In the first volume of 1840 we find illustrations by Alfred Crowquill in the Miscellany; in the second volume of the same year Leech appeared, both on wood and steel. The woodcuts--especially one of “a highly respectable man”--are full of humour and fresh observation. Extraordinary as the advance had been which Cruikshank had made by his powerful dramatic illustrations to “Oliver Twist,” his illustrations to Mr. Ainsworth’s romances, and particularly to “The Tower of London,” and “Windsor Castle,” and “The Miser’s Daughter”--proved that he had yet higher laurels to win. His etchings on steel show a greatly superior technical handling to his earlier work with the needle. He obtained effects which Rembrandt would not have disdained. He showed for the first time that he could realize a middle distance, as well as a foreground and a background. And then he had in perfect subjection, and ready to his hand and mind, all the vast store of observation of men and things, he had been inde-fatigably accumulating from his boyhood His plates to these three works are absolutely astonishing, when they are analysed, for the amount of original thought,--for the technical skill in rendering infinite varieties of light and shade, of emotion, of scenery,--which they comprehend. It is deeply to be lamented that Cruikshank’s connection with Harrison Ainsworth *--a connection in which the artist found some of his finer inspirations--was marred by quarrels, and was sundered finally with a controversy, which is the counterpart of that he engaged in with the biographer and the friends of Charles Dickens. I suspect that Thackeray involuntarily led Cruikshank to claim more than his proper share in the successes he and Harrison Ainsworth had together. * Mr. Ainsworth died while these volumes were passing through the press, January 1882.