If Wayside Poesies (Routledge, 1867) is not the finest illustrated book of the Christmas season of 1866, it is in the very front rank. Its eighteen drawings by G. J. Pinwell are among the best things he did; the five by Fred Walker are also well up to his best manner, and the nineteen by J. W. North include some of the most exquisite landscapes he ever set down in black and white. It was really one of Messrs. Dalziels' projects, and its publishers were only distributors; so that the credit—and it is not slight—of producing this admirable volume belongs to the popular engravers whose names occur in one capacity or another in almost every paragraph of this chronicle. Still more full of good things, but all reprinted, is Touches of Nature by Eminent Artists (Strahan, 1866). This folio volume, 'into which is gathered much of the richest fruit of Strahan and Company's magazines,' does not belie its dedication. As almost every one of its ninety-eight subjects is referred to in the record of the various magazines whence they were collected, it will suffice to note that it contains three by Sandys, nine by Fred Walker, four by Millais, five by A. Boyd Houghton, eight by G. J. Pinwell, two by Lawless, and many by J. W. North, W. Small, J. Pettie, G. Du Maurier, J. Tenniel, J. D. Watson, Robert Barnes, with specimens of Charles Keene, J. Mahoney, Marcus Stone, W. Orchardson, F. J. Shields, Paul Gray, H. H. Armstead, and others.

A volume of even greater interest is Millais's Collected Illustrations (Strahan, 1866). The eighty drawings on wood include many subjects originally published in Lays of the Holy Land, Once a Week, Tennyson's Poems, Good Words, Orley Farm, etc. etc. Copies in good condition are not often in the market; but it should be the blue riband of every collector, for the blocks here receive more careful printing than that allowed by the exigencies of their ordinary publication, and, free from any gold border, set on a large and not too shiny page, they tell out as well as one could hope to find them. As you linger over its pages you miss many favourites, for it is by no means an exhaustive collection even from the sources mentioned; but it is representative and full of superb work, interspersed though it be with the less fine things done while the great draughtsman was still hampered by the conventions of Mulready and Maclise.

Idyllic Pictures (Cassell, 1867) is another reprinted collection, this time selected entirely from one magazine, The Quiver. It contains a fine Sandys here called October, elsewhere The Advent of Winter, whereof the artist complained bitterly of the 'cutting.' In March 1884, the Art Journal contained a very excellent paper on 'Frederick Sandys,' by J. M. Gray, where the original drawing for this subject is reproduced by process. The more important things in Idyllic Pictures are: G. J. Pinwell's Faded Flowers (p. 13), Sailor's Valentine (p. 47), The Angel's Song (p. 73), The Organ-man (p. 121), and Straight On (p. 169); A. Boyd Houghton's Wee Rose Mary (p. 89), St. Martin (p. 181), and Sowing and Reaping (p. 189); Paul Gray's Cousin Lucy (Frontispiece), A Reverie (p. 17), By the Dead (p. 21), Mary's Wedding-day (p. 141), and The Holy Light (p. 193); W. Small's Between the Cliffs (p. 29), My Ariel (p. 43), A Retrospect (p. 85), Babble (p. 109), and Church Bells (p. 173); T. Morten's Izaak Walton (p. 69) and Hassan (p. 81); M. E. Edwards's A Lullaby (p. 49), Seeing Granny (p. 117), and Unrequited (p. 129), with others by the artists already named, and R. Barnes, H. Cameron, R. P. Leitch, C. J. Staniland, and G. H. Thomas.

Two Centuries of Song, selected by Walter Thornbury (Sampson Low, 1867), is a book almost exactly on the lines of those of the earlier sixties, which seems at first sight to be out of place amid the works of the newer school. It has nineteen full-page drawings, set in ornamental borders, which, printed in colours, decorate (? disfigure) every page of the book. The illustrations, engraved by W. J. Linton, Gavin Smith, H. Harral, are by eminent hands: H. S. Marks, T. Morten, W. Small, G. Leslie, and others. The frontispiece, Paying Labourers, temp. Elizabeth, by the first named, is very typical; Phyllis, by G. Leslie, a pretty half-mediæval, half-modern 'decorative' subject; and Colin and Phœbe, by W. Small, a delightful example of a broadly-treated landscape, with two figures in the distance—a really notable work. In my own copy, freely annotated with most depreciatory criticisms of text and pictures in pencil by a former owner, the illustration (p. 138) has vanished, but on its fly-leaf the late owner has written—

'This verse its picture had,
A vulgar lass and lout;
The wood-cut was so bad
That I would cut it out.'

That it is signed G. W. is a coincidence more curious than pleasing to me, and I quote the quatrain chiefly to show that the term 'wood-cut' for 'wood-engraving' has been in common use unofficially, as well as officially, all through this century. Nevertheless it is a distinct gain to differentiate between the diverse methods, by refusing to regard the terms as synonymous.

G. DU MAURIER

'STORY OF A FEATHER'
p. 63

'SEND THE CULPRIT
FROM THE HOUSE
INSTANTLY'