During this time, albeit he was still compelled to do daily-bread work unworthy of his genius, he buckled to labours, by some of which his name is destined to live. In 1831 he undertook to illustrate Roscoe’s Novelists’ Library; and his genius brightens some seventeen volumes of the series.* But his fertility--and in his best vein between 1830 and the year when he and Dickens came in contact--was prodigious. In addition to his forty-nine etchings to “Tom Jones,” “Amelia,” “Roderick Random,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tristram Shandy,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “Don Quixote,” “Gil Bias,” etc., in Roscoe’s Library, “Beauties of Washington Irving,” “Baron Munchausen,” he illustrated “The Gentleman in Black,” “The New Bath Guide,” “Hood’s Comic Annual,” “Sunday in London” (curious as studies of the fashions of the day) (1833), Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague,” “Bombastes Furioso,” in which he revelled. Ainsworth’s “Rookwood,” “Tough Yarns,” “Odds and Ends.” * The complete set is in nineteen volumes--the first two volumes, containing Robinson Crusoe, were illustrated by Jacob George Strutt. Cruikshank, however, illustrated a Robinson Crusoe with two steel plates and some thirty small woodcuts in 1831. It was reprinted in 1836. “Mirth and Morality” (a collection of original tales by Carlton Bruce, published by Tegg), and “Minor Morals for Young People,” by his friend John Bowring. Within this period, moreover, he began his Comic Almanacs, and his fine series of illustrations to the Waverley Novels; and he superintended the collection of his more important scattered works, as his large French caricatures, retouching them, for Mr. M’Lean, the eminent print-seller of the Haymarket. I pass over much minor work as his drawings or etchings from the sketches of others, as Auldjo’s “Constantinople.” The third and fourth parts of his “Scraps and Sketches,” and his “Sketch-Book”--in which are some of his most famous bits--are also of this most fruitful epoch. In these we find some of his hardest hits against intemperance, as in, the Gin Shop, where Death is setting a trap for a party of drinkers, who, with their young children, are tippling at the bar of a public-house; and the Alehouse and the Home, and the Pillars of the Gin Shop. In the first composition we have the parlour of a tavern, where, in the midst of the uproarious conviviality, a boy is trying to wake his drunken father; in the second is the wretched home, with the poor wife nursing a sick child. So far back as 1832 this chord had been struck in Cruikshank’s heart. In the Pillars of the Gin Shop (also of this time), a drunkard and his wife, with their poor children, are watched by the arch-fiend, who is perched near a stile in the distance.