“Cunning,” he remarks, “signifies especially a habit or gift of over-reaching, accompanied with enjoyment and a sense of superiority. It is associated with small and dull conceit, and with an absolute want of sympathy or affection. Its essential connection with vulgarity may be at once exemplified by the expression of the butcher’s dog in Landseer’s ‘Low Life.’ Cruikshank’s ‘Noah Claypole,’ in the illustrations to ‘Oliver Twist,’ in the interview with the Jew, is, however, still more characteristic. It is the intensest rendering of vulgarity absolute and utter with which I am acquainted.” Mr. Paget, in his admirable article on Cruikshank’s genius, already quoted, becomes eloquent on the prodigious effect upon his time which the pictorial moralist achieved, and especially by his illustrations to “Oliver Twist”:-- “More than forty years have passed since the appear-of these works; * and if we were asked who, through that period, has been the most faithful chronicler of the ways, customs, and habits of the middle and lower classes of England, we should answer, George Cruikshank. In his pictures of society there is no depth which he has not sounded. From the murderer’s cell to the pauper’s deathbed there is no phase of crime and misery which has not served him to point a moral. But his sympathies are never perverted, or his sense of right and wrong dimmed by the atmosphere in which he moves. He is a stern though kindly moralist. In his hands vice is vice--a foe with whom no terms are to be kept. Yet, with what true feeling, what consummate skill, does he discriminate the shades of character, the ranks and degrees of crime, the extent and limits of moral corruption! In none of his works is this so apparent as in what we are inclined to rank as the most refined and complete of all, namely, the illustrations to “Oliver Twist.” Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank worked cordially hand in hand in the production of this admirable work, and neither will grudge to the other his share in the fame which has justly attended their joint labours. The characters are not more skilfully developed, as the story unfolds itself, by the pen of Dickens, than by the pencil of his colleague. Every time we turn over this wonderful series, we are more and more impressed with the genius that created, and the close observation of human nature which developed, the characteristics of Oliver through every varying phase of his career, from the memorable day when he ‘asked for more’;--of Sikes, the housebreaker (compare his face in the frontispiece of the first column, where he has just brought Oliver back to the Jew, with that at page 216 of the third volume, where he is attempting to destroy his dog); of Fagin--from the ‘merry old gentleman’ frying sausages, to the ghastly picture of abject terror which he presents in the condemned cell; of Noah Claypole,--mark him as he lies cowering under the dresser in Mrs.