1823-4 is a period to which we owe some historical etchings of consummate skill. They illustrated "Points of Humour," a work in two parts which was expressly designed to afford scope for Cruikshank's power of rendering ludicrous situations. The artist was on his mettle, and his twenty etchings for this collection of anecdotes are among the immortal children of Momus. Among his simpler designs is the scene in the apartment of Frederick the Great when his heir presumptive demanded if the monarch would return his shuttlecock. The required studies of childish impudence and royal amusement are perfect. More elaborate, but equally successful, is the drawing of the voracious boor, the ill-natured general whom he offered to eat, and the King of Sweden who enjoyed the spectacle of their emotions. The boor with the hog on a plate under his arm, his terrible teeth a-glitter for hog and general, is more alarming than the ogre in Cruikshank's _Hop-o'-my-Thumb_; he tacitly affirms his creator's power to confer delicious terrors on the nursery. Flying Konigsmark's fear of pointing hand and barrack-like paunch mingles exquisitely with the hatred of his backward glance, and Charles Gustavus smiles with unpardonable _aplomb_. The etching is a comic masterpiece. After this there is no advance in Cruikshank's comic treatment of history, for his quite simple rendering, more than ten years later, "Miscellany" (1838), of a freak of absent-mindedness on the part of Sir Isaac Newton in "Bentley's," is of merely sufficient merit. [Illustration: TURPIN'S FLIGHT THROUGH EDMONTON. From "Rookwood," 1836.] The Ainsworth-Cruikshank connection began, artistically, with the etchings which illustrate the fourth edition of "Rookwood" (1836). If for Turpin we read Nevison, the novel may pass as quasi-historical. The etching here reproduced is in what may be called Cruikshank's "Humourist" style. It has vivacity and brightness. The reader who figured himself passing into romance through the pretty portico of trees depicted on Ainsworth's title-page, will feel, as he looks at this representation of comic prodigy, that he has arrived.