'GOLDEN THOUGHTS FROM
GOLDEN FOUNTAINS'
LOVE
W. SMALL
'GOLDEN THOUGHTS FROM
GOLDEN FOUNTAINS'
MARK THE GREY-HAIRED
MAN
In 1869 The Nobility of Life (Warne), an anthology, edited by L. Valentine, is attractive, less by reason of its coloured plates after J. D. Watson, C. Green, E. J. Poynter, and others, than from its headpieces, by A. Boyd Houghton (pp. 26, 106, 122, 136, 146, 178), Francis Walker (pp. 82, 170), J. Mahoney (p. 98), which, subsidiary as they appear here, are in danger of being overlooked. Carmina Crucis (Bell and Daldy, 1860), poems by Dora Greenwell, has two or three decorative pieces, by G. D. L[eslie], which might be attributed to the influence of the Century Guild Hobby Horse, if direct evidence did not antedate them by twenty years. Miss Kilmansegg, illustrated by Seccombe; The Water Babies, Sir Noel Paton and P. Skelton; In Fairyland, R. Doyle (Longmans); Vikram and the Vampire, E. Griset (Longmans), and Æsop's Fables (Cassell), with one hundred clever and humorous designs, by the same artist, are among the few others that are worth naming.
Several series of volumes, illustrated by various hands, may be noticed out of their due order. For the date of the first volume is often far distant from the last, and yet, as the series maintained a certain coherency, it would be confusing to spread its record over a number of years and necessitate continual reiteration of facts.
The Choice Series of selections from the poets, published by Messrs. Sampson Low and Co., include several volumes issued some time before they were included as part of this series. The ideal of all is far more akin to that of the early fifties—when the original editions of several of these were first issued—than to that of the sixties. They include Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy (1857), Campbell's Pleasures of Hope (1855), Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (1857), Goldsmith's Deserted Village and Vicar of Wakefield, Gray's Elegy (1853), Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, Milton's L'Allegro, Warton's The Hermit, Wordsworth's Pastoral Poems, and Rogers's Pleasures of Memory (1864). All the volumes, but the last, have wood-engravings by various hands after drawings by Birket Foster, Harrison Weir, Gilbert and others; but in the Pleasures of Memory 'the large illustrations' are produced by a new method without the aid of an engraver, and some little indulgence is asked for them on the plea of the inexperience of the artists in this process. 'The drawing is made' (to continue the quotation) 'with an etching needle, or any suitable point, upon a glass plate spread with collodion. It is then photographed [? printed] upon a prepared surface of wax, and from this an electrotype is formed in relief which is printed with the type.' Samuel Palmer, J. D. Watson, Charles Green, and others are the artists to whom this reference applies, and the result, if not better than the best contemporary engraving, is certainly full of interest to-day.