One of Cruikshank's humorous ideas is particularly his own, because it satisfies his passionate industry. I mean those processions of images which he summoned by the enchantment of single central ideas. _The Triumph of Cupid_ in "George Cruikshank's Table Book" (1845) is as perfect an example as I can cite. Cruikshank is seated by a fire with his "little pet dog Lilla" on his lap. From the pipe he is smoking ascends and curls around him a world of symbolic life. The car of the boy-god is drawn by lions and tigers. Another cupid stands menacingly on a pleading Turk; a third cupid is the tyrant over a negro under Cruikshank's chair; a fourth cupid, sitting on Cruikshank's left foot, toasts a heart at the "fire office"; more cupids are dragging Time backwards on the mantelpiece, and another is stealing his scythe. Consummate ability is shown in the delicate technique of this etching, which was succeeded as an example of _multum in parvo_ by the well-known folding etching _Passing Events or the Tail of the Comet of 1853_, appearing in "George Cruikshank's Magazine" (February 1854). [Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF "ILLUSTRATIONS OF TIME," 1827 This drawing borrows idea from Gillray, as also does the frontispiece by Cruikshank to "Angelo's Picnic" (1834). Compare Gillray's _John Bull taking a Luncheon_ (1798).] Playing on words is very characteristic of Cruikshank's humour. Thus he shows us "parenthetical" legs, as Dickens wittily called them, by the side of those of "a friend in-kneed," and a man (dumbly miserable) arrested on a rope-walk is "taken in tow." Viewing Cruikshank at this game does not help one to endorse the statement of Thomas Love Peacock, inspired by the drawing of January in "The Comic Almanack" (1838), "A great philosopher art thou, George Cruikshank, In thy unmatched grotesqueness," for a philosopher is a systematiser and a punster is an anarchist. But we do not need him as a philosopher or as an Importance of any kind. What we see and accept as philosophy in him is the appropriation of misery for that Gargantuan meal of humour to which his Time sits down. Yet in that philosophy it is certain that ironists and pessimists excel him. An entomologist as generous in classification as Mr Swinburne, author of "Under the Microscope," will now observe me in the process of being re-transformed into a scolytus. "Impossible!" cries the reader who remembers my repentance on page 203. But I say "Inevitable." Since I had the courage to bore my way through a catalogue of famous books illustrated humorously by Cruikshank, I feel it my duty to bid the reader look at a list of works of which he should acquire all the italicised items, in such editions as he can afford, if he wishes to know Cruikshank's humour as they know it who call him "The Great George."