some of them at least--take
an honourable place in an iconography of nineteenth-century art, many of
the illustrations here reproduced are in themselves sufficient to prove.

[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "GOULD'S BOOK OF FAIRY TALES." BY
ARTHUR GASKIN. (METHUEN AND CO.)]

[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "LULLABY LAND" BY CHARLES ROBINSON.
(JOHN LANE. 1897)]

After so many pages devoted to the subject, it might seem as if the mass
of material should have revealed very clearly what is the ideal
illustration for children. But "children" is a collective term, ranging
from the tastes of the baby to the precocious youngsters who dip into
Mudie books on the sly, and hold conversations thereon which astonish
their elders when by chance they get wind of the fact. Perhaps the
belief that children can be educated by the eye is more plausible than
well supported. In any case, it is good that the illustration should be
well drawn, well coloured; given that, whether it be realistically
imitative or wholly fantastic is quite a secondary matter. As we have
had pointed out to us, the child is not best pleased by mere portraits
of himself; he prefers idealised children, whether naughtier and more
adventurous, or absolute heroes of romance. And here a strange fact
appears, that as a rule what pleases the boy pleases the girl also; but
that boys look down with scorn on "girls' books." Any one who has had
to do with children knows how eagerly little sisters pounce upon books
owned by their brothers. Now, as a rule, books for girls are confined to
stories of good girls, pictures of good girls, and mildly exciting
domestic incidents, comic or tragic. The child may be half angel; he is
undoubtedly half savage; a Pagan indifference to other people's pain,
and grim joy in other people's accidents, bear witness to that fact.
Tender-hearted parents fear lest some pictures should terrify the little
ones; the few that do are those which the child himself discovers in
some extraordinary way to be fetishes. He hates them, yet is fascinated
by them. I remember myself being so appalled by a picture that is still
keenly remembered. It fascinated me, and yet was a thing of which the
mere memory made one shudder in the dark--the said picture representing
a benevolent negro with Eva on his lap, from "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a
blameless Sunday-school inspired story. The horrors of an early folio of
Foxe's "Martyrs," of a grisly "Bunyan," with terrific pic