Cruikshank then quotes passages from Dickens’s article, and continues: “Now this, which you call ‘Frauds on the Fairies,’ in my humble opinion, might as well have been called ‘Much Ado about Nothing’; for, had my editor been altering the title of any standard literary work, the writing of any man of mark--one of your own glorious books, for example--then, indeed, you might have raised a hue and cry; but to insist upon preserving the entire integrity of a fairy tale, which had been and is constantly altering in the recitals, and in the printing of various editions of various countries, and even counties, appears to my little mind like shearing one of your own ‘whole hogs,’ where there is ‘great cry and little wool.’” Then Cruikshank asks where is tenderness and mercy in Tom Thumb’s father, when he induced his wife to take their seven children into the forest to perish miserably of hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts? “My editor,” Hop-o’-my-Thumb proceeds, “seeing that such a statement was not only disgusting, but against nature, and consequently unfit for the pure and parentloving minds of children, felt certain that any father acting in such a manner must either be _mad or under the influence of intoxicating liquor_, which is much the same thing, and therefore, wishing to avoid any allusion to such an awful affliction as insanity, has accounted for my father’s unnatural conduct by attributing to it that cause which marks its progress, daily and hourly, by acts of unnatural brutality.” Farther on, Hop-o’-my-Thumb, referring to the little peculiarity of the young ogres “biting little children on purpose to suck their blood,” wants to know whether they are good things to be nourished in a child’s heart. “And I should also like to know,” he adds, “what there is so enchanting and captivating to ‘_young fancies_’ in this description of a father (ogre though he be) cutting the throats of his own seven children? Is this the sort of stuff that helps to ‘_keep us ever young_,’ or give us that innocent delight which we may share with children?” Having thanked Mr. Cruikshank for rescuing his family character from the moral taints which former biographers had put upon it, representing him to be, in the transaction of the seven-league boots and the mother of the slaughtered children, “an _unfeeling, artful liar, and a thief_,” and his parents “_receivers of stolen goods_,” he turns upon Mr. Dickens for his attempt to throw ridicule upon the Temperance question, and also his “evident contempt, and even hatred, against that cause,” as shown in his “Whole Hogs.” Hop-o’my-Thumb hereupon valiantly and defiantly remarks: “This is not the place, nor is it my purpose, now to discuss the Temperance question, but I take the liberty of telling you that it is a question which you evidently do not understand, for if you did, your good heart and sanguine disposition would make you, if possible, a more enthusiastic advocate than my editor.”