These novels of excess were stepping-stones to a sounder realism which we find in "Mornings at Bow Street" (1824) and "More Mornings at Bow Street" (1827). Here the illustrator's task was to illustrate selected police cases, and through the medium of wood engraving a most delectable entertainment was the result. A choleric gentleman's row with a waiter presents itself as a fractured plate in the rim of which two tiny figures display respectively the extremes of napkined deprecation and of kicking impudence. Tom Crib[b]'s pursuit of a coppersmith suggests a wild elephant storming after a frenzy of flying limbs. The genius that was to realise Falstaff is disclosed in the drawing of a drummer boy discovered in a clothes basket. Did he come to Bow Street? we ask, and did those Cupids fighting in the circuit of a wedding-ring come too? The answer is Yes, but because of one who probably was not there, whose name we know. [Illustration: _Tom, Getting the best of a Charley._ From "Life in London," by Pierce Egan, 1821.] At one illustration let us cry halt. It represents a foaming pot of beer assaulting a woman who said to the magistrate, "Your honour, it was the beer." In itself it is a masterpiece of delicate literalism. That power of enlivening the inanimate, which humanises the pump, representing Father Mathew at a small party in "The Comic Almanack" of 1844, exasperates this pot and bids it strike home. But what we are to observe particularly is this early presentation to Cruikshank's mind of alcohol as a personality at war with human beings. As far back as 1811, in _The Dinner of the Four-in-Hand Club at Salthill_, an uproarious piece in the style of Rowlandson's _The Brilliants_ (1801), he put the genius of the bottle into form and anecdote, but here we have the serious aspect of drink obvious even in humour. Beer is striking a woman. In 1832 he produced in _The Ale House and the Home_ a contrast so stated in the title that we need say no more than that the gloomy wife and her baby, sitting by candlelight in the bare room where the man's supper lies to reproach his drink-spoiled appetite, are a sadder sight than the frying-pan of St Bartholomew's Fair in the number of "Scraps and Sketches" where they appear.