ever fell from the pen of any one man." [Illustration: DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO RETURNING HOME. From "The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote," 1833.] It would be a species of literary somnambulism to wander further in a path of bibliography where ideas must be taken as they come instead of being ideally chosen and grouped. There is this mischief in Cruikshank's fecundity, that it tends to convert even a fairly bright critic into a scolytus boring his way through a catalogue. We emerge from our burrowing more percipient than before of the speculative nature of the undertaking to illustrate illustrious works of imagination. Sinking in competitive humour is akin to drowning; for he who materialises images despatched to the mind's eye by literary genius incurs the risk of having his work not only excelled by images in the eyes of minds other than his own, but ignored in compliment to them. Fortunate, then, is Cruikshank in the fact that on the whole we do not regret the healthy industrialism which permitted him to illustrate so many examples of imaginative literature. The reader to whom any appearance of digression is displeasing in art will now kindly believe that only a second has elapsed since he began the only complete paragraph of page 183. The scolytus is converted, and we return to our true viewpoint--the middle of a heterogeneous litter--and look for characteristics of Cruikshankian humour. [Illustration: NEW READINGS. The Irishman tries to read a reversed sign by standing on his head. From "The Humourist," vol. iv., 1821.]