comical
wee limbs."[90] In _The Witches' 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
mischievous employment. The words of the song in Dryden's _King Arthur_
convey the best possible description of t