OVER-ILLUSTRATION.

THE pictorial embellishment of books is by no means a modern device. The first attempts at the preservation of thoughts, of facts, and of events, or at the perpetuation and enforcement of religious opinions, were symbolical, or literally figurative. Illustration began upon the walls of temples or of tombs, and, without the adjunct of a typographical text, spoke to future generations of the great unprinted book of human life. Those who, with much painstaking, resorted to drawing, had a double purpose. There was the immediate gratification of the eye, but there was also that indefinable desire to be remembered, and to be known even to the end of time, which of all animals, so far as we know, man alone possesses. Painting and drawing supplemented architecture and sculpture. All faith seeks an outward and formal expression, and all mythologies tend to a material exposition. This is often employed long after its original significance has passed into oblivion, and modern Christianity sometimes uses types that had their origin in Egypt and in India centuries before the monotheistic idea was developed by the patriarchs and prophets. To most these types are esoteric, and have hardly the suggestion even of an exoteric meaning; and it is not improbable that we are now employing some symbols of our own device which in the far-off future will be entirely unintelligible. As the world becomes more and more venerable, we may be Egytians or Assyrians to our distant successors.

Picture illustration belongs to the infancy of modern literature. The block-books were first without text, or the text was on the same page with the picture. Generally there was no letter ing except such as sufficed for an explanation of the subject. The block-books, combining text and illustration, naturally fol lowed. Here, too, the pictures were the important and prominent

part of the book. Many of them were such books as were made for children in the last century. The prints were unideal, rude, and incongruous, but after a fashion they told the story. Almost all of them were religious. Many of them were simply childish, although they were intended, undoubtedly, for adults. Sometimes the print was on a single sheet. It is thought that these books were originally designed as suggestions of subjects to the ignorant clergy, but they were soon found in the hands of the people. As the text, when there was any, was always in Latin, it was of no value to them. The story was told by the picture. These books were of no use to men of letters, and occupied something like the position of the dime novel, or the lower class of illustrated newspapers, of the present day. Sometimes the pictures were printed and the text written. After the block-books were given up, these pictures were frequently used for ornamenting typographic work. This combination of letterpress and pictures, coeval with the discovery of printing, though passing through many fluctuations of public taste, has never been entirely abandoned. The Bible, and books of travel, poetry, and romance, were continually and profusely illustrated. Small volumes of limited cost had copper frontispieces and title-pages. The Lykens Bible, printed in the sixteenth century, had almost as many pictures as Doré's. No chap-book was so poor and rude as not to have one or two prints, however inartistic. Prayerbooks for the people were almost always thus illustrated, if not enriched. Certain wood-engravings, having become popular, were used year after year, until they were incapable of any further service. The pictorial adornment of all important English books during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was upon a careful and liberal if not an extensive scale, the coppers being often on the same page with the text. Cave's "Lives of the Apostles" (1676) has, besides a full-page copper frontispiece, a folding copper of two pages, with twenty-eight smaller copies printed upon the page. If a poem like "Hudibras" was to be reprinted, an artist like Hogarth was employed to illustrate it. Very rich authors could print as sumptuously as they pleased. A copy (two volumes, 1729) of the works of Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, has a noble folding portrait of that author, engraved by Vertue after Kneller, another large plate of the poet's monument, engraved by Foudrinier, and twenty smaller coppers (including initial letters) worked on the printed

page, unsigned, but probably also by Foudrinier. To come down to modern times, "The Hermit of Warkworth," by Bishop Percy (1771), a mere pamphlet of fifty-two pages, has a beautiful copper by Taylor, printed on the title-page, and the lettering tells us that this was executed through the liberality of the Duke of Northumberland. A "Dissertation on Oriental Gardening," by Sir William Chambers (1772), a pamphlet of ninetytwo pages, has a fine copper on the title-page designed by Cipriani, and engraved by F. Bartolozzi, with two smaller prints by that engraver; and the whole dedication to the King is engraved on copper-"very pretty prints," as the author calls them in a letter to Voltaire, while deprecating "the nonsense" of his own writing. We have given these as minor examples of the illustrations of the last century. The English books of that period were sufficiently elegant without carrying pictorial effort too far for good taste and human patience.

It is a noteworthy fact that the first step in the direction of a more profuse illustration should have been backward in the direction of the "Bible for the Poor," and similar ancient productions-the first step, we mean, substantially. In the mere skill exhibited, of course the modern picture-books were infinitely superior, however different upon the point of realism. But in the latest as well as in the earliest time, there was the same concession to the limited intellectual capacity of readers. There could be no books fitted to catch the sixpences of the people without pictures. All the periodicals designed for the patronage of the cottage, of the farm-house, of the manufacturing towns, swarmed with prints. This was the sixteenth century over again. The apology was hardly candid. The real design was to sell the "Penny Magazine"; the pretense was to increase the sense of art among the lower classes. All the workmen were to become cognoscenti, and to be able to tell the difference between an Andrea del Sarto and a Caravaggio. The actual motive was to catch the eye of children of a larger growth. A tolerably well engraved wood-cut after the "Transfiguration" could give no idea of that work specially worth having; no more, in fact, than the most general notion of the composition of the picture. It was not of so much value to the illiterate reader as a description of the work in prose by Mr. Ruskin would be. Yet the Society that printed the "Penny Magazine" is entitled to the credit of a high and honorable aim; and it failed only through

the fallacy of supposing that the eye could be made to do the work of the mind, and that the uneducated, without regard to a hundred adverse conditions, would spring at once to an appreciation of what is greatest in art. The end was, that the device of illustration passed into the hands of those who better understood what such readers wanted, and who could furnish ad libitum the coarse, the striking, and the realistic.

The ornamentation of manuscript books in the middle ages, and before the invention of printing, was carried to great elegance and perfection. Although black was the color of ink usually preferred, on account of its greater legibility, texts were written sometimes in blue, purple, green, gold, and silver inks. For the border, pictures, and initials, the work was passed to the designer, and from his hands to those of the illuminator. Mr. De Vinne, in his "Invention of Printing," says: "The gravest truths were hedged in with the most childish conceits. Angels, butterflies, goblins, clowns, birds, snails, and monkeys, sometimes in artistic, much oftener in grotesque, and sometimes in highly offensive positions, are to be found in the illuminated borders of copies of the gospels and the writings of the fathers." This was mere ornamentation, and not illustration; but stories, sometimes from the Scriptures, were embossed upon the leathern covers. Books of love and song were manufactured in a specially dainty manner, for the use of ladies. Illustrations in miniature were produced, and the books were bound with corresponding elegance. Of such books it is hardly necessary to say the prices were often enormous. This style of book-making continued even to the seventeenth century, and for a long time printed books were looked upon as vulgar by fastidious collectors.

We cannot, of course, set aside practical values. There are certain departments of literature and of scientific learning in which an appeal to the eye appears to be necessary, or if not so absolutely, at least it is so convenient that it would be a waste of time and labor not to resort to it. This is true of mathematics, of mechanical demonstrations, of the physical sciences, of manuals of navigation, of maps and charts, and of topographical surveying generally. It is equally true of architecture, and of mensuration and proportion, as applied to machinery. The inventor must draw his plan upon paper before he can construct his working model. In the compilation of encyclopædias, drawings save space and secure accurate comprehension. It is draw

ing that renders objective teaching on a general scale possible. In natural history, no possible verbal description of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, or of fishes could be either so rapid or so effective as a pictorial representation. In popular philological dictionaries, some engravings have been found useful; while in newspapers, in which space is really valuable, illustrated advertisements have been abandoned. The proprietors of such journals hardly want them at any price, nor would they often repay the advertiser for the large rates demanded. Prints are used, though sparingly, in the advertising supplements of the monthly magazines.

The ordinary purpose of an illustration is to explain, to elucidate, to render clear what is obscure or abstruse; and this is doubtless the secondary object of the pictorial embellishment of works of literary character. Used in this way, it differs from pictures designed to enhance the sumptuousness of a volume, and to increase its typographical elegance and bibliographical value, which now appears to be the primary intention. The writer of a book of travels may not have the faculty, by verbal description, of bringing to the mind of his readers the beauties of a landscape, even if he were sure of that reader's capacity or attention, and so the pictorial is the natural expedient. The glowing pages of Mr. Ruskin attest that a man of genius is not at the mercy of such resources. The more perfect the letterpress, the less it needs graphic aid, whatever may be thought of a purely suggested and ideal treatment of the text. A picture might be made from Shakespeare's description of the Cliff of Dover, but no picture could add to the sense that he awakens of its loftiness. The fishermen walking on the beach like mice, the tall bark diminished to a cock, and especially the surge murmuring so far down as to be inaudible, could not be put into a picture at all, nor would the choughs and crows or the samphire-gatherers tell much upon canvas; nothing of these but mere imitation, the lowest form of art, being available. Not Turner himself could have added anything from his palette to the exquisite opening of the Fifth Book of "Paradise Lost"to the rosy steps of morn advancing, and sowing the earth with orient pearl; nor could there be any painting of the fuming rills and the shrill matin song of birds on every bough. How far can a wood-engraving, or an etching, or steel or copper reproduce a scene where all depends upon sound and color? These