Both illustrate, however, a long course of evolution, and contain in themselves, it might be said, a compendium--or condensation--of the history of contemporary art in its various forms of development. The first impulse in art seems to answer to the primitive imitative impulse in children--the desire to embody the familiar forms about them--to characterize them in line and colour. The salient points of an animal, for instance, being first emphasized--as in the bone scratchings of the cave men--so that children's drawings and drawings of primitive peoples present a certain family likeness, allowing for difference of environment. They are abstract, and often almost symbolic in their characterization of form, and it is not difficult to imagine how letters and written language became naturally evolved through a system of hieroglyphics, starting from the unsystemized but irrepressible tendency of the human to record his linear ideas of rhythm on the one hand, or his impressions of nature on the other. It would seem that the illustrator or picture writer came first in the order of things, and the book afterwards--like the system we have heard of under modern editors of magazines, of the picture being done first and then written up to, or down to, by the author. Side by side with the evolution of letters and calligraphic art went on the evolution of the graphic power and the artistic sense, developing on the one hand towards close imitation of nature and dramatic incident, and on the other towards imaginative beauty, and systematic, organic ornament, more or less built upon a geometric basis, but ultimately bursting into a free foliation and flamboyant blossom, akin in inventive richness and variety to a growth of nature herself. The development of these two main directions of artistic energy may be followed throughout the whole world of art, constantly struggling, as it were, for the ascendancy, now one and now the other being paramount; but the history of their course, and the effect of their varying influences is particularly marked in the decoration and illustration of books. Although as a rule the decorative sense was dominant throughout the illuminated books of the Middle Ages, the illustrator, in the form of the miniaturist, is in evidence, and in some, especially in the later MSS., finally conquers, or rather absorbs, the decorator. There is a MS. in the Egerton collection in the British Museum (No. 943), "The Divina Commedia" of Dante, with miniatures by Italian artists of the fourteenth century, which may be taken as an early instance of the ascendancy of the illustrator, the miniatures being placed somewhat abruptly on the page, and with unusually little framework or associated ornament; and although more or less decorative in the effect of their simple design, and frank and full colour, the main object of their artists was to illustrate rather than to decorate the text. [Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY.