r, sympathetic, human, and not involving a quest of
style for which color is really indispensable, is a mistress at whose
service there is no derogation in placing one's self. To do little
things instead of big _may_ be a derogation; a great deal will depend
upon the way the little things are done. Besides, no work of art is
absolutely little. I grow bold and even impertinent as I think of the
way Mr. Rein-hart might scatter the smaller coin. At any rate, whatever
proportion his work in this line may bear to the rest, it is to be hoped
that nothing will prevent him from turning out more and more to play
the rare faculty that produces it. His studies of American _moeurs_ in
association with Mr. Warner went so far on the right road that we
would fain see him make all the rest of the journey. They made us ask
straightway for more, and were full of intimations of what was behind.
They showed what there is to see--what there is to guess. Let him carry
the same inquiry further, let him carry it all the way. It would be
serious work and would abound in reality; it would help us, as it were,
to know what we are talking about. In saying this I feel how much I
confirm the great claims I just made for the revival of illustration.

ALFRED PARSONS

It would perhaps be extravagant to pretend, in this embarrassed age,
that Merry England is still intact; but it would be strange if the
words "happy England" should not rise to the lips of the observer of Mr.
Alfred Parsons' numerous and delightful studies of the gardens, great
and small, of his country. They surely have a representative value in
more than the literal sense, and might easily minister to the quietest
complacency of patriotism. People whose criticism is imaginative will
see in them a kind of compendium of what, in home things, is at once
most typical and most enviable; and, going further, they will almost
wish that such a collection might be carried by slow stages round the
globe, to kindle pangs in the absent and passions in the alien. As
it happens to be a globe the English race has largely peopled, we can
measure the amount of homesickness that would be engendered on the
way. In fact, one doubts whether the sufferer would even need to be of
English strain to attach the vision of home to the essentially lovable
places that Mr. Parsons depicts. They seem to generalize and typify
the idea, so that every one may feel, in every case, that he has a
sentimental property