Happy are children of all ages who have such a ballad and such pictures as this in store for them!  It is a comfort to think that woodcuts never wear out, and that the book still may be had for a shilling, for those who can command that sum of money.

In the “Epping Hunt,” which we owe to the facetious pen of Mr. Hood, our artist has not been so successful.  There is here too much horsemanship and not enough incident for him; but the portrait of Roundings the huntsman is an excellent sketch, and a couple of the designs contain great humor.  The first represents the Cockney hero, who, “like a bird, was singing out while sitting on a tree.”

And in the second the natural order is reversed.  The stag having taken heart, is hunting the huntsman, and the Cheapside Nimrod is most ignominiously running away.

The Easter Hunt, we are told, is no more; and as the Quarterly Review recommends the British public to purchase Mr. Catlin’s pictures, as they form the only record of an interesting race now rapidly passing away, in like manner we should exhort all our friends to purchase Mr. Cruikshank’s designs of another interesting race, that is run already and for the last time.

Besides these, we must mention, in the line of our duty, the notable tragedies of “Tom Thumb” and “Bombastes Furioso,” both of which have appeared with many illustrations by Mr. Cruikshank.  The “brave army” of Bombastes exhibits a terrific display of brutal force, which must shock the sensibilities of an English radical.  And we can well understand the caution of the general, who bids this soldatesque effrenee to begone, and not to kick up a row.

Such a troop of lawless ruffians let loose upon a populous city would play sad havoc in it; and we fancy the massacres of Birmingham renewed, or at least of Badajoz, which, though not quite so dreadful, if we may believe his Grace the Duke of Wellington, as the former scenes of slaughter, were nevertheless severe enough:  but we must not venture upon any ill-timed pleasantries in presence of the disturbed King Arthur and the awful ghost of Gaffer Thumb.

We are thus carried at once into the supernatural, and here we find Cruikshank reigning supreme.  He has invented in his time a little comic pandemonium, peopled with the most droll, good-natured fiends possible.  We have before us Chamisso’s “Peter Schlemihl,” with Cruikshank’s designs translated into German, and gaining nothing by the change.  The “Kinder und Hans-Maerchen” of Grimm are likewise ornamented with a frontispiece copied from that one which appeared to the amusing version of the English work.  The books on Phrenology and Time have been imitated by the same nation; and even in France, whither reputation travels slower than to any country except China, we have seen copies of the works of George Cruikshank.