I should say at once that sincere graphic or naturalistic drawing, with individual character and style, is always preferable to merely lifeless, purely imitative, and tame repetition in so-called decorative work. [Illustration: HENRY PAYNE. FROM "A BOOK OF CAROLS." (ALLEN, 1893.)] [Illustration: F. MASON. FROM "HUON OF BORDEAUX." (ALLEN, 1895.)] [Illustration: GERTRUDE M. BRADLEY. THE CHERRY FESTIVAL. (FROM A PEN DRAWING.)] [Illustration: MARY NEWILL. PORLOCK. (FROM A PEN DRAWING.)] [Sidenote: DECORATIVE PRINCIPLES.] While I claim that certain decorative considerations such as plan, scale balance, proportion, quantity, relation to type, are essential to really beautiful book illustration, I do not in the least wish to ignore the clever work of many contemporary illustrators because they only care to be illustrators pure and simple, and prefer to consider a page of paper, or any part of it unoccupied by type, as a fair field for a graphic sketch, with no more consideration for its relation to the page itself or the rest of the book, than an artist usually feels when he jots down something from life in his sketch-book. [Illustration: CELIA LEVETUS. A BOOKPLATE.] I think that book illustration should be something more than a collection of accidental sketches. Since one cannot ignore the constructive organic element in the formation--the idea of the book itself--it is so far inartistic to leave it out of account in designing work intended to form an essential or integral part of that book. I do not, however, venture to assert that decorative illustration can only be done in _one_ way--if so, there would be an end in that direction to originality or individual feeling. There is nothing absolute in art, and one cannot dogmatize, but it seems to me that in all designs certain conditions must be acknowledged, and not only acknowledged but accepted freely, just as one would accept the rules of a game before attempting to play it. The rules, the conditions of a sport or game, give it its own peculiar character and charm, and by means of them the greatest amount of pleasure and keenest excitement is obtained in the long run, just as by observing the conditions, the limitations of an art or handicraft, we shall extract the greatest amount of pleasure for the worker and beauty for the beholder. [Sidenote: THE DIAL.]