[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "KATAWAMPUS." BY ARCHIE MACGREGOR. (DAVID NUTT)]
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "TO TELL THE KING THE SKY IS FALLING." BY ALICE WOODWARD (BLACKIE AND SON. 1896)]
Mr. Harry Furniss's coloured toy-books--"Romps"--are too well known to need description, and many another juvenile volume owes its attraction to his facile pencil. Of these, the two later "Lewis Caroll's"--"Sylvia and Bruno," and "Sylvia and Bruno, Concluded," are perhaps most important. As a curious narrative, "Travels in the Interior" (of a human body) must not be forgotten. It certainly called forth much ingenuity on the part of the artist. In "Romps," and in all his work for children, there is an irrepressible sense of movement and of exuberant vitality in his figures; but, all the same, they are more like Fred Walker's idyllic youngsters having romps than like real everyday children.
Mr. Linley Sambourne's most ingenious pen has been all too seldom employed on children's books. Indeed, one that comes first to memory, the "New Sandford and Merton" (1872), is hardly entitled to be classed among them, but the travesty of the somewhat pedantic narrative, interspersed with fairly amusing anecdotes, that Thomas Day published in 1783, is superb. No matter how familiar it may be, it is simply impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, the sanctimonious tutor, or the naughty Tommy, as Mr. Sambourne has realised them. The "Anecdotes of the Crocodile" and "The Presumptuous Dentist" are no less good. The way he has turned a prosaic hat-rack into an instrument of torture would alone mark Mr. Sambourne as a comic draughtsman of the highest type. Nothing he has done in political cartoons seems so likely to live as these burlesques. A little known book, "The Royal Umbrella" (1888), which contains the delightful "Cat Gardeners" here reproduced, and the very well-known edition of Charles Kingsley's "Water Babies" (1886), are two other volumes which well display his moods of less unrestrained humour. "The Real Robinson Crusoe" (1893) and Lord Brabourne's (Knatchbull-Hugessen's) "Friends and Foes of Fairyland" (1886), well-nigh exhaust the list of his efforts in this direction.