From "A Comic Alphabet," 1836. See Pope's "The Wife of Bath" (after Chaucer), II. 387-392.] The student of Cruikshank's humour must follow him through many volumes in which his pencil is subservient to literature; and in this journey he will often open his mouth to yawn rather than to laugh. The professional humorist, like the professional poet, is the prey of the Irony that sits up aloft; and Cruikshank was not an exception. Indeed one may say of some of his crowded caricatures that one has to wade through them. In the humorous illustration of literature his work is seldom risible, but it usually pleases by a combination of neatness and energy. Despite his intense egotism he ventured to associate his art with the works of Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, R. E. Raspe, Cowper, Byron, Scott, Dickens, Goldsmith, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Le Sage, and Cervantes. These names evoke a world of humorous life in which is missing, to the knowledge of the spectator, only the humour which shines in jewels of brief speech and rings in the heavenly onomatopoeia of absurdity. Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde are decidedly not of that world, though Raspe, by a freak of irony, graced his brutal pages with lines which the snark-hunter might have coveted, and Smollett's elegance in burlesque gravity is dear to an admirer of "The Importance of being Earnest." [Illustration: _Lion of the Party_ From "George Cruikshank's Table Book," 1845.] For Shakespeare, Cruikshank seems to have felt a tender reverence. As early as 1814 we find him drawing Kean as Richard III., and Hamlet for J. Roach, the publisher of "The Monthly Theatrical Reporter"; 1815 is the date of a lithograph of _Juliet and the Nurse_ published by G. Cruikshank and otherwise unmemorable; in 1827 he made one of his "Illustrations of Time," a vivacious portrait of Puck about to girdle the earth. In 1857-8 came the Cruikshankian series of etchings for R. B. Brough's "Life of Sir John Falstaff." This series exhibits great skill and conscientiousness; the critic of "The Art Journal" (July 1858) was able to suppose them "actual scenes." Falstaff has a serene and majestic face; his bulk is too dignified for the scales of a showman; one understands his æsthetic abhorrence of a "mountain of mummy." Humour cancels his debt of shame for cowardice, and well would it have been if that rebellious Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, the original of Falstaff, could have looked into Falstaff's roguish eyes as he reclined on the field of Shrewsbury and peeped at his freedom from all the bigotries which threaten and terrify mankind. Cruikshank unconsciously imparts this thought, but it is with conscience that he is amiable to Falstaff, who, begging, hiding, shamming, "facing the music," and dying, is his pet and ours by grace of his refined and beautiful art.