To "Sunday in London" (1833)--a capital social satire--Cruikshank contributed fourteen cuts, one of which, _The Pay-Table_, preserves the memory of those mischievous contracts between publican and foreman, whereby the latter received a percentage of the spendings of his men on drink and the men were provided with drink on the credit of the foreman. It is an admirable study in fuddled perplexity confronted with Bung in a business instead of a Bacchic mood, abetted by a shark of the victim's calling. Two other cuts--mere rabblement and eyesore--leave on the mind a feeling of disgust almost without interest and without shame. The spectator has no sense that these people turned out at church time, raging, leering, tottering, have deteriorated from any average or standard of human seemliness. If it were not for a dog gazing in amazement at one prone drunkard, if it were not for the dog and his question, one would ask, _Cui bono_? This is not missionary work--Cruikshank was only "flirting with temperance" as late as 1846--and we need have no compunction in seeking relief from such ugliness in the exquisite burlesque of pathos contained in _Over-head and Under-foot_ (1842). Forget who can the agonised impatience bolted and Chubb-locked in the breast of that lonely bachelor, but expressed in his folded arms and upturned face. [Illustration: OVER-HEAD AND UNDER-FOOT. From "The Comic Almanack," 1842.] 1842, which saw that, also saw John O'Neill's poem "The Drunkard," and especially _The Raving Maniac and the Driv'ling Fool_, one of four etchings by Cruikshank which illustrate it. An anonymous writer, in an article for an 1876 reprint of the etchings, says that these two figures "are the most forcible ever drawn by the artist's pencil." This opinion is unjust to the force of Cruikshank's comic figures, and to that terrible pair, Fagin in the condemned cell and Underhill bawling at the stake, but the force of the etching thus praised is extraordinary. With parted blubber lips and knees relaxed, his nerveless left hand dangling at the wrist like a dead white leaf, his right hand grasping the gin-glass, the fool, unconscious of tragedy, faces the maniac who streams upon the air sleeves that much exceed the length of his homicidal arms. By reason of the delicacy of the etching which conveys these haunting figures, they excite pleasure before horror, and always in horror a little pleasure too.