Nical models of real locomotives; or, to be more correct, they enjoy the make-believe with quite as great a zest. Hence, perhaps, in praising conscious art for children's literature, one is unwittingly pleasing older tastes; indeed, it is not inconceivable that the "prig" which lurks in most of us may be nurtured by too refined diet. Whether a child brought up wholly on the aesthetic toy-book would realise the greatness of Rembrandt's etchings or other masterpieces of realistic art more easily than one who had only

known the current pictures of cheap magazines, is not a question to be decided off-hand. To foster an artificial taste is not wholly unattended with danger; but if humour be present, as it is in the works of the best artists for the nursery, then all fear vanishes; good wholesome laughter is the deadliest bane to the prig-microbe, and will leave no infant lisping of the preciousness of Cimabue, or the wonder of Sandro Botticelli, as certain children were reported to

do in the brief days when the aesthete walked his faded way among us. That modern children's books will--some of them at least--take an honourable place in an iconogr