always "hedging" and playing for safety, felt compelled to accord a
certain amount of praise to the new enterprise.

It is true that "Felix Summerley" created only one type of the modern
book. Possibly the "stories turned into satires" to which he alludes are
the entirely amusing volumes by F. H. Bayley, the author of "A New Tale
of a Tub." As it happened that these volumes were my delight as a small
boy, possibly I am unduly fond of them; but it seems to me that their
humour--_a la_ Ingoldsby, it is true--and their exuberantly comic
drawings, reveal the first glimpses of lighter literature addressed
specially to children, that long after found its masterpieces in the
"Crane" and "Greenaway" and "Caldecott" Toy Books, in "Alice in
Wonderland," and in a dozen other treasured volumes, which are now
classics. The chief claim for the Home Treasury series to be considered
as the advance guard of our present sumptuous volumes, rests not so much
upon the quality of their designs or the brightness of their literature.
Their chief importance is that in each of them we find for the first
time that the externals of a child's book are most carefully considered.
Its type is well chosen, the proportions of its page are evidently
studied, its binding, even its end-papers, show that some one person was
doing his best to attain perfection. It is this conscious effort,
whatever it actually realised, which distinguishes the result from all
before.

It is evident that the series--the Home Treasury--took itself seriously.
Its purpose was Art with a capital A--a discovery, be it noted, of this
period. Sir Henry Cole, in a footnote to the very page whence the
quotation above was extracted, discusses the first use of "Art" as an
adjective denoting the _Fine_ Arts.

[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "HOUSEHOLD STORIES FROM GRIMM." BY
WALTER CRANE (MACMILLAN AND CO. 1882)]

Here it is more than ever difficult to keep to the thread of this
discourse. All that South Kensington did and failed to do, the aesthetic
movement of the eighties, the new gospel of artistic salvation by
Liberty fabrics and De Morgan tiles, the erratic changes of fashion in
taste, the collapse of Gothic architecture, the triumph of Queen Anne,
and the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineties--in short, all the
story of Art in the last fifty years, from the new Law Courts to the
Tate Gallery, from Felix Summerley to a Hollyer photograph, from the
introduction of glyptogra