Again the silence of art is noticeable. There was so little art contemporaneous with our greater literature, and the best of that was so closely confined to landscape, that it is all the more observable how meagre is the show in our picture galleries of any history of childhood. Now and then a portrait appears, the child usually of the artist’s patron, but there is little sign that artists seek in the life of children for subjects upon which to expend thought and power. They are not drawn to them, apparently, except when they appear in some foreign guise as beggars, where the picturesqueness of attire offers the chief motive. In illustration of this, I may be pardoned if I mention my own experience when conducting, a few years ago, an illustrated magazine for young people. I did my best to obtain pictures of child life from painters who were not merely professional book-illustrators, and the only two that I succeeded in securing were one by Mr. Lambdin, and Mr. La Farge’s design accompanying Browning’s poem of The Pied Piper. On the lower ground of illustrations of text, it was only now and then that I was able to obtain any simple, unaffected design, showing an understanding of a child’s figure and face. It was commonly a young woman who was most successful, and what her work gained in genuineness it was apt to lose in correctness of drawing. I shall be told that matters have improved since then, and shall be pointed to the current magazines of the same grade as the Riverside. I am quite willing to concede that the demand for work of this kind has had the effect of stimulating designers, but I maintain that the best illustrations in these magazines are not those which directly represent children. And when I say children, I mean those in whom consciousness is developed, not infants and toddlers, who are often represented with as much cleverness as other small animals and pets. It is more to the point that, while the introduction of processes and the substitution of photography for direct drawing on the wood have greatly enlarged the field from which wood-cuts may be drawn, there is little, if any, increase in the number of strong designs illustrative of childhood. Formerly the painter was deterred from contributing designs by the slight mechanical difficulties of drawing on boxwood. Unless he was in the way of such work, he disliked laying his brush down and taking up the pencil. Now everything is done for him, and his painting is translated by the engraver without the necessity of any help from him. Yet how rarely, with the magazines at hand to use his paintings, does the painter voluntarily seek such subjects!