The artist perhaps invented this pretty speech, but the "Good Night! Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma" is of the very spirit of the redundancy by which children hope in heaping words together to express accumulation of emotion. Du Maurier's children never make the nasty pert answers upon which, for their nearly impossible but always vulgar smartness, the providers of jokes about children for the comic papers generally depend. He is simply going on with his "novel"--_The Tale of the House_ it might be called--when he affords us realistic glimpses of nursery conversation. _Mamma_. "What is Baby crying for, Maggie?" _Maggie_. "I don't know." _Mamma_. "And what are you looking so indignant about?" _Maggie_. "That nasty, greedy dog's been and took and eaten my punge-take!" _Mamma_. "Why, I saw you eating a sponge-cake a minute ago!" _Maggie_. "O--that was Baby's." We need hardly labour the point of the "been and took and eaten" as an instance of felicity in reconstructing children's conversation, and making the verisimilitude to their grammar the charm of the reconstruction. _Ethel_. "Isn't it sad, Arthur? There's the drawing-room cleared for a dance, and all the dolls ready to begin, only they've got no partners!" _Arthur_. "Well, Ethel! There's the four gentlemen in my Noah's Ark; but they don't look as if they cared very much about _dancing_, you know!" (_February_ 24, 1872). _Ethel_. "And O, Mamma, do you know as we were coming along we saw a horrid woman with a red striped shawl drink something out of a bottle, and then hand it to some men. I'm sure she was tipsy." _Beatrice_ (who always looks on the best side of things). "Perhaps it was only Castor Oil, after all!" _A whispered appeal_. "Mamma! Mamma! don't scold him any more, it makes the room so dark." It is the _poetry_ of the nursery that is to be felt throughout du Maurier's art in this vein. And how well he knows the emotions of childhood. For instance, the large drawing "Farewell to Fair Normandy" (October 2, 1880), extending across two full pages of _Punch_, in which the children away for their seaside holiday leave the sands for the last time in a mournful procession. The sky is dimmed with an evening cloud. Du Maurier has compressed much poetry into the scene. It has been said that "there is only one art," and this seems to be proved on great occasions by those who can command more than one art for the expression of their feelings. It is difficult to say where in this picture the artist in du Maurier gives place to the poet, as difficult as it is to say before a picture of Rossetti. [Illustration: Illustration for "Wives and Daughters" _The Cornhill_, 1865.]