t it was designed for babies. But the context shows
that it was the unlettered adult, not the juvenile, who was addressed.
As the designs, obviously prepared for children, begin to appear, they
are almost entirely educational and by no means the work of the best
artists of the period. Even when they come to be numerous, their object
is seldom to amuse; they are didactic, and as a rule convey solemn
warnings. The idea of a draughtsman of note setting himself deliberately
to please a child would have been inconceivable not so many years ago.
To be seen and not heard was the utmost demanded of the little ones even
as late as the beginning of this century, when illustrated books
designed especially for their instruction were not infrequent.

[Illustration: "THE WALLS OF BABYLON." ILLUSTRATION FROM "A MUSEUM FOR
YOUNG GENTLEMEN AND LADIES" (S. CROWDER. 1790)]

As Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton pointed out in his charming essay, "The New
Hero," which appeared in the _English Illustrated Magazine_ (Dec. 1883),
the child was neglected even by the art of literature until Shakespeare
furnished portraits at once vivid, engaging, and true in Arthur and in
Mamillus. In the same essay he goes on to say of the child--the new
hero:

"And in art, painters and designers are vying with the poets and with
each other in accommodating their work to his well-known matter-of-fact
tastes and love of simple directness. Having discovered that the New
Hero's ideal of pictorial representation is of that high dramatic and
businesslike kind exemplified in the Bayeux tapestry, Mr. Caldecott, Mr.
Walter Crane, Miss Kate Greenaway, Miss Dorothy Tennant, have each tried
to surpass the other in appealing to the New Hero's love of real
business in art--treating him, indeed, as though he were Hotei, the
Japanese god of enjoyment--giving him as much colour, as much dramatic
action, and as little perspective as is possible to man's finite
capacity in this line. Some generous art critics have even gone so far
indeed as to credit an entire artistic movement, that of pre-Raphaelism,
with a benevolent desire to accommodate art to the New Hero's peculiar
ideas upon perspective. But this is a 'soft impeachment' born of that
loving kindness for which art-critics have always been famous."

[Illustration: "MERCURY AND THE WOODMAN." ILLUSTRATION FROM "BEWICK'S
SELECT FABLES." BY THOMAS BEWICK (1784)]

[Illustration: "THE BROTHER AND SISTER." ILLUSTRATION FROM "BEWICK'S