[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 very poorly equipped draughtsmen and cheap engravers. Some, in pamphlet shape, contain nursery rhymes and little stories, others are devoted to the alphabet and arithmetic. Amongst them are many printed on card, shaped like the cover of a bank-book. These were called battledores, but as Mr. Tuer has dealt with this class in "The Horn Book" so thoroughly, it would be mere waste of time to discuss them here.
Mr. Elkin Mathews also permitted me to run through his interesting collection, and among them were many noted elsewhere in these pages, but the rest, so far as the pictures are concerned, do not call for detailed notice. They do, indeed, contain pictures of children--but mere "factual" scenes, as a rule--without any real fun or real imagination. Those who wish to look up early examples will find a large and entertaining variety among "The Pearson Collection" in the National Art Library at South Kensington Museum.