[32] That eloquence of subsidiary detail, which has had so many exponents in English art from Hogarth onwards, is one of Mr. Thomson's most striking characteristics. The reader will find it exemplified in the beautiful book-plate at page 111, which, by the courtesy of its owner, Mr. Ernest Brown, I am permitted to reproduce. By this time his reputation had long been firmly established. To the Jane Austen volumes succeeded other numbers of the so-called "Cranford" series, to which, in 1894, Mr. Thomson had already added, under the title of _Coridon's Song and other Verses_, a fresh ingathering of old-time minstrelsy from the pages of the _English Illustrated_. Many of the drawings for these, though of necessity reduced for publication in book form, are in his most delightful and winning manner,--notably perhaps (if one must choose!) the martial ballad of that "Captain of Militia, Sir Bilberry Diddle," who --dreamt, Fame reports, that he cut all the throats Of the French as they landed in flat-bottomed boats --or rather were going to land any time during the Seven Years' War. Excellent, too, are John Gay's ambling _Journey to Exeter_., the _Angler's Song_ from Walton (which gives its name to the collection), and Fielding's rollicking "A-hunting we will go." Other "Cranford" books, which now followed, were James Lane Allen's _Kentucky Cardinal_, 1901; Fanny Burney's _Evelina_, 1903; Thackeray's _Esmond_, 1905; and two of George Eliot's novels--_Scenes of Clerical Life_, 1906, and _Silas Marner_, 1907. In 1899 Mr. Thomson had also undertaken another book for George Allen, an edition of Reade's _Peg Woffington_,--a task in which he took the keenest delight, particularly in the burlesque character of Triplet. These were all in the old pen-work; but some of the designs for _Silas Marner_ were lightly and tastefully coloured. This was a plan the author had adopted, with good effect, not only in a special edition of _Cranford_ (1898), but for some of his original drawings which came into the market after exhibition. Nothing can be more seductive than a Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately tinted in sky-blue, _rose-Du Barry_, and apple-green (the _vert-pomme_ dear--as Gautier says--to the soft moderns)--a treatment which lends them a subdued but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a pedigree, and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm of the phrase-maker who described their inventor as the "Charles Lamb of illustration."