reproduced will serve as well as a
thousand to indicate their general style.

Some few of these books have contributed to later nursery folk-lore, as,
for example, the well known "Jack Horner," which is an extract from a
coarse account of the adventures of a dwarf.

One quality that is shared by all these earlier pictures is their
artlessness and often their absolute ugliness. Quaint is the highest
adjective that fits them. In books of the later period not a few blocks
of earlier date and of really fine design reappear; but in the
chap-books quite 'prentice hands would seem to have been employed, and
the result therefore is only interesting for its age and rarity. So far
these pictures need no comment, they foreshadow nothing and are derived
from nothing, so far as their design is concerned. Such interest as they
have is quite unconcerned with art in any way; they are not even
sufficiently misdirected to act as warnings, but are merely clumsy.

[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "GERMAN POPULAR STORIES." BY G.
CRUIKSHANK (CHARLES TILT. 1824)]

[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "GERMAN POPULAR STORIES." BY G.
CRUIKSHANK (CHARLES TILT. 1824)]

Children's books, as every collector knows, are among the most
short-lived of all volumes. This is more especially true of those with
illustrations, for their extra attractiveness serves but to degrade a
comely book into a dog-eared and untidy thing, with leaves sere and
yellow, and with no autumnal grace to mellow their decay. Long before
this period, however, the nursery artist has marked them for his own,
and with crimson lake and Prussian blue stained their pictures in all
too permanent pigments, that in some cases resist every chemical the
amateur applies with the vain hope of effacing the superfluous colour.

Of course the disappearance of the vast majority of books for children
(dating from 1760 to 1830, and even later) is no loss to art, although
among them are some few which are interesting as the 'prentice work of
illustrators who became famous. But these are the exceptions. Thanks to
the kindness of Mr. James Stone, of Birmingham, who has a large and most
interesting collection of the most ephemeral of all sorts--the little
penny and twopenny pamphlets--it has been possible to refer at first
hand to hundreds, of them. Yet, despite their interest as curiosities,
their art need not detain us here. The pictures are mostly trivial or
dull, and look like the products of ve