Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/261

 Frolic ["Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft"], we find a happy blending of the terrible and the grotesque. Look at the old hags floating out to sea in their tubs; and the strange, uncanny thing with dreadful eyes bobbing up and down midway between the foremost old woman and the distant vessel. The thing may be a ship, it may be a fish, or it may be a fiend, in the dim half light we cannot tell what,—but it is horribly suggestive of nightmare, and makes one laugh as well as shudder. Some ghostly goblins, the creations of George's weird fancy, will be found in "The Omnibus"; we see them following a ghostly ship manned by ghostly mariners, and we find in the same book ghostly Dutchmen playing a game of diabolical leap-frog with Australian kangaroos. In one illustration he introduces us to a cheerful assembly of ancestral ghosts: there is the ghostly saucer-eyed head of the family, with a ghostly hound peeping beneath his chair, a ghostly grandmother, half a dozen ghostly spinster aunts, a ghostly butler, a ghostly cook, a ghostly small boy, two ghostly candles; and lastly, a ghostly cat. Small wonder that under the influence of such ghostly surroundings the hair of the affrighted ghost-seer stands erect in the extremity of his terror.

This same book contains, too, the celebrated etching of Jack o'Lantern, probably the best illustration of the supernatural which we owe to the pencil and weird imagination of the artist. "Talk of Fuseli and his wind-bag, there is real vivid imagination enough in this to make a whole academy of Fuselis. It is just an Egyptian darkness, with breaking through it, above a bog-hole, some black bulrushes, and above them a bending, leathery goblin exulting over some drowned traveller, the meteor lamp he carries casting a downward flicker on the dark water. Such darkness, such wicked speed, such bad, Puck-like malice, such devilry, Hoffman and Poe together could not have better devised. Many a May exhibition has not half the genius in all its pictures that focuses in that gem of jet." The description is admirable; but Walter. Thornbury has altogether misconceived the artist's idea. Jack o'Lantern is simply misguiding a belated traveller into a bog, and the elfin grin which pervades his countenance testifies to the delight he takes in his