We have now sounded the word which invites inquiry as to the nature of Cruikshank's artistic service to London. London is not the Tower or St James's Palace. Cruikshank, however, is not injured by this scorching truism. If we go back to 1827 and 1829 we encounter in "The Gentleman's Pocket Magazine" twenty-four _London Characters_, of which fifteen are from the hand of George Cruikshank, who doubtless remembered Rowlandson's "Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders" (1820). George is responsible for very neat portraits of a beadle, waterman, dustman, watchman ..., and the Cruikshankian enthusiast cries "Eureka!" for he spies Mr Bumble among them. With "Sunday in London" (1833) came the first example of Cruikshank's comic treatment of London, which a book-collector, as distinct from a print-collector, can prize. The woodcuts in this volume reveal a state of society in which people had less sense of proportion than they have now, and were excessively vain or excessively humble, according to the state of their paunch and the view of them held by the policeman or the beadle. The power of the beadle had not yet been broken by a metrical inquiry concerning the origin of his hat. Frenchmen were still "mounseers," and soldiers marched to Divine Service through St James's Park to the tune of "Drops of Brandy." The flavour of the obsolete is rich in "Sunday in London"; we who look at it feel strangely toned-down. [Illustration: THE STREETS, MORNING. From "Sketches by Boz," Second Series, 1837.] Place in London as well as character is presented vividly in Cruikshank's contributions to "Sketches by Boz" (1836-7). Witness the examples here given. In _The Streets, Morning_, I, a Londoner, feel the poetry of streets cleansed by quiet, the chastity of Comfort enjoyed, as it were, by the tolerance of Hardship. The little sweep is an extinct animal, and yet we are in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials. _Monmouth Street_, as exhibited by Cruikshank in the same work, is an appreciation of the Hebrew dealer in old clothes as well as a caricature. We feel the street to be an open-air parlour and nursery combined; it remains imperturbably domestic though we walk in it. Another etching, depicting a beadle hammering the door of a house supposed to be on fire, elicited from Mr Frederick Wedmore the confession that he knew no artist "so alive as Cruikshank to the pretty sedateness of Georgian architecture," though the remark will be more appreciated after a look at the pretty etching entitled _French Musicians or Les Savoyards_ (1819), reprinted in "Cruikshankiana" (1835).