It is evident, as one glances back over the centuries, that the child occupies a new place in the world to-day. Excepting possibly certain royal infants, we do not find that great artists of the past addressed themselves to children. Are there any children's books illustrated by Dürer, Burgmair, Altdorfer, Jost Amman, or the little masters of Germany? Among the Florentine woodcuts do we find any designed for children? Did Rembrandt etch for them, or Jacob Beham prepare plates for their amusement? So far as I have searched, no single instance has rewarded me. It is true that the _naïveté_ of much early work tempts one to believe that it was designed for babies. But the context shows that it was the unlettered adult, not the juvenile, who was addressed. As the designs, obviously prepared for children, begin to appear, they are almost entirely educational and by no means the work of the best artists of the period. Even when they come to be numerous, their object is seldom to amuse; they are didactic, and as a rule convey solemn warnings. The idea of a draughtsman of note setting himself deliberately to please a child would have been inconceivable not so many years ago. To be seen and not heard was the utmost demanded of the little ones even as late as the beginning of this century, when illustrated books designed especially for their instruction were not infrequent. [Illustration: "THE WALLS OF BABYLON." ILLUSTRATION FROM "A MUSEUM FOR YOUNG GENTLEMEN AND LADIES" (S. CROWDER. 1790)] As Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton pointed out in his charming essay, "The New Hero," which appeared in the _English Illustrated Magazine_ (Dec. 1883), the child was neglected even by the art of literature until Shakespeare furnished portraits at once vivid, engaging, and true in Arthur and in Mamillus. In the same essay he goes on to say of the child--the new hero: "And in art, painters and designers are vying with the poets and with each other in accommodating their work to his well-known matter-of-fact tastes and love of simple directness. Having discovered that the New Hero's ideal of pictorial representation is of that high dramatic and businesslike kind exemplified in the Bayeux tapestry, Mr. Caldecott, Mr. Walter Crane, Miss Kate Greenaway, Miss Dorothy Tennant, have each tried to surpass the other in appealing to the New Hero's love of real business in art--treating him, indeed, as though he were Hoteï, the Japanese god of enjoyment--giving him as much colour, as much dramatic action, and as little perspective as is possible to man's finite capacity in this line. Some generous art critics have even gone so far indeed as to credit an entire artistic movement, that of pre-Raphaelism, with a benevolent desire to accommodate art to the New Hero's peculiar ideas upon perspective. But this is a 'soft impeachment' born of that loving kindness for which art-critics have always been famous."