In 1822 appeared a post-dated volume of "German Popular Stories ... collected by M. M. Grimm." A companion volume was published in 1826, and both books were adorned by the hand of George Cruikshank. Excepting two much-admired German leprechauns or fairy cobblers in one of Cruikshank's twenty-two etchings, they do not present a fairy worth smiling at, and these cobblers, boundlessly delighted by a present of clothes, are, of course, very far from being of the angelic _élite_ of Fairyland, as drawn by Sir Joseph Noel Paton for Mrs S. C. Hall. But Fairyland is in the imagination of democracy, and he is a good patriot of that country who amuses us with its "freaks," for they are dear to the _hoi polloi_ which appreciate novelty more than perfection. Cruikshank in his Grimm mood is for the "living drollery" which cured Sebastian's scepticism concerning the phoenix and the unicorn. He rejoicingly presents a nose as long as a garden hose--a nose worthy of the beard which travels from page 6 to page 7 of his "Table-Book" (1845). He refreshes us with the humorous pleasure of the giant inspecting Thumbling on the palm of his hand; and he convulses us with the vocal display of the ass, dog and cat which plunge through the glass of a window into the robbers' room. Ruskin said of these etchings that they "were unrivalled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt; (in some qualities of delineation unrivalled even by him)"; to that eulogy I can only add that they are inspiriting because they are candid and vivid, and show that realism can be on the side of magic. Passing without pause some tiny cuts, upon which children would pounce for love of gnomes, in "The Pocket Magazine" (1827, 1828), we arrive again at Cruikshank's sketches for Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), and inspect elves and fairies, barely prettier than mosquitoes, annoying mortals. Worry is incarnate in a horizontal man who is supported in and drawn through the air by elves, directed by two drivers, one on each of his boots. Beautiful is the contempt for herrings of an elf standing on a plate which a comrade is about to smash with a hammer in the presence of a cheaply-hospitable (and sluttish) housewife whom a dozen elves have pulled downstairs by her feet. Fables which invent sorrow to prevent it can only be classed as fairy-tales by a sacrifice of the _mot juste_, which I make in order to call attention to an exquisite quartet of etchings by George Cruikshank, illustrating Richard Frankum's verses entitled "The Bee and the Wasp" (1832). No hand but his who drew the shadow-buyer in Peter Schlemihl could have drawn the hair-lines of the criminal insect who mocks the drowning bee in the third of these etchings. So pleased and delicate a malignancy is expressed in him that he figures to me as a personification of evil, and I am disagreeably conscious of smiling to think that, because he speaks and is seen, he is a gentleman compared with a trypanosome or a bacillus coli.