However, amid an active period of book-illustration in which the dominant idea was vivacious, scenic, and characteristic representation, with the decorative instinct largely to seek, if not practically absent, began suddenly the great period which we know as “the sixties.” Its opening was marked by Moxon’s publication in 1857 of an edition of Tennyson’s Poems. There was no attempt to make a beautiful book of it; the format, the type, the paper, the binding, were all quite ordinary; but among the illustrations happened to be masterpieces. For among the noted artists engaged upon the work--including Mulready and Clarkson Stanfield--were three young men who proved to be great illustrators, and these, by their wonderful designs for this volume, drawn direct upon the wood-blocks for facsimile engraving, initiated a movement that is remarkable in the history of British Art. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt brought to their task all the romantic and decorative pictorial ideals of their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and no more inspiring matter than Tennyson’s early poems could have been illustrated by such artists with such ideals. No sooner was it seen that, in the hands of such contemporary reproductive engravers as the Dalziels, Swain, Hooper, and Linton, the wood-block could offer opportunities to the graphic artist such as it had not offered since the age of Dürer, than most of the leading painters of the more imaginative order turned to it as a medium for expression. Book after book and magazine after magazine issued from the press with illustrations which were remarkable for fine expressive significance, true interpretative vision, and decorative beauty--designs, in fact, which created a new tradition in English book-illustration. To attempt any enumeration of these books and magazines of that amazing period, in which one may find masterpieces that would adorn the reputations of the greatest masters of design, were beyond the scope of this article. There was no attempt to make the books beautiful in themselves, with artistic relation between type and illustration, and harmonious decoration of the page; the designs held in themselves all that the books offered in the way of adornment. It must therefore suffice here to call to memory just the most individual and important of the artists whose work in line upon the wood-block made the years, roughly speaking, between 1860 and 1870 so gloriously memorable. Who shall say that John Everett Millais showed himself a greater artist in his paintings than he did in his black-and-white designs for “The Parables of Our Lord”--superb things--or his illustrations to Tennyson’s poems and Anthony Trollope’s novels? With his unfailing gift of vital interpretation, whether romantic or simply dramatic, allied to masterly command of design, he was the ideal illustrator. How splendidly effective, too, was the pictorial imagination of Dante Gabriel Rossetti