I have already mentioned Mr. Walter Crane and the fanciful and decorative charm of his colour-books. It was on the wood-block in the “sixties” and “seventies” that he began his long and distinguished career as a book-illustrator, and, with his delicate feeling for expressive line and the harmoniously decorated page, he has produced book after book, in which Shakespeare or Spenser, William Morris, the beloved Grimm, or the anonymous authors of immortal fairy tale and nursery rhyme, have inspired his graphic fancy to sweet and dainty picturings, whether in colour or in black-and-white. Genuine picture-books his, with the pictorial adornment extending from end-paper to end-paper, and the pages bearing their pictures happily balanced with their letterings amid decorative borders. To name even the best of his books would involve quite a long catalogue. Turning from the veteran’s sweet and gracious simplicity of fancy to the wizardry of Mr. Arthur Rackham’s alertly imaginative art, with its wide-ranged flights of grotesque or romantic fantasy, is like going from a field of daisies, daffodils, and bluebells into a garden of wonderful exotics. Mr. Rackham stands apart from all the other illustrators of the day; his genius is so thoroughly original. Scores of others have depicted fairyland and wonderland, but who else has given us so absolutely individual and persuasively suggestive a vision of their marvels and allurements? Whose elves are so elfish, whose witches and gnomes are so convincingly of their kind, as Mr. Rackham’s? His line, with its distinctive accent, is his very own; so are his colour-tones; and no little of the secret of his success lies in a subtly harmonious intimacy between design and colour-scheme adapted with peculiarly sympathetic understanding to the capacity and limitations of the photographic mediums of reproduction. In the printed drawings of Mr. Rackham we find the three-colour process never forced, but always at its best, and his happily balanced tones seem to suggest the very atmosphere of mystery and enchantment proper to those worlds of romance and faëry which this fascinating artist delights to picture. But whether he expresses his visions in colour or black-and-white, he gives always new meanings to old tales. Looking at his drawings, one feels more at home even in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one wonders with Alice afresh and more zestfully, frolics again with childish seriousness among the fairy tales, and gives oneself up as readily to the romantic spell of the “Nibelungen Ring” as to the whimsical supernaturalness of the beasts and birds of Æsop and the nursery rhyme. With all this, Mr. Rackham’s pictorial invention is essentially decorative.