_ If I did, I'm very sorry: I never _meant_
to say a word like it: and, if you had written "I could make
it still more like, on darker paper; but I've no more at
hand. How long can you wait for me to get some?" I should
have replied, "Six weeks, or six _months_, if you
prefer it!"

I have already spoken of his love of nature, as opposed to the
admiration for the morbid and abnormal. "I want you," he writes to
Miss Thomson, "to do my fairy drawings from _life_. They would be
very pretty, no doubt, done out of your own head, but they will be ten
times as valuable if done from life. Mr. Furniss drew the pictures of
'Sylvie' from life. Mr. Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for
me, who resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he no more
needed one than I should need a multiplication-table to work a
mathematical problem!" On another occasion he urges the importance of
using models, in order to avoid the similarity of features which would
otherwise spoil the pictures: "Cruikshank's splendid illustrations
were terribly spoiled by his having only _one_ pretty female face
in them all. Leech settled down into _two_ female faces. Du
Maurier, I think, has only _one_, now. All the ladies, and all
the little girls in his pictures look like twin sisters."

It is interesting to know that Sir Noel Paton and Mr. Walter Crane
were, in Lewis Carroll's opinion, the most successful drawers of
children: "There are but few artists who seem to draw the forms of
children _con amore_. Walter Crane is perhaps the best (always
excepting Sir Noel Paton): but the thick outlines, which he insists on
using, seem to take off a good deal from the beauty of the result."

He held that no artist can hope to effect a higher type of beauty than
that which life itself exhibits, as the following words show:--

I don't quite understand about fairies losing "grace," if
too like human children. Of course I grant that to be like
some _actual_ child is to lose grace, because no living
child is perfect in form: many causes have lowered the race
from what God made it. But the _perfect_ human form,
free from these faults, is surely equally applicable to men,
and fairies, and angels? Perhaps that is what you mean--that
the Artist can imagine, and design, more perfect forms than
we ever find in life?

I have already referred several times to Miss Ellen Terry as having
been one of Mr. Dodgson's f