The illustrations to Mr. Ruskin's earlier works were for the most part triumphs of line-engraving—of the old standard art, in which the designer and the engraver united their forces for a joint result, like players on different instruments of concerted music. It was never their intention to give the style and the touch of the draughtsman, his separate individuality, his momentary mood, as shown in the very material and handling of the original sketch. This is the boast of modern photographic engraving—that it tries to reproduce the master, to facsimile the authentic document.

And this is what we want here in such pictures as may rightly illustrate a collection of Poems written in Youth, in bygone historic times, recording a famous man's childhood and boyhood, his first impressions and fresh ideas of the world and of life. For such a purpose we want genuine records of the traditional precocity which we should like to verify: some true measure of the progress which we suspect, but cannot otherwise trace, by which genius was developed. We want to see Ruskin's drawings, and not engravers' plates this time; for we have sometimes doubted how much of the beauty of those wonderful engravings in Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice was really the work of the same hand as that which wrote the books.