The "German Popular Stories" probably contain the most striking specimens of Cruikshank's power as a designer of _fairy_ subjects. In reference to these illustrations, our great critic, Mr. Ruskin, says: "They are of quite sterling and admirable art, in a class precisely parallel in elevation to the character of the tales which they illustrate; and the original etchings, as I have before said in the Appendix to my 'Elements of Drawing,' were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt, in some qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him." "_The Two Elves_," says Hamerton, "especially the nearer one, who is putting on his breeches, are drawn with a point at once so precise and vivacious, so full of keen fun and inimitably happy invention, that I have not found their equal in comic etching anywhere ... the picturesque details of the room are etched with the same felicitous intelligence; but the marvel of the work is in the expression of the strange little faces, and the energy of the comical wee limbs."[90] In _The Witches' Frolic_ ["Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft"], we find a happy blending of the terrible and the grotesque. Look at the old hags floating out to sea in their tubs; and the strange, uncanny thing with dreadful eyes bobbing up and down midway between the foremost old woman and the distant vessel. The _thing_ may be a ship, it may be a fish, or it may be a fiend,--in the dim half light we cannot tell what,--but it is horribly suggestive of nightmare, and makes one laugh as well as shudder. Some ghostly goblins, the creations of George's weird fancy, will be found in "The Omnibus"; we see them following a ghostly ship manned by ghostly mariners, and we find in the same book ghostly Dutchmen playing a game of diabolical leap-frog with Australian kangaroos. In one illustration he introduces us to a cheerful assembly of ancestral ghosts: there is the ghostly saucer-eyed head of the family, with a ghostly hound peeping beneath his chair, a ghostly grandmother, half a dozen ghostly spinster aunts, a ghostly butler, a ghostly cook, a ghostly small boy, two ghostly candles; and lastly, a ghostly cat. Small wonder that under the influence of such ghostly surroundings the hair of the affrighted ghost-seer stands erect in the extremity of his terror.