Picture-books and illustrated books are another independent little problem. It is a curious fact that it is not the beautiful lithographs of birds and animals, flocks and landscapes, children in irreproachable Russian dresses and short socks, seated in the corner of ancestral mahogany sofas, refreshing themselves from antique silver porringers, that the little living heads hang over by the hour on the nursery floor. It is much more likely to be the thunderous landscapes of the old Dutch woodcuts in Great-grandmama's Bible, the queer, chaotic, symbolistic plates of the _Mother-Play_; the wonderful prints of Comenius' _Orbis Pictus_; the casualties of John Leech's hunting fields. True, they delight in the charming details of all Kate Greenaway's books; and Walter Crane's pictures so rich in color and beautiful detail give ceaseless joy; but one must confess that they are a bit inclined to "shy" at pictures they know to be intended for them. Every nursery that can compass it should have as many as possible of the books illustrated in color by Boutet de Monvel. The children should never see comic illustrations of their nursery rhymes and stories. They are all banal as wit and trashy as art, substituting an ugly and distorted image for the possibly beautiful one the child might have made for himself. After they have passed out of infancy, they do not need pictures in their stories. The black-and-white print is inadequate when color and movement should be a part of the image, and children should have the discipline of relying entirely on themselves in visualizing the images of the text. There should also be in the "little library," or accessible to the little readers in the big one, beside the illustrated Bible, the one big volume of Shakespeare with Gilbert's pictures--an inexhaustible mine of life and art; Engelmann and Anderson's _Atlas of the Homeric Poems_, a _Dictionary of Classical Antiquities_, and an encyclopedia that the older children can use, should have a place on these shelves.