In _Rhymes and Roundelays_, illustrated by Birket Foster (Bogue, 1856), the designs are not without a trace of artificiality, but it contains also some of the earliest and best examples of a most accomplished draughtsman, and in it many popular blocks began a long career of 'starring,' until from guinea volumes some were used ultimately in children's primers and the like. _The Works of William Shakespeare_ illustrated by John Gilbert (Routledge, 1856-8) will doubtless be remembered always as his masterpiece. At a public dinner lately, an artist who had worked with Sir John Gilbert on the _Illustrated London News_, and in nearly all the books of the period illustrated by the group of draughtsmen with whom both are associated, spoke of his marvellous rapidity--a double-page drawing done in a single night. Yet so sure is his touch that in the mass of these hundreds of designs to Shakespeare you are not conscious of any scamping. Without being archæologically impeccable, they suggest the types and costumes of the periods they deal with, and, above all, represent embodiments of actual human beings. They stand apart from the grotesque caricatures of an earlier school, and the academic inanities of both earlier and later methods. Virile and full of invention, the book is a monument to an artist who has done so much that it is a pleasure to discover some one definite accomplishment that from size alone may be taken as his masterpiece, if merely as evidence that praise, scantily bestowed elsewhere, is limited by space only. [Illustration: FORD MADOX BROWN WILLMOTT'S 'POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,' 1857 THE PRISONER OF CHILLON]