We meet Cruikshank's Falstaff again in the drawing entitled _The First Appearance of William Shakespeare on the Stage of the Globe_ (January 1863). Here we have the élite of Shakespeare's creations in a throng about his cradle. Titania and Oberon are at its foot, as though he owed them birth; Touchstone and Feste try to catch a gleam of laughter from his eyes; Prospero waves his wand; Othello gazes with hate at the guarded enchanter, more potent than Prospero, who is to bring his woe to light; Romeo and Juliet have eyes only for each other. Richard the Third is there, sadder than Lear; the witches who prophesied the steps of Macbeth towards hell gesticulate hideously by their cauldron; and Falstaff, cornuted as becomes the "deer" of Mrs Ford, smiles at a vessel that reminds him, as do all vessels, of sack and metheglins. There is charm and beauty of ensemble in this picture, which I have described from a coloured drawing in the South Kensington Museum made by its designer in 1864-5. I know nothing that suggests more forcibly the fatefulness hidden in the inarticulate stranger who appears every day in the world without a history and without a name. [Illustration: ADAMS'S VISIT TO PARSON TRULLIBER. Frontispiece to "Joseph Andrews," 1831. The book is dated 1832. This is one of the plates in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832).] Smollett and Fielding, both novelists who present humour as the flower of annoyance and catastrophe, were hardly to be congratulated when Cruikshank innocently showed them up in "Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith" (1832). In both the reader of literature discerns a gentleman. In Fielding he sees a radiant man of the world from whom literary giants who succeeded him drew nutriment for ambition. Both Smollett and Fielding have heroines, and touch men in the nerve of sweetness, and fell them with love. But Cruikshank cared naught for their women, though he reproduced something equivalent to the charm of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives." When first he went to Smollett, it was for a _Point of Humour_ (1824), which centres in an "irruption of intolerable smells" at dinner. The point pricked, as one may say, but it was blunt in effect compared with that of a later artist's drawing of _Columbus and the Egg_ or that of Cruikshank's cook swallowing to order in _Land Sharks and Sea Gulls_ (1838). The really vivid picture is recognised by a lasting imprint on a mind which is incapable of learning Bradshaw by heart, and Cruikshank's drawings for Smollett are reduced in my mind to _Mrs Grizzle extracting three black hairs from Mr Trunnion_, and his drawings for Fielding are reduced into the ruined face and rambling fat of Blear-eyed Moll.