Among those who have never allowed themselves to be troubled by the art-for-art’s-sake grain of truth in a bushel of chaff is Edwin A. Abbey. As an artist he must largely stand or fall upon his merit as a teller of stories. Have his stories been intrinsically interesting? Is his way of telling them artistic? That he has won his way from a stool at the drawing table of Harper and Brothers to a seat in the Royal Academy will not of itself convince a great many people, who are of the opinion that the story-telling picture is just what attracts the English and is the bane of their Academy. So, to reach an acceptable estimate of Abbey’s rank as an artist, we must confine ourselves strictly to the character of his work, both in pen and ink and in paint. It was in 1871, when he was nineteen years old, that he passed from his student days at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts into the employment of the Harpers, becoming one of the firm’s band of illustrators, including, among others, Charles S. Reinhart, Howard Pyle, Joseph Pennel, and Alfred Parsons, who helped to draw attention in Europe to the superiority of the chief American illustrated monthlies. In 1878 came his first great opportunity, when he was commissioned to illustrate some of the poems of Herrick, and, in search of material, visited England, where, except for a few short visits to this country, he has remained ever since. He betook himself to Stratford-on-Avon and Bidford, and later to Broadway, in Worcestershire. Probably every true artist has within him a little world of his own, an island in the ocean of the world around him, a little spot of fact, on which flourish the trees and flowers and personages of his imagination. He is happy if circumstances permit him to work in it, and still more happy if his world of fancy has some correspondence to the actual world about him. Such was Abbey’s happiness in having his footsteps directed through rural England. On the other hand, it could have been no accident that put it in his way to illustrate an old-time poem. The whole tenor of his subsequent work, since he has been at liberty to choose his own subjects, proves that the bias of his temperament is toward the past: to the days of picturesque costume, to a period remote enough to justify his fancy in selecting what it would, and ignoring what it would not. Nor do I overlook the fact that Abbey from the first has shown an ability to create from within himself an environment for his conceptions. Yet, even so, he could not have lighted on a place more fertilizing to such a temperament than the English scenes among which he has moved, with their old-time associations and simple rural loveliness.