I do not pretend, of course, that in all of the great mass of book-illustration to-day there is any attempt to conform to this artistic standard--though the general average is higher. Let us therefore be clear as to what we mean by artistic illustration. To be regarded as a work of art, I take it, any graphic illustration must be composed of intrinsic decorative elements; its pictorial expression of the visualized idea must be controlled by such qualities, with harmonious balance, of form and tone as could in themselves give satisfaction as design or pattern apart from any question of literary or dramatic significance. When the expressive elements are perfectly fused with the decorative, then we get great illustration which may outlive all changes and fashions of taste. Thus, if we look with a sense of pictorial art at William Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job or his own poems, at the noble woodcut designs of Millais, Sandys, Boyd Houghton, and the other great illustrators of the “sixties,” or at Aubrey Beardsley’s “Rape of the Lock” designs, we shall see why all these illustrations are likely to live for their own sakes as works of art, and we shall gather confidence in the permanent artistic value of not a little of the book-illustration being done to-day. We shall also understand why so much of the popular illustration of the period immediately preceding the “sixties” has died with the literature that called it forth; why even the immortal “Phiz” lives artistically chiefly because the types and episodes he made visually familiar to us have long been absorbed in our popular memories; why even the great George Cruikshank, with his infinity of illustrative invention and wit, his enormous range and facility of graphic expression, yet with his passion for significant detail uncontrolled by the decorative instinct, seems quite old-fashioned--old-fashioned as no drawing of Charles Keene’s, whatever contemporary phase of life it presented, could ever become.