In these plates are some of the brightest bits of his picturesqueness of outline, his happy, sprightly treatment of light and shade, and of his higher faculties as an artist, of which fate permitted him to give the world only scattered fragmentary evidences. Thackeray said of him, that he could draw an ancient gloomy market-place as well as Mr. Front or Mr. Nash. What could be more picturesque, or daintier in the play of light, or happier in the variety of the architecture, than the backgrounds of the scenes where Sir John is arrested at the suit of Mrs. Quickly, or when the knight not only persuades Mrs. Quickly to withdraw her action, but also to lend him more money? Mr. F. Wedmore has called attention, and with ample reason, to the exquisite pathos of the death of Falstaff, “in which the face of one who has died ‘a babbling of green fields,’ lies very calm, with the sign of gentle fancies but lately flown.” These plates were reissued in a “Library Shakspeare” published in parts between 1871 and 1874, together with illustrations by Sir John Gilbert (who, by the way, in his youth delighted in copying Cruikshank’s etchings and drawings on wood); but it is to be hoped that they may some day be rewedded to Brough’s biography, and reappear as the artist’s last important creation. [Illustration: 258] The twenty years which elapsed between the first issue of “Falstaff” and the artist’s death, albeit no idle years, have left not much completely worthy of the best that had gone before. Cruikshank furnished etchings to the “Life and Enterprises of Robert William Elliston, Comedian” (1857), “Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs--revelations of the Wynds and Dens of Glasgow” (1858), Mr. Alfred Cole’s “Lorimer Littlegood” (1858), “Stenelaus and Amylda, a Christmas Temperance Tale” (1858), a frontispiece to Lowell’s “Biglow Papers” (1859), Dudley Costello’s “Holiday with Hobgoblins” (1861), “The Bee and the Wasp; a Fable in Verse” (1861), “A Discovery concerning Ghosts” (1863), Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of the West of England” (1865), the “Savage Club Papers” (1867), “The Oak,” a magazine, edited by his friend the Rev. Charles Rogers (1868), “Coila’s Whispers,” by the Knight of Morar (1869), “The Brownies,” and other tales, by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1870), “The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil,” by Edward G. Flight (1871), “Lob-lie-by-the-Fire,” and other tales, by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1874). Then there are two works, the illustrations to which proclaim the coming end. “Peeps at Life,” and “Studies in my Cell,” by the London Hermit, published in 1875, are signed “George Cruikshank, aged 83, 1875;” and in Mrs. Octavian Blewitt’s “The Rose and the Lily,” is a frontispiece--George Cruikshank’s last design--signed, “Designed and etched by George Cruikshank, age 88, 1875.” This plate is here reproduced. Not before 1869 did George Cruikshank publish his last political plate.