e over the dwindling fields
that are still left to conquer. Such art as Alfred Parsons'--such an
accomplished translation of local aspects, translated in its turn by
cunning hands and diffused by a wonderful system of periodicity through
vast and remote communities, has, I confess, in a peculiar degree, the
effect that so many things have in this age of multiplication--that
of suppressing intervals and differences and making the globe seem
alarmingly small. Vivid and repeated evocations of English rural
things--the meadows and lanes, the sedgy streams, the old orchards and
timbered houses, the stout, individual, insular trees, the flowers under
the hedge and in it and over it, the sweet rich country seen from the
slope, the bend of the unformidable river, the actual romance of the
castle against the sky, the place on the hill-side where the gray church
begins to peep (a peaceful little grassy path leads up to it over
a stile)--all this brings about a terrible displacement of the very
objects that make pilgrimage a passion, and hurries forward that
ambiguous advantage which I don't envy our grandchildren, that of
knowing all about everything in advance, having trotted round the globe
annually in the magazines and lost the bloom of personal experience. It
is a part of the general abolition of mystery with which we are all so
complacently busy today. One would like to retire to another planet with
a box of Mr. Parsons' drawings, and be homesick there for the pleasant
places they commemorate.

There are many things to be said about his talent, some of which are
not the easiest in the world to express. I shall not, however, make them
more difficult by attempting to catalogue his contributions in these
pages. A turning of the leaves of Harper brings one constantly face to
face with him, and a systematic search speedily makes one intimate.
The reader will remember the beautiful Illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's
novel of _Springhaven_, which were interspersed with striking
figure-pieces from the pencil of that very peculiar pictorial humorist
Mr. Frederick Barnard, who, allowing for the fact that he always seems
a little too much to be drawing for Dickens and that the footlights
are the illumination of his scenic world, has so remarkable a sense of
English types and attitudes, costumes and accessories, in what may be
called the great-coat-and-gaiters period--the period when people
were stiff with riding and wicked conspiracies w