And in the last, here reproduced, we see them when
"Their prity lips with blackberries were all besmeared and dyed,
And when they saw the darksome night, they sat them down and cried."
But here it is more probable that it was the tragedy which attracted readers, as the Police News attracts to-day, and that it became a child's favourite by the accident of the robins burying the babes.
The example from the "History of Sir Richard Whittington" needs no comment.
A very condensed version of "Robinson Crusoe" has blocks of distinct, if archaic, interest. The three here given show a certain sense of decorative treatment (probably the result of the artist's inability to be realistic), which is distinctly amusing. One might select hundreds of woodcuts of this type, but those here 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 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.