all process blocks, and accordingly the present generation has no idea of what a steel engraving or a wood engraving is like. Modern pen drawing and modern tone are pictorially rich and surprisingly ingenious, but the absence of the technique of old engraving must of necessity have a permanent effect on the artistic outlook of the twentiethcentury child.

The collector may find delight in Bewick's woodcuts in the Looking Glass for the Mind, 1792, with its quaint pictures of Little Anthony and of Leonora and Adolphus. We know he served his apprenticeship to Beilby at Newcastle, and worked on "A Newly Invented Horn Book," "Battledores," and Primers" for children. When he was teaching children with his cuts of a Dog, a Fish, and an Eagle, he was himself learning his art of the white line.

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Among the most delightful children's books ever published are those with the designs of Randolph Caldecott; his "Nursery Books" never grow stale. Not only do they include all the wellknown nursery tales, but one finds whimsical illustrations of Heigh Ho! says Rowley," in "A Frog he would a wooing go," as well as lesser known rhymes such as "The Three Jovial Huntsmen," and there is Goldsmith's "Madam Blaize as well as Cowper's "John Gilpin"; though not strictly nursery, they fall in with the charm of a series of wonderful pictures printed in colour, which have appealed not only to child readers but to collectors.

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Children on the China Shelf.-The potter, in his search for subjects that would be at once artistic and have a quick sale, found in childhood and studies of children models ready to hand, which would lend themselves naturally to his art. Vases with elaborate painting, high as they undoubtedly are in ceramic art, are not on the same plane as the skilful manipulation of clay in simulation of the human figure. The symmetry of a vase is subject to the action of the fire in reducing it from its height when placed in the oven to roughly two-thirds that height. This is obviously not to be compared to the dangers and trials of the same process applied to delicately modelled figures. It is for this reason that all figures coming from the potter's hand should be treasured. In any case they should not be criticized too harshly. Those persons who have perhaps found fault with the insipid expression or want of firm character in porcelain figures may possibly reconsider their verdict, and commence to marvel that figures can be produced in porcelain at all.

The potter's children stand on a plane by themselves. From the day when Dwight, that master English potter, modelled his daughter Lydia, to the present time when Japanese figures of queer little maids cross the seas to please some European buyer, for a few shillings, the gallery of childhood with its inimitable fantasies has been exploited by the potter. In common with the painter, he has seen the intense pathos and beauty of budding

life. His dainty little figures have not the enduring soul of Gainsborough's brush. There is no "Blue Boy" of the china shelf to stand forth for all time. Sir Joshua's "Age of Innocence" finds no replica in porcelain. But in another art, there is to those who consider the technique and the intense task before the potter, sufficient joyousness and colour, and real crystallization of the momentary pose, to satisfy lovers of poetry and actuality. Each collector has his taste or his weakness; some have confined themselves to Toby jugs or to "monkey orchestras," others have found the potter's children a sweet and beautiful subject in which to specialize. It is inevitable that the crowd of English potters who derived inspiration from the artificial schools of ceramics on the Continent should themselves offer few native touches to the shelf of English china representing childhood. The Chelsea and the Derby and the Bow figures, perfect though they may be in technique, have in some respects little that is new to offer. There is a Derby figure of a "Boy with a Flute," which may represent a tiny musician of the period decked forth in eighteenth-century style, but Chelsea figures of children, "A boy playing a Flageolet," and its companion, are thin echoes of something Chinese. They were produced when Chinese taste governed English art from lac to teapots, and are as unEnglish as the mandarin crossing the bridge in the willow-pattern plate, or the exotic birds deftly painted with gorgeous plumage on Worcester