quaint truth in the commonplace. With another contemporary artist Dickens had closer relations. The Sketches were illustrated by George Cruikshank; so was Oliver Twist, and a foolish bit of gossip, troublesome at the time, would have it that Oliver's history had come into being at the suggestion of certain drawings of Cruikshank's own. For my own part, I can enjoy only a few of the famous woodcuts in these early books; it appears to me that a man of less originality than Cruikshank's, the late Fred Barnard, has done incomparably better work in his pictures to the novels. But in their leaning to the grotesque, author and illustrator were so much alike that one can at all events understand the baseless story which Dickens took all possible trouble to refute. Some years afterwards, when Cruikshank published his picture called The Bottle, intended as a blow in the cause of temperance, Dickens constantly spoke and wrote of it with high admiration, though he had fault to find with the manner in which its lesson was conveyed. There could not but exist much sympathy between these workers on lines so similar in different arts; but beyond the fact of Dickens's liking for the artist's designs from the beginning of his own career, nothing, so far as I know, can be advanced in proof of his having
