The works which George Cruikshank illustrated, and the enterprises on which he entered during the thirty-years of his teetotal career, would be enough to fill the life of an ordinary worker. After he had contributed “The Bottle” and “The Drunkard’s Children” to the Temperance cause, he engaged with renewed ardour, if with failing fortunes, in his old work of book illustration. For the Brothers Mayhew he illustrated “The Greatest Plague in Life,” “Whom to Marry and How to get Married,” “The Magic of Kindness,” and “The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys during ‘the World’s Show’ of 1851.” In the first two are some etchings full of the old spirit and the old quickness of observation. In the “Magic of Kindness” are some charming fairy scenes, notably the “Genius of Industry And “Whole Hogs.” “Turning the Forest into a Fleet,” and in the “Adventures of the Sandboys” is Cruikshank’s famous plate of all the world going to Hyde Park--a new rendering of his pictorial preface to the Omnibus. In this we find that the hand had lost none of its cunning, and that the fancy and the power of observation were undimmed. [Illustration: 211] About this time--that is, between 1849 and 1853--Cruikshank illustrated two Christmas stories by Mrs. G-ore, “The Snowstorm” and “The Inundation,” in Angus B. Beach’s “Clement Lorimer,” * the “Songs of the late Charles Dibdin,” Frank Smedley’s “Frank Fairleigh,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”--representing some seventy etchings, and as many wood blocks. The “Frank Fairleigh” etchings introduced Cruikshank to Frank Smedley, and led to a final venture in the magazine form, with which David Bogue, the publisher, had resolved to test finally the hold the artist still had on the public. * Mr. Wedmore, in his article on Cruikshank, says of one of the etchings in this book, “Miss Eske carried away during her Trance,” that it is among the things that show him to have had “the imagination of tragedy.”