"The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman" is one of the puzzles of literature. Mr Andrew Lang decides that it is a _volkslied_, to which, for the version of it illustrated by Cruikshank, Thackeray contributed the notes considered by some to be by Dickens. Mr Blanchard Jerrold thinks "nobody but Thackeray" could have written the lines about "this young bride's mother Who never was heard to speak so free," and I think that the notes are Thackeray's, and the ballad an example of a class of literature from which Thackeray drew comic inspiration. Cruikshank heard it sung outside "a wine vaults" (_sic_) at Battle Bridge by a young gentleman called "The Tripe-skewer." The ballad became part of Cruikshank's repertory. Mr Walter Hamilton states that Cruikshank sang "Lord Bateman" in the presence of Dickens and Thackeray "at a dinner of the Antiquarian Society, with the Cockney mal-pronunciations he had heard given to it by a street ballad-singer." He adds that Thackeray expressed a wish, which he allowed Cruikshank to sterilise, to print the ballad with illustrations. We may therefore suppose, despite the omission of the notes to Lord Bateman from the "Biographical Edition" of Thackeray's works, that they are by the author of "The Ballad of Eliza Davis." Cruikshank, overflowing with lacteal kindness, added three verses to the "loving ballad" as he heard it, in which the bride who yields place to the Turk's daughter is married to the "proud porter." Cruikshank's etchings are charmingly naïve and expressive. The bibliophool pays eight guineas for a first edition, minus the shading of the trees in the plate entitled _The Proud Young Porter in Lord Bateman's State Apartment_. "The Bachelor's Own Book" is a story told in pictures and footlines, both by the artist. The hero is "Mr Lambkin, gent," a podgy-nosed prototype of Juggins, who amuses himself by the nocturnal removal of knockers and duly appears in the police court, but is ultimately led to domestic felicity by the dreary spectacle of a confirmed bachelor alone in an immense salon of the Grand Mausoleum Club. Some of the etchings--notably Mr Lambkin feebly revolting against his medicine--are mirth-provoking, and his various swaggering attitudes are well-imagined. "Cruikshankiana" conveniently presents a number of George Cruikshank's caricatures in reprints about a decade older than the plates. The preface solemnly but with ludicrous inaccuracy states that in each etching "a stern moral is afforded, and that in the most powerful and attractive manner."