“Again, no disparagement to my friend Pierce Egan (who is one of the pleasantest as well as one of the greatest men now extant, and with whom, last time I was in town, I did not hesitate to crack a bottle of Belcher’s best), Cruikshank made another, and a still more striking stride, when he stepped from Egan to Burns, and sought his inspiration from the very best of all Burns’s glorious works, ‘The Jolly Beggars.’ It is of this work (the ‘Points of Humour’) that I am now to speak. It was for the purpose of puffing it and its author, and of calling upon all who have eyes to water and sides to ache to buy it, that I began this leading lecture. It is, without doubt, the first thing that has appeared since the death of Hogarth. Yes, Britain possesses once more an artist capable of seizing and immortalizing the traits of that which I consider as by far the most remarkable of our national characteristics--the _Humour_ of the People. _Ex pede_ Herculem: the man who drew these things is fit for anything. Let him but do himself justice, and he must take his place _inter lumina Anglorum_.” Of “Life in London,” and “Life in Paris,” which followed it, Thackeray, writing seventeen years after Wilson, utters the opinion which is likely to be the final one on the literary and artistic merits of these works:--“A curious book, called ‘Life in Paris,’ published in 1822, contains a number of the artist’s plates in the aquatint style; and though we believe he had never been in that capital, the designs have a great deal of life in them, and pass muster very well. A villainous race of shoulder-shrugging mortals are his Frenchmen indeed. And the heroes of the tale, a certain Mr. Dick Wildfire, Squire Jenkins, and Captain O’Shuffleton, are made to show the true British superiority on every occasion when Britons and French are brought together. This book was one among the many that the designer’s genius has caused to be popular; the plates are not carefully executed, but, being coloured, have a pleasant, lively look. The same style was adopted in the once famous book called ‘Tom and Jerry, or Life in London,’ which must have a word of notice here; for, although by no means Mr. Cruikshank’s best work, his reputation was extraordinarily raised by it. Tom and Jerry were as popular twenty years since as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller now are; and often have we wished, while reading the biographies of the latter celebrated personages, that they had been described as well by Mr. Cruikshank’s pencil as by Mr. Dickens’s pen.