In 1866, however, Cruikshank executed two plates for Ruskin; one of them illustrated "The Blue Light" from Grimm, the other showed the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper into the mountain; and in the same year he almost paralleled the success of his fairy cobblers in Grimm by an etching of Pixies engaged in making boots, which he did for Frederick Locker, afterwards Locker-Lampson. In 1868 Cruikshank made the large and beautiful etching entitled "Fairy Connoisseurs inspecting Mr Frederick Locker's Collection of Drawings." Anyone who has read "My Confidences" (1896) will acknowledge that it was a happy thought to invite the Little People into Mr Locker-Lampson's library, for this bibliophile, so humorous and elegant, so ready with the exact Latin quotation needed to civilise perfectly the shape of an indecorum, was in essence a child whose toys were consecrated to the fairies by his purity in loving them. We will take leave of Cruikshank as a fairy artist by a look at a sketch for his picture _The Fairy Ring_. He painted the picture, which is his best oil-painting, in 1855 for the late Henry Miller of Preston, for £800. The sketch referred to sold at Sotheby's in 1903 for £25, 10s. This sketch--a painting--I saw at the Royal Aquarium, as in a bleak railway station without the romance of travel. The Fairy King stands on a mushroom about which rotate two rings of merrymakers between which run torch bearers. They are mad, these merrymakers, and madness is delight. Hard by, a towering foxglove leans into space, bearing two joyous sprites. Gigantic is the lunar crescent that shines on the scene; it is a gate through which an intrepid fairy rides a bat above the revels. In this impressionistic sketch, Cruikshank shows himself participant in the mysterious exultation of the open night where man, intruding, feels neither seen nor known. _The Fairy Ring_ belongs to the poetry of humour. It perorates for a supernaturalist whose fashionable ignorance, touched with less durable vulgarity, blinded him to such visions as, in our time, the poet "A. E." has depicted. Looking at Cruikshank's supernatural world of littleness and prettiness, of mirth, extravagance, and oddity, we feel in debt to his limitations. VI