These samples may serve to show that in the stories of by no means highly-gifted children we come face to face with interesting traits of the young mind, and can study some of the characteristic tendencies of early and primitive art.[226] Of the later efforts to imitate older art, as verse writing, the same cannot, I think, be said. Children’s verses so far as I have come across them are poor and stilted, showing all the signs of the cramping effect of models and rules to which the child-mind cannot easily accommodate itself, and wanting all true childish inspiration. No doubt, even in these choking circumstances, childish feeling may now and again peep out. The first prose compositions, letters before all if they may be counted art, give more scope for the expression of a child’s feeling and the characteristic movements of his thought, and might well repay study.[227] ----- Footnote 226: The child’s feeling for climax shown in these is further illustrated in a charming story taken down by Miss Shinn, but unfortunately too long to quote here. See _Overland Monthly_, vol. xxiii., p. 19. Footnote 227: Perez deals with children’s literary compositions in the work already quoted (chap. ix.). Cf. Paola Lombroso, _op. cit._, cap. viii. and ix. ----- There is one other department of this child-art which clearly does deserve to be studied with some care—drawing. And this for the very good reason that it is not wholly a product of our influence and education, but shows itself in its essential characteristics as a spontaneous self-taught activity of childhood which takes its rise, indeed, in the play-impulse. This will be the subject of the next essay. X. THE YOUNG DRAUGHTSMAN. _First Attempts to Draw._ A child’s first attempts at drawing are pre-artistic and a kind of play, an outcome of the instinctive love of finding and producing semblances of things illustrated in the last essay. Sitting at the table and covering a sheet of paper with line-scribble he is wholly self-centred, ‘amusing himself,’ as we say, and caring nothing about the production of “objective values”. Yet even in the early stages of infantile drawing the social element of art is suggested in the impulse of the small draughtsman to make his lines indicative of something to others’ eyes, as when he bids his mother look at the ‘man,’ ‘gee-gee,’ or what else he fancies that he has delineated.[228] And this, though crude enough and apt to shock the æsthetic sense of the matured artist by its unsightliness, is closely related to art, forming, indeed, in a manner a preliminary stage of pictorial design. ----- Footnote 228: