Moncrieff, so the tale goes (_Every Night Booky or Life after Dark_, 1827), when he dramatised for the Adelphi ‘Tom and Jerry’ (_Life in London_), ‘wrote his piece from Cruikshank’s plates,’ and ‘boiled his kettle with Pierce Egan’s letterpress.’ Half a century later, Andrew Halliday, adapting _The Miser’s Daughter_ for the same theatre, made up his most effective scenes from the designs of the artist. It was on witnessing the performance of this latter, and finding his part in its production was totally ignored--always a sensitive subject with the combative veteran--that George Cruikshank was incited to make that public vindication of his claim to a share in the authorship of this and other works--notably _Oliver Twist_--illustrated by his hand, and involving the candour and sense of justice of Ainsworth, Dickens, and himself. 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.’