by tongs applied to the nose, their publisher Kidd, for whom he is anxious to state he only illustrated "The Gentleman in Black" (1831). Moreover in 1860 he misused his "Pop-Gun" to picture another publisher, who advertised his nephew Percy as Cruikshank _tout court_, as a sandwich-man similarly assaulted by him; yet by some freak of humour or affection the "very excellent, industrious, worthy good fellow" Percy, over whom I throw the embroidery of his uncle's praise, bestowed the name of George upon his son, as if for the confusion of bibliographers, and the evocation of a spirit armed with the ghosts of tongs. Indeed the gods themselves seem to have sported with George Cruikshank's name, for Dr Nagler, having read that "the real Simon Pure was George Cruikshank," wrote thus in his "Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon" (1842): "Pure Simon, der eigentliche Name des beruhmten Carikaturzeichners Georg [_sic_] Cruikshank." Simon Pure shall save us from digression by leading us to a didactic work by Cruikshank of which Mrs Centlivre's "quaking preacher" would have heartily approved. This work is the oil-painting entitled _The Worship of Bacchus_ (1862). It is an old man's athletic miracle, being a picture thirteen feet four by seven feet eight, of which there exists an etching by the same hand of less, though formidable size, which was published June 20, 1864. The oil-painting was presented to the nation by Cruikshank's friends and conveyed to its destination April 8, 1869. Cruikshank drew a fancy sketch of his mammoth on that great day of its life. Little did he imagine what the cognoscenti of the twentieth century would think of it. I saw it in 1902; visited it much as one visits an incarcerated friend, following a learned official with jingling keys to a dungeon under the show-rooms of the National Gallery. It was alone, was convict 495, alone and dingy. Many phrases have been found for this picture. John Stewart said that it contains "all the elemental types of pictorial grouping, generalised on the two axioms of balance and variety." Another critic said that "it is not even a picture, but a multitude of pictures and bits of pictures crowded together in one huge mass of confusion and puzzle." Cruikshank himself said, speaking August 28, 1862, "I have not the vanity to call it a picture.... I painted it with a view that a lecturer might use it as so many diagrams."