Exit the Pilgrim, and re-enter the Devil. Cruikshank made remarkable successes in two series of illustrations wherein this magnate assumes the form of a man of our world. The books in which they appear are "Peter Schlemihl" by Adelbert von Chamisso (1823) and "The Gentleman in Black" by J. Y. Akerman (1831). To Chamisso the Devil is "a silent, meagre, pale, tall elderly man" wearing an "old-fashioned grey taffetan coat" with a "close-fitting breast-pocket" to it, and he is willing to buy Peter's shadow. Meagre and close-fitting is Cruikshank's idea of him; he is only substantial enough to give posture and movement to his clothes. That is a beautiful etching where he is folding Peter's shadow as a tailor folds a suit and Peter is unaware of the terrible oddity of a foot on the ground having for shadow a foot in the air--a foot no longer subordinate to Peter who will tread the earth in despair when he is a shadowless man; and that is a marrow-thrilling etching where Peter's tempter stands casting two shadows and flourishing a document promising the delivery of Peter's soul to the bearer after its separation from Peter's body. There is a haunting cold brightness about the Schlemihl etchings. If you see them without a _sensation_ of their difference from the work of any body except him who made them, your acquaintance includes a prodigy, a Cruikshank plus x. To J. Y. Akerman the Devil was "a stout, short, middle-aged gentleman of a somewhat saturnine complexion" who "was clad in black" and "had a loose Geneva cloak ... of the same colour." Like Schlemihl's customer he pays with a bottomless purse and in the cuts, engraved by J. Thompson and C. Landells, we see him a grave humorous and sinister person, who after his urbanity has been shaken by the cleverness of the law, is exhibited without warrant of narrative, as Old Horny on a gibbet. I presume the above-mentioned J Thompson, by the way, to be the John Thompson whom Cruikshank describes at the foot of a letter from this engraver dated "Feb. 7, [18]40," as "the Great, the wonderful Artistic Engraver on wood--and who used to engrave my drawings as no other man ever did."