humour, like a sparrow, alights without regard to conventions. The majority can laugh with Rabelais, though they have not the idealism which created Theleme. Jokes that annoy the nose are no longer tolerable in art, but in Cruikshank's time so wholesome a writer as Captain Marryat thought Gillray worth imitating in his translation of disease into terms of humour. Hence The Headache and The Cholic (1819), signed with an anchor (Captain Marryat's signature) and etched by Cruikshank, follow The Gout by Gillray (1799). The reader may well ask if the sight of a hideous creature sprawling on a man's foot is humour according to my definition. I can only presume that in what Mr Grego calls the "port-wine days," Gillray's plate was like sudden sympathy producing something so absolutely suitable for swearing at, that patients smiled in easy-chairs at grief.

Broad humour has an eye on sex. The uncle who, on being asked at dinner for an opinion on a lady's costume, observes that he must go under the table to form it, is a type of the broad humorist in modern life. Cruikshank had none of that tenderness for women's clothes which in modern representation removes altogether the pudical idea from costume and substitutes the idea of witchery by foam of lace and coil of skirts. His guffaws and those of Captain Marryat and J. P***y, whose invention exercised his needle, at the Achilles in Hyde Park, in 1822, are vexatious enough to make one wish to restore all fig-leaves to the fig-forest. It is not possible for a man with an indefinite and inexpressible feeling for woman to laugh like that. Hearing his laughter we know that Cruikshank's humour about woman must always be obvious.

It is, and yet it is not measured by the height of her hat as he depicted it in 1828, when he contributed to that long series of jokes which culminate in Jan Linse's girl at the theatre who will not take her hat off because, "mamma, if I put it in my lap I can't see myself." In the annals of absurdity is there anything more worthy to be true at the expense of the British Navy than Cruikshank's picture of the chambermaid confronted with the leg which she has mistaken for a warming-pan? Another woman, whom Cruikshank compels us to remember by force of humorous idea, is to be found in Points of Humour (1823). She is the doxy in "The Jolly Beggars," sitting on the soldier's lap. We see her while she holds up

The soldier has lost an arm and a leg, but his face is the face of infatuation and her lips are the lips of lust. The toes of her bare feet express pleasure longing for ecstasy. I write seriously: they are very eloquent toes. There is a fire near the amorous pair, and the dog basking by it, uninterested in them, is a token of peace unpried upon. Her left hand grasps a pot of whiskey. She is in heaven. Indeed there is too much heaven in the picture for me to laugh at it. Behind the incongruity which clamours for laughter is the magic of drink reshaping in idea a half-butchered man and reviving the fires of sex.

After this we glide politely from women as they blossom in the drollery of Cruikshank. Jenny showers "pills, bolus, julep and apozem too" on the physicians who would have exenterated her (vide "The New Bath Guide," 1830). The "patent washing machines" remember their sex at the approach of Waverley (vide "Landscape-Historical Illustrations," 1836), and remind us that in 1810 T. Tegg published a less refined Scotch Washing over the signature of Cruikshank. Nanse sheds the light of a candle upon the corpse of the cat compressed by a heavy sitter (vide "The Life of Mansie Wauch," 1839). The squaw "in glass and tobacco-pipes dress'd" evokes lyrical refusal from the Jack who has sworn to be constant to Poll (vide "Songs, Naval, and National, of the late Charles Dibdin," 1841). Lady Jane Ingoldsby smilingly—with lifted hand for note of interjection—allows her attention to be directed to the half of her drowned husband which was not "eaten up by the eels" (vide "Bentley's Miscellany," 1843). William's widow contemplates with fury the sailor upon whose nose has alighted her dummy babe (vide "The Old Sailor's Jolly Boat," 1844); and General Betsy gobbles her novel in a chaotic kitchen, oblivious of the horror of her mistress (vide "The Greatest Plague in Life," 1847).

In all this pageant of absurdity is wanting the special touch which surprises the spectator. The emotions of the women are rendered as with a consciousness that they are a merchandise of art and "in stock."

The caricaturist of mankind, to immortalise his work, must haunt us with physiognomy. Thus HonorÉ Daumier in Le Bain Chaud haunts us with the burlesque heroism in the face of a man about to sit down in water which pretends to scald him. Sir John Tenniel haunts us with the complacent slyness of Dizzy bringing in the hot water for February 1879 to that distrustful lie-abed John Bull. Charles Dana Gibson haunts us with the charmed vanity of an aged millionairess sitting up, bald and bony, in a regal bed, with her coffee-cup arrested in hand by the fulsome puff of her person and adornments read to her by her pretty maid. George Du Maurier haunts us with the freezing question in the face of the knight who has permitted himself to crack an empty eggshell on the "Fust o' Hapril."

How does Cruikshank stand as a creator of humorous physiognomy? The answer is not from a trumpet. He invented crowds of people who seem merely the fruits of formulÆ, and in comedy the simple application of the science of John Caspar Lavater is weak in effect, since laughter is tributary to surprise.

Compare Daumier's man in hot water with Cruikshank's Trotting (a similar subject in "The Humourist," vol. iii., 1820), and one sees the difference between mere Lavaterism and emotion detected with delight. Compare Daumier's facetious ruffian asking the time of the man he intends to rob with almost any ruffian in Cruikshank's humorous gallery and one can only say that, in effect, one drew him to haunt the mind; the other to bore it. One ruffian surpasses his type without deserting it; the other is the type itself. Here and there, however, Cruikshank creates an individual who is more than his type without being divergent from it. Do we find such a one in the serious eater in Hope ("Phrenological Specimens," 1826), in whose bone, already as innutritious as a toothbrush, his dog confides for sustenance? I think so, because I see him when I think of appetite as of tragedy. Humour accepts him in deference to her idea that there is nothing that cannot be laughed at, and she is worthy of deification when she goes down, down, down, laughing where even her worshippers are mute.

I doubt if Cruikshank twice excelled in respect of authenticity in humour the host and guest whom he presented in the reproduced subjects from Heads of the Table (1845). Humour ascends from his Hope to them as to a heaven of animals from a purgatorial region. That even what I have called Cruikshank's Lavaterism can be amusing is proved by his portrait of Socrates at the moment before he said "rain follows thunder."

We owe probably to Cruikshank's inveterate love of punning the capital study in disdain as provoked by envy exhibited in one of the lions in The Lion of the Party (1845). Of his animal humour I shall have more to say: these lions are more human than many of his representations of homo sapiens; they need no footline.

The student of Cruikshank's humour must follow him through many volumes in which his pencil is subservient to literature; and in this journey he will often open his mouth to yawn rather than to laugh. The professional humorist, like the professional poet, is the prey of the Irony that sits up aloft; and Cruikshank was not an exception. Indeed one may say of some of his crowded caricatures that one has to wade through them. In the humorous illustration of literature his work is seldom risible, but it usually pleases by a combination of neatness and energy.

Despite his intense egotism he ventured to associate his art with the works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron, Scott, Dickens, Goldsmith, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Le Sage, and Cervantes. These names evoke a world of humorous life in which is missing, to the knowledge of the spectator, only the humour which shines in jewels of brief speech and rings in the heavenly onomatopoeia of absurdity. Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde are decidedly not of that world, though Raspe, by a freak of irony, graced his brutal pages with lines which the snark-hunter might have coveted, and Smollett's elegance in burlesque gravity is dear to an admirer of "The Importance of being Earnest."

For Shakespeare, Cruikshank seems to have felt a tender reverence. As early as 1814 we find him drawing Kean as Richard III., and Hamlet for J. Roach, the publisher of "The Monthly Theatrical Reporter"; 1815 is the date of a lithograph of Juliet and the Nurse published by G. Cruikshank and otherwise unmemorable; in 1827 he made one of his "Illustrations of Time," a vivacious portrait of Puck about to girdle the earth. In 1857-8 came the Cruikshankian series of etchings for R. B. Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff." This series exhibits great skill and conscientiousness; the critic of "The Art Journal" (July 1858) was able to suppose them "actual scenes." Falstaff has a serene and majestic face; his bulk is too dignified for the scales of a showman; one understands his Æsthetic abhorrence of a "mountain of mummy." Humour cancels his debt of shame for cowardice, and well would it have been if that rebellious Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, the original of Falstaff, could have looked into Falstaff's roguish eyes as he reclined on the field of Shrewsbury and peeped at his freedom from all the bigotries which threaten and terrify mankind. Cruikshank unconsciously imparts this thought, but it is with conscience that he is amiable to Falstaff, who, begging, hiding, shamming, "facing the music," and dying, is his pet and ours by grace of his refined and beautiful art.

We meet Cruikshank's Falstaff again in the drawing entitled The First Appearance of William Shakespeare on the Stage of the Globe (January 1863). Here we have the Élite of Shakespeare's creations in a throng about his cradle. Titania and Oberon are at its foot, as though he owed them birth; Touchstone and Feste try to catch a gleam of laughter from his eyes; Prospero waves his wand; Othello gazes with hate at the guarded enchanter, more potent than Prospero, who is to bring his woe to light; Romeo and Juliet have eyes only for each other. Richard the Third is there, sadder than Lear; the witches who prophesied the steps of Macbeth towards hell gesticulate hideously by their cauldron; and Falstaff, cornuted as becomes the "deer" of Mrs Ford, smiles at a vessel that reminds him, as do all vessels, of sack and metheglins. There is charm and beauty of ensemble in this picture, which I have described from a coloured drawing in the South Kensington Museum made by its designer in 1864-5. I know nothing that suggests more forcibly the fatefulness hidden in the inarticulate stranger who appears every day in the world without a history and without a name.

Smollett and Fielding, both novelists who present humour as the flower of annoyance and catastrophe, were hardly to be congratulated when Cruikshank innocently showed them up in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832). In both the reader of literature discerns a gentleman. In Fielding he sees a radiant man of the world from whom literary giants who succeeded him drew nutriment for ambition. Both Smollett and Fielding have heroines, and touch men in the nerve of sweetness, and fell them with love. But Cruikshank cared naught for their women, though he reproduced something equivalent to the charm of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives." When first he went to Smollett, it was for a Point of Humour (1824), which centres in an "irruption of intolerable smells" at dinner. The point pricked, as one may say, but it was blunt in effect compared with that of a later artist's drawing of Columbus and the Egg or that of Cruikshank's cook swallowing to order in Land Sharks and Sea Gulls (1838). The really vivid picture is recognised by a lasting imprint on a mind which is incapable of learning Bradshaw by heart, and Cruikshank's drawings for Smollett are reduced in my mind to Mrs Grizzle extracting three black hairs from Mr Trunnion, and his drawings for Fielding are reduced into the ruined face and rambling fat of Blear-eyed Moll.

Those who will may compare the Smollett of Rowlandson with that of Cruikshank. The comparison may determine whether a dog is funnier while being trodden on or immediately after, and shows the indifference of Rowlandson to his artistic reputation. Cruikshank's attempts to illustrate Goldsmith are few and, as a series, unsuccessful. The reproduced specimen is a fair example of his realistic method. It exhibits the blackguard's sense of absurdity in the Christian altruism which paralyses the nerves of the pocket—sensitive usually as the nerves of sex—and which tyrannises over the nerves of pride.

Fisher, Son, & Co., the publishers of Cruikshank's illustrations of the "Waverley" novels (1836-7-8), assumed "the merit of having been the first to illustrate the scenes of mirth, of merriment, of humour, that often sparkle" in these works. In "Landscape Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels" he supplied the comic plates; his Bailie Macwheeble rejoicing before Waverley, for chapter lxvi. of "Waverley," was the first etching done by him on steel. His "Waverley" etchings are characteristic works, sometimes brilliant in pattern or composition, occasionally ministering to a love of physiognomical ugliness which the small nurses of the dolls called "golliwoggs" can better explain than I. His predilection for the curious and uncanny is shown in some striking plates, including that in which he depicts the terror of Dougal and Hutcheon as they mistake the ape squatting on Redgauntlet's coffin for "the foul fiend in his ain shape."

Cruikshank's illustrations for "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron" (1824-5) are cuts which include such deplorable effects of bathos (e.g. Haidee saving Don Juan from her Father's wrath) that one has no heart to praise the rough vigour of Juan opposing the Entrance to the Spirit Room. A Byron illustrated by protected aborigines seems realisable after seeing these pictures. If anybody paid the artist for them it should have been Wordsworth; that they did not weigh on Cruikshank's conscience, we may infer from the fact that in 1833 he cheerfully caricatured Byron for "Rejected Addresses" as a gentleman in an easy-chair kicking the terrestrial globe.

We have already discussed the fruit of Cruikshank's association with Dickens. We have not, however, paid tribute to Cruikshank's capital etchings for "Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi," edited by Boz (1838). The portrait of the famous clown holding in his arms a hissing goose and a squeaking pig, while voluble ducks protrude their heads from his pockets and a basket of carrots and turnips afflicts his back, is extraordinarily funny.

Though Cruikshank's relations with Thackeray were far happier than with Dickens, they resulted in nothing important to his reputation. His etchings illustrating Thackeray's contributions to "The Comic Almanack" (1839-40) weary one with plain or uninteresting faces, though that which exhibits the expressive blubber-face of Stubbs, horsed for the birching earned by his usury, provokes an irrational smile which serves for praise. His illustrations to "A Legend of the Rhine" (Thackeray's contribution to "George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845) are not equal to Thackeray's drawings for "The Rose and the Ring" (1855).

In the world of humour one does not descend in moving from Thackeray to Charles James Lever. With Lever's own portrait of his hero to guide him, Cruikshank illustrated "Arthur O'Leary" (1844). Among his ten etchings in this novel is an amusing exhibition of Corpulence submitting to identification by measurement; it surpasses the scene by Du Maurier in which the tailor promises to be round in a minute if his customer will press one end of the tape-measure to his waist.

Cruikshank's ten etchings for "Gil Blas" (1833) are the works of an intelligent machine, which may be called humorous because it takes down the fact that Dame Jacintha held the cup to the Canon's mouth "as if he had been an infant." R. Smirke, R.A., with his sympathetic eye for flesh (as of a gardener for flowers) is obviously preferable to Cruikshank as Le Sage's illustrator, though our artist's Euphrasia is a dainty miss. Cruikshank's fifteen illustrations for "Don Quixote" (1833-34) are neat and for the most part uninspired renderings of pathological humour. Although it was within his ability to make a readable picture without words, he merely reminds one of the anecdote of the attack on the wind-mills. Compare the plate referred to with the painting on the same subject by Jose Moreno Carbonaro. Cruikshank's combatant is no more than a knight about to attack something—presumably a wind-mill. Carbonaro chooses the moment that exposes the knight as mad, futile, dismally droll, and we see him and his horse in the air, the latter enough to make Pegasus hiccup with laughter. Cruikshank's designs for "Don Quixote" compare favourably, however, with the audacious scratches which constitute most of his brother Robert's chronicle of the Knight of La Mancha (1824). The collector who affords a crown to buy the former designs should also acquire "Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote," by H. D. Inglis, with six etchings by George Cruikshank (1837). The etchings—three of which are perfect anecdotes—were evidently done con amore; but, good as they are, they were lucky if they satisfied an editor who believed Inglis's "New Gil Blas" to be "one of the noblest and most finished efforts in the line of pure imaginative writing that ever fell from the pen of any one man."

It would be a species of literary somnambulism to wander further in a path of bibliography where ideas must be taken as they come instead of being ideally chosen and grouped. There is this mischief in Cruikshank's fecundity, that it tends to convert even a fairly bright critic into a scolytus boring his way through a catalogue. We emerge from our burrowing more percipient than before of the speculative nature of the undertaking to illustrate illustrious works of imagination. Sinking in competitive humour is akin to drowning; for he who materialises images despatched to the mind's eye by literary genius incurs the risk of having his work not only excelled by images in the eyes of minds other than his own, but ignored in compliment to them. Fortunate, then, is Cruikshank in the fact that on the whole we do not regret the healthy industrialism which permitted him to illustrate so many examples of imaginative literature.

The reader to whom any appearance of digression is displeasing in art will now kindly believe that only a second has elapsed since he began the only complete paragraph of page 183. The scolytus is converted, and we return to our true viewpoint—the middle of a heterogeneous litter—and look for characteristics of Cruikshankian humour.

We have seen so much of Cruikshank's kingdom of supernature that it is scarcely necessary to revisit it. The reader will note, however, that the degradation of the terrible to the absurd is his chief humorous idea of supernature, and that he respects the seriousness of fairy tales. Not even the burlesque metaphors of Giambattista Basile—that monkey of genius among the euphuists—tempts him to ridicule the stories in "Il Pentamerone"; no one less than Milton can banish the ridiculous from his idea of Satan. A Satan who is a little lower than Punch, is he not more absurd than Man figured as a little lower than the angels? He is both more absurd and more satisfactory. Out of the folklore of Iceland and Wales and Normandy he comes to us outwitted by mortals who seem paradoxically to think that the Father of lies has a right to their adherence to the letter of their agreements with him. Out of Cruikshank's caricature he comes to us with a tail capable of delineating a whole alphabet of humour. The fire which he and his demons can live in without consumption becomes jocose. If you doubt it, compare Cruikshank's etching for Douglas Jerrold's story, "The Mayor of Hole-cum-Corner" (1842), with his etching, Sing old Rose and burn the Bellows in "Scraps and Sketches" (1828). The human-looking demon with his left leg in the flabbergasted mayor's fire is much funnier in effect than the negro sailor boiling the kettle over his wooden leg. Human terror at superiority over natural law is highly ludicrous when the superiority is evinced as though it were ordinary, negligible, and compatible with sociableness. We cannot now say of such humour that it is a revelation, though once it was brighter than all the fires of Smithfield. There are foes of peace which in Cruikshank's simplicity he thought of as good. For these, too, there is a Humour to keep them at bay, until Science delivers us from their evil by making them obsequious to all who see them.

When Humour pretends to drop from the supernatural to the commonplace, it—I cannot for the moment persuade myself to write he or she—is about to continue its most important mission, for it deserts a subject which is naturally laughable for one which is not; it goes from the supernatural to the commonplace. The supernatural is naturally laughable because the human animal instinctively laughs at that which at once transcends and addresses his intelligence, on a principle similar perhaps to that which Schopenhauer acted on when he smiled at the angle formed by the tangent and the circumference of a circle. At the commonplace, however, the human animal never spontaneously laughs. Its staleness is not dire to him; but negativeness is not good, and Cruikshank helps the commonplace to be his friend.

When we view the demeanour of Cruikshank towards the commonplace we are agreeably surprised by his agility and daring. For instance, take a book called "Talpa," by C. W. Hoskyns (1852). It is a narrative of agricultural operations, in the course of which the author says, "The worst-laid tile is the measure of the goodness and permanence of the whole drain, just as the weakest link of a chain is the measure of its strength." Cruikshank, not being in the mood for drawing a drain, depicts a watchdog who has broken his chain's weakest link and is enthusiastically rushing towards an intruder whose most bitable tissues are reluctantly offered to him in the attempt to scale a wall. The hackneyed metaphor thus obviously illustrated being valueless on the page where we find it, our smile is for the "cheek" of the artist in calling attention to it rather than for the humour of the drawing as an exhibition of funk and glee. Thus the "obvious" marries the obvious, and the result is what is called originality. Again, what is more commonplace in its effect on the mind than decoration as viewed on wall-paper, frames, and linoleum, and in all those devices which flatter Nature's alleged abhorrence of vacuum? It is unhealthy to observe their repetitiousness. Cruikshank, however, saw that to be amusing where the utmost demanded is an inoffensive filling of vacancy was to triumph against dulness in its own sanctum. Consequently in the decorations above and below the main designs in "The Humourist" (1819-20) an appropriate hilarity animates effects which do not frustrate the decorative idea of announcing the completeness of the pictures of which they are the crown and base. His treatment of title-pages is delightfully droll. Thus the title-page of "My Sketch Book" (1834) takes the form of a portrait of himself, with a nose like the extinguisher of a candlestick, directing the posing of the required capital letters on the shelves of a proscenium. On the title page of "The Comic Almanac" (1835) the letter ~L~ is a man sitting sideways with his legs stretched horizontally together, and on the title-page of "The Pentamerone" (1848) the polysyllable becomes the teeth of an abnormal king. Studies by Cruikshank in the South Kensington Museum (9950-~T~) show that he imagined the letter ~M~ as two Chinamen united by their pigtails, which form the ~V~ between the perpendiculars of that letter, and are also employed as a hammock. This play with the alphabet is exhibited as early as 1828 in The Pursuit of Letters, where all the letters in the word Literature flee, on legs as thin as the track of Euclid's point, from philomathic dogs, while their brethren ~A B C~ attempt to escape from three such babes as might have sprung from the foreheads of men made out of the dust of encyclopÆdias. As late as July 1874, in reply to a coaxing letter from George S. Nottage, we see Cruikshank making human figures of the letters of the word "Portraits."

We return now to the zoological humour which has flashed across these pages. In the United States the art of humanising the creatures of instinct to make them articulately droll has been practised with such success by Gus Dirks, J. S. Pughe, and A. Z. Baker, that if Noah's Ark is not too "denominational," it is there that we should seek the origin of their humour. Cruikshank, though he did re-draw William Clarke's swimming duck holding up an umbrella (in "Three Courses and a Dessert," 1830), achieved nothing so triumphantly zoological as the ostrich who swallowed her medicine but forgot to uncork the bottle containing it, or the porcupine who asked a barber for a shampoo, or the cat who discovered that her Thomas was leading a tenth life, or the elephant who wondered how the stork managed to convey him to his parents, or the beetle-farmer who mowed a hairbrush. Cruikshank, however, was in the Ark before them, and brought back enough humour resembling theirs to show what he missed, besides humour of a different kind which they do not excel. In "Scraps and Sketches" (1829) he preceded the Americans in the humour which makes the horse the critic of the motor-car, though not in that which seems to make the motor-car the caricaturist of the horse; and in the above-named publication he represents a dog in the act of prophesying cheap meat for the canine race. Again, in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) two elephants laugh together over a pseudopun on the word trunk.

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We are not, however, reminded of America by the inquiry printed below the elephant on the next page, which might well have surprised Lewis Carroll by resemblance more than all the works of Mr G. E. Farrow. Neither does America recognise the silence of her own laughter in those drawings in which Cruikshank caricatures humanity under zoological likenesses. His alderman realising Haynes Bayly's wish to be a butterfly in "My Sketch Book" (1835); his coleopteral beadle in "George Cruikshank's Omnibus" (1842), are simple attempts to make tours de force of what is rather obscurely called the obvious, and one realises that art can find itself strong in embracing feeble idea. The most striking of his zoological ideas is the effect of abnormal behaviour on human people. Witness in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) the "dreadful tail" unfolded in the dialogue: "Doth he woggle his tail?" "Yes, he does." "Then I be a dead mon!" One may also cite the horror of the diver at the rising in air of a curly and vociferous salmon from the dish in front of him (ibid.). Among all his drawings of animals (those for Grimm excepted) there is one etching which stands out as a technical triumph produced by a sense of irony. I refer to the etching entitled The Cat Did It! in "The Greatest Plague of Life" (1847). Fifteen pussies in a kitchen throw the crockery off the dresser, topple the draped clothes-horse into the fire, smash the window glass and devour the provisions. The scene is like a burlesque of one of its designer's etchings in Maxwell's "Irish Rebellion." It is unique.

We must not quit Cruikshank's zoological drawings without remarking on the curious inconsistency of his attitude towards animals. We find him both callous and tender. In illustrating "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" he chose (one assumes) to draw the Baron flaying the fox by flagellation; at any rate we have his wood-cut depicting the abominable operation; and in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832), poor Reynard, for the sake of a pun, is exhibited as "Tenant intail" of a spring-trap. Yet in "My Sketch Book" (1835) he presents us with frogs expostulating with small boys for throwing stones at them ("I pray you to cease, my little Dears! for though it may be sport to you, it is death to us"). Again, his canine reference to cats' meat, already mentioned, implies a heartlessness towards horses which is contradicted by his touching but not much prized etching The Knackers Yard, to be found in "The Voice of Humanity" (May 1831), in "The Melange" (1834), and in "The Elysium of Animals" (1836). Moreover, in "My Sketch Book" (1835) he severely exhibits human insensitiveness to the sufferings of quadrupeds in The Omnibus Brutes—qy. which are they? It is therefore clear that Cruikshank thought humanely about animals, though as a humorist he was irresponsible and gave woe's present to ease—its comicality. And before we write him down a vulgarian let us remember our share in his laughter at the absurdity of incarnations which confer tails on elemental furies and indecencies, and compel elemental importances and respectabilities to satisfy their self-love by ruinous grimaces and scaffoldings of adipose tissue.

In a comparison I have already associated Cruikshank with Lewis Carroll, who was systematically the finest humorist produced by England till his death in 1898. The most intensely comic thing ever wrought by the hand of Cruikshank is, I think, by the absolute perfection of its reasoning a priori, a genuine "carroll" in a minor key. It is the drawing in "Scraps and Sketches" (1832) in which, to a haughty, unamused commander, the complainant says, "Please, your Honor, Tom Towzer has tied my tail so tight that I can't shut my eyes."

One of Cruikshank's humorous ideas is particularly his own, because it satisfies his passionate industry. I mean those processions of images which he summoned by the enchantment of single central ideas. The Triumph of Cupid in "George Cruikshank's Table Book" (1845) is as perfect an example as I can cite. Cruikshank is seated by a fire with his "little pet dog Lilla" on his lap. From the pipe he is smoking ascends and curls around him a world of symbolic life. The car of the boy-god is drawn by lions and tigers. Another cupid stands menacingly on a pleading Turk; a third cupid is the tyrant over a negro under Cruikshank's chair; a fourth cupid, sitting on Cruikshank's left foot, toasts a heart at the "fire office"; more cupids are dragging Time backwards on the mantelpiece, and another is stealing his scythe. Consummate ability is shown in the delicate technique of this etching, which was succeeded as an example of multum in parvo by the well-known folding etching Passing Events or the Tail of the Comet of 1853, appearing in "George Cruikshank's Magazine" (February 1854).

Playing on words is very characteristic of Cruikshank's humour. Thus he shows us "parenthetical" legs, as Dickens wittily called them, by the side of those of "a friend in-kneed," and a man (dumbly miserable) arrested on a rope-walk is "taken in tow." Viewing Cruikshank at this game does not help one to endorse the statement of Thomas Love Peacock, inspired by the drawing of January in "The Comic Almanack" (1838),

for a philosopher is a systematiser and a punster is an anarchist. But we do not need him as a philosopher or as an Importance of any kind. What we see and accept as philosophy in him is the appropriation of misery for that Gargantuan meal of humour to which his Time sits down. Yet in that philosophy it is certain that ironists and pessimists excel him.

An entomologist as generous in classification as Mr Swinburne, author of "Under the Microscope," will now observe me in the process of being re-transformed into a scolytus. "Impossible!" cries the reader who remembers my repentance on page 203. But I say "Inevitable." Since I had the courage to bore my way through a catalogue of famous books illustrated humorously by Cruikshank, I feel it my duty to bid the reader look at a list of works of which he should acquire all the italicised items, in such editions as he can afford, if he wishes to know Cruikshank's humour as they know it who call him "The Great George."

The Humourist (4 vols., 1819-20).
German Popular Stories (2 vols., 1823-4).
Points of Humour (2 vols., 1823-4).
Mornings at Bow Street (1824).
Greenwich Hospital (1826).
More Mornings at Bow Street (1827).

Phrenological Illustrations (1826).
Illustrations of Time (1827).
Scraps and Sketches (4 parts and one plate of an
unpublished 5th part, 1828-9, 1831-2, 1834).
My Sketch Book (9 numbers, with plates dated 1833, 1834, 1835).
Punch and Judy (1828).
Three Courses and a Dessert (1830).
Cruikshankiana (1835).
The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman (1839).
George Cruikshank's Omnibus (9 parts, 1841-2).
The Bachelor's Own Book (1844).
George Cruikshank's Table Book (12 numbers, 1845).
George Cruikshank's Fairy Library (4 parts, 1853-4, 1864).
George Cruikshank's Magazine (2 numbers, 1854).

This list reminds us that, though Cruikshank often conferred a bibliophile's immortality upon authors more "writative," to quote the Earl of Rochester, than inspired, he was sometimes the means of arresting great literary merit on its way to oblivion. A case in point is William Clarke's "Three Courses and a Dessert," a book of racy stories containing droll and exquisite cuts by Cruikshank, after rude sketches by its author, who did Cruikshank the service of accusing him in "The Cigar" (1825) of being stubbornly modest for half an hour. Again, we owe to Cruikshank our knowledge of "The Adventures of Sir Frizzle Pumpkin; Nights at Mess; and Other Tales" (1836), a work of which I will only say that its anonymous narrative of good luck in cowardice won a smile from one of the most lovable of poets on the day she died.

"The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman" is one of the puzzles of literature. Mr Andrew Lang decides that it is a volkslied, to which, for the version of it illustrated by Cruikshank, Thackeray contributed the notes considered by some to be by Dickens. Mr Blanchard Jerrold thinks "nobody but Thackeray" could have written the lines about "this young bride's mother Who never was heard to speak so free," and I think that the notes are Thackeray's, and the ballad an example of a class of literature from which Thackeray drew comic inspiration. Cruikshank heard it sung outside "a wine vaults" (sic) at Battle Bridge by a young gentleman called "The Tripe-skewer." The ballad became part of Cruikshank's repertory. Mr Walter Hamilton states that Cruikshank sang "Lord Bateman" in the presence of Dickens and Thackeray "at a dinner of the Antiquarian Society, with the Cockney mal-pronunciations he had heard given to it by a street ballad-singer." He adds that Thackeray expressed a wish, which he allowed Cruikshank to sterilise, to print the ballad with illustrations. We may therefore suppose, despite the omission of the notes to Lord Bateman from the "Biographical Edition" of Thackeray's works, that they are by the author of "The Ballad of Eliza Davis." Cruikshank, overflowing with lacteal kindness, added three verses to the "loving ballad" as he heard it, in which the bride who yields place to the Turk's daughter is married to the "proud porter." Cruikshank's etchings are charmingly naÏve and expressive. The bibliophool pays eight guineas for a first edition, minus the shading of the trees in the plate entitled The Proud Young Porter in Lord Bateman's State Apartment.

"The Bachelor's Own Book" is a story told in pictures and footlines, both by the artist. The hero is "Mr Lambkin, gent," a podgy-nosed prototype of Juggins, who amuses himself by the nocturnal removal of knockers and duly appears in the police court, but is ultimately led to domestic felicity by the dreary spectacle of a confirmed bachelor alone in an immense salon of the Grand Mausoleum Club. Some of the etchings—notably Mr Lambkin feebly revolting against his medicine—are mirth-provoking, and his various swaggering attitudes are well-imagined.

"Cruikshankiana" conveniently presents a number of George Cruikshank's caricatures in reprints about a decade older than the plates. The preface solemnly but with ludicrous inaccuracy states that in each etching "a stern moral is afforded, and that in the most powerful and attractive manner."

We are now brought to the conclusion of our most important chapter. Will Cruikshank's humour live? or, rather, may it live? for things live centuries without permission, and the fright of Little Miss Muffet is more remembered than the terror of Melmoth. The answer should be "Yes" from all who acknowledge beauty in the sparkle of evil and of good. No humorist worthy of that forbidden fruit which made thieves of all mankind can refrain from the laughter which is paid for by another. Mark Twain, who has nerves to thrill for martyred Joan of Arc, delights in the epitaph, "Well done, good and faithful servant," pronounced over the frizzled corpse of a negro cook. Lowell, the poet, extracted a pun from the blind eyes of Milton. Punch, in 1905, amused us with the boy who supposed that horses were made of cats' meat, and in 1905 Sir Francis Burnand thought that the most humorous pictorial joke published by him in Punch was Phil May's drawing of a fisherman being invited to enter the Dottyville Lunatic Asylum. There is heroism as well as vulgarity in laughter saluting death and patience, hippophagy and cannibalism, ugliness and deprivation. He is a wise man who sees smiling mouths in the rents of ruin and the spaces between the ribs of the skeleton angel. Humour, irresponsible and purposeless, is of eternity, and to me (at least) it is the one masterful human energy in the world to-day. It is against compassion and importance and remorse and horror and blame, but it is not for cruelty, or for indifference to distress. Nothing exists so separate from truth and falsehood and right and wrong. Nothing is more instant in pure appeal to the intellect, no blush is more sincere than that of the person who before company cannot see a joke. Humorists are dear to the critic because they criticise by re-making in the world of idea the things they criticise. Among them Cruikshank is dearer than some, less dear than others. Through the regency and reign of the eldest son of George the Third he, even more than Cobbett, seems to me the historian of genius, by virtue of prodigious merriment in vulgar art. The great miscellany of humour which he poured out revitalises his name whenever it is examined by the family of John Bull. For it is his own humour—the humour of one who had the power to appropriate without disgrace because he was himself an Original.

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