where there were donkeys, sheep, goats and cows
grazing; then all four would sit down on the grass before some chosen
subject and sketch the patient model.

Edwin Landseer's first loving recollections of his father went back to
these little excursions across the Heath. And for each boy to take back
to his mother and sisters a picture of something they had seen was a
great joy.

"Well, boys, what shall we draw today?" the father would ask at
breakfast-time.

And then they would all vote on it, and arguments in favor of goat or
donkey were eloquently and skilfully set forth.

I said that a very young child could draw pictures: standing by my chair
as I write this line is a chubby little girl, just four years old, in a
check dress, with two funny little braids down her back. She is begging
me for this pencil that she may "make a pussy-cat for Mamma to put in a
frame."

What boots it that the little girl's "pussy-cat" has five or six legs and
three tails--these are all inferior details.

The evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race, and
long before races began to write or reason they made pictures.

Art education had better begin young, for then it is a sort of play; and
good artistic work, Robert Louis Stevenson once said, is only useful
play.

Probably Edwin Landseer's education began a hundred years before he was
born; but his technical instruction in art began when he was three years
old, when his father would take him out on the Heath and placing him on
the grass, put pencil and paper in his hand and let him make a picture of
a goat nibbling the grass.

Then the boy noted for himself that a goat had a short tail, a cow a
switch-tail, and horses had no horns, and that a ram's horns were unlike
those of a goat.

He had begun to differentiate and compare--and not yet four years old!

When five years of age he could sketch a sleeping dog as it lay on the
floor better than could Thomas, his brother, who was seven years older.

We know the deep personal interest that John Landseer felt in the boy,
for he preserved his work, and today in the South Kensington Museum we
can see a series of sketches made by Edwin Landseer, running from his
fifth year to manhood.

Thus do we trace the unfolding of his genius.

That young Landseer's drawing was a sort of play there is no doubt.
People who set very young children at tasks of grubbing out cold facts
from books come plainly within the province