The humour of George Cruikshank deserves separate consideration, because it is essentially the man himself. Despite a technical excellence so peculiar that, according to the author of Number 1 of "Bursill's Biographies," the engraver Thompson "kept a set of special tools, silver-mounted and with ivory handles, sacred for" Cruikshank's designs, his sense of beauty was not eyes to him. Women he usually saw as lard or bone, and this strange perversity of vision and art differentiates him from the moderns by more than time. For instance, the women presented by Mr S. D. Ehrhart and O'Neill Latham (a lady-artist), to mention only two modern humorists, materialise an idea of beauty in humour which was as foreign to Cruikshank as apple-blossom to a _pomme de terre_. [Illustration: A GENTLEMAN'S REST BROKEN (in consequence of going to bed with his leg on). From an etching in "Scraps and Sketches," Part 1, 1828.] Humour with Cruikshank was elemental. A joke was sacred from implication; it was self-sufficient, vocal in line and curve, percussive. He was a contemporary of Douglas Jerrold, who was humorous when he called a town Hole-cum-Corner. He was a contemporary of Thomas Hood, who was humorous when he announced that "from her grave in Mary-bone They've come and bon'd your Mary." He was in that "world of wit" where they kept a nutmeg-grater on the table in order to say, when a great man was mentioned, "there's a grater." He was in a world where professional humour was perversely destructive of faith in imagination. [Illustration: EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY. From "Points of Humour," 1823. The unfaithful wife has concealed her lover in the clock. The husband, who has unexpectedly returned, devours bacon at 1 A.M., while she is in an agony of apprehension.] But what is humour? Late though the question be, it should be answered. Humour, then, is the ability to receive a shock of pleasant surprise from sounds and appearances without attributing importance to them. As the proof of humour is physiological, its appeal to the intellect is as peremptory as that of terror. It is a benignant despot which relieves us from the sense of destiny and of duty. Its range is illimitable. It is victoriously beneath contempt and above worship.