Though Cruikshank's relations with Thackeray were far happier than with Dickens, they resulted in nothing important to his reputation. His etchings illustrating Thackeray's contributions to "The Comic Almanack" (1839-40) weary one with plain or uninteresting faces, though that which exhibits the expressive blubber-face of Stubbs, horsed for the birching earned by his usury, provokes an irrational smile which serves for praise. His illustrations to "A Legend of the Rhine" (Thackeray's contribution to "George Cruikshank's Table-Book," 1845) are not equal to Thackeray's drawings for "The Rose and the Ring" (1855). [Illustration: PRO-DI-GI-OUS! (Dominie Sampson in "Guy Mannering"), "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland and the Waverley Novels," 1836.] In the world of humour one does not descend in moving from Thackeray to Charles James Lever. With Lever's own portrait of his hero to guide him, Cruikshank illustrated "Arthur O'Leary" (1844). Among his ten etchings in this novel is an amusing exhibition of Corpulence submitting to identification by measurement; it surpasses the scene by Du Maurier in which the tailor promises to be round in a minute if his customer will press one end of the tape-measure to his waist. Cruikshank's ten etchings for "Gil Blas" (1833) are the works of an intelligent machine, which may be called humorous because it takes down the fact that Dame Jacintha held the cup to the Canon's mouth "as if he had been an infant." R. Smirke, R.A., with his sympathetic eye for flesh (as of a gardener for flowers) is obviously preferable to Cruikshank as Le Sage's illustrator, though our artist's Euphrasia is a dainty miss. Cruikshank's fifteen illustrations for "Don Quixote" (1833-34) are neat and for the most part uninspired renderings of pathological humour. Although it was within his ability to make a readable picture without words, he merely reminds one of the anecdote of the attack on the wind-mills. Compare the plate referred to with the painting on the same subject by Jose Moreno Carbonaro. Cruikshank's combatant is no more than a knight about to attack something--presumably a wind-mill. Carbonaro chooses the moment that exposes the knight as mad, futile, dismally droll, and we see him and his horse in the air, the latter enough to make Pegasus hiccup with laughter. Cruikshank's designs for "Don Quixote" compare favourably, however, with the audacious scratches which constitute most of his brother Robert's chronicle of the Knight of La Mancha (1824). The collector who affords a crown to buy the former designs should also acquire "Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote," by H. D. Inglis, with six etchings by George Cruikshank (1837). The etchings--three of which are perfect anecdotes--were evidently done _con amore_; but, good as they are, they were lucky if they satisfied an editor who believed Inglis's "New Gil Blas" to be "one of the noblest and most finished efforts in the line of pure imaginative writing that