"St James's," the last important novel by Ainsworth which Cruikshank illustrated, gave the artist opportunities for drawing St James's Palace, London, and portraits of the Duke of Marlborough and other celebrities. He accepted these opportunities, but his most striking designs remind one of his illustrations for Smollett. He rejoices in the contrast between masculine lath and feminine tub, and in one plate afflicts us with a grinning face which exceeds in ugliness any of C. Delort's portraits of "l'Homme qui rit." The vigorous design here given touches the imagination on account of the absent presence of the dame in the picture hanging on the wall. [Illustration: THE MARQUIS DE GUISCARD ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE HARLEY. The man on the table drawing his sword is the Duke of Newcastle ("Saint James's"). From "Ainsworth's Magazine," 1844.] In "Ainsworth's Magazine" for January 1846 the last fruit of Cruikshank's connection with Ainsworth appeared, after a year's sterility, as a careful etching illustrating that novelist's "Sir Lionel Flamstead, a Sketch": in the preceding year Cruikshank produced for W. H. Maxwell the series of historic etchings which, in the opinion of Mr Frederic G. Stephens, "marks the highest point of Cruikshank's invention." These etchings illustrate a history of the insurrections in Ireland in 1798 and 1803. In the selection of Cruikshank, Maxwell or his publishers may have remembered the skill with which he had illustrated I. Whitty's "Tales of Irish Life" (1824), though it is one thing to render the frantic humour of a fight arising from O'Finn calling Redmond a rascal, or the muddled emotions of a wake, and quite another to exhibit the conflict between two nightmares of patriotism. Howbeit Cruikshank realised the horror and poetry of war. His twenty-one Maxwellian etchings are instructively comparable with Callot's precious series "_Les Misères et les Mal-heurs de la Guerre_" (1633). Callot is at once more horrible and self-restrained. One peers into his work; one listens to Cruikshank's. The artist of the seventeenth century drew with minute delicacy the forms and gestures of men. He studied them as a naturalist, indifferent to the individuality of the unit after fixing the individuality of the class to which it belongs. Callot's men are users of the wheel and the estrapade; they roast the husband while they ravish the wife. They are not grotesques: they are men. Maurice Leloir drew men of their age and country no more elegantly for the bravest novel of Dumas. Cruikshank, on the other hand, drew well and hideously not only Irish men, but Irish individuals. His rebel, obscenely jocose, impaling a child, might, though a detail in a crowded etching, have been drawn for Scotland Yard; so too might a woman squatting and smoking while a wretch writhes on four pikes which take his weight and give it him back in torture. England is to glow, Ireland is to blush as she looks at Cruikshank's people of '98.