WALTER CRANE.--This popular artist was born in Liverpool, August 15, 1845, his father being sometime secretary and treasurer of the (then) Liverpool Academy. After a boyhood spent mostly at Torquay the family came to London in 1857. In 1859 he became a pupil of Mr. W. J. Linton, the well-known engraver, and remained with him for three years. About 1865 he first saw the work of Burne-Jones at the Society of Painters in Water Colours. These drawings, and some Japanese toy-books which fell in his way, have no doubt strongly influenced his style; but the earlier pre-Raphaelites and the _Once a Week_ school had been eagerly studied before. Although Mr. Crane, with his distinctly individual manner, is not a typical artist of the sixties any more than of the seventies, or of to-day, and although his style had hardly found its full expression at that time, except in the toy-books, yet no record of the period could be complete without a notice of one whose loyalty to a particular style has done much to found the modern 'decorative school.' [Illustration: WALTER CRANE 'GOOD WORDS' 1863, p. 795 TREASURE-TROVE] His first published drawing, _A man in the coils of a serpent_, appears in a quite forgotten magazine called _Entertaining Things_, vol. i. 1861, p. 327 (Virtue); others, immature, and spoilt by the engraver, are in _The Talking Fire-irons_ and similar tracts by the Rev. H. B. Power. In many of the magazines, of which the contents are duly noted,--_Good Words_, _Once a Week_, _The Argosy_, _London Society_, etc.--reference has been already made to each of his drawings as it appeared therein. A bibliography of his work, to be exhaustive, would take up more room than space permitted here. As it will be the task of the one, whoever he may be, who undertakes to chronicle English illustrations of the seventies, it may be left without further notice. For, with the exception of the _New Forest_ (1862), all the other books which may be called masterpieces of their order, _Grimms' Household Stories_, _The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde_, _The Baby's Bouquet_, _Baby's Opera_, _Æsop's Fables_, _Flora's Feast_, _Queen Summer_, the long series of Mrs. Molesworth's children's books, many 'coloured boards' for novels, and the rest, belong to a later period.