THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



temporary puts it, "The printed mat- 

 ter of some of them has for a good 

 while been doing all that printed matter 

 can to reduce the popular intelligence 

 to that early stage which makes the life 

 of nursery governesses and mistresses of 

 kindergartens so hard, in which all the 

 resources of pedagogy have to be ex- 

 hausted to keep the child's attention 

 fixed on anything." In a later article 

 the Nation remarks that, for the pur- 

 pose for which they are now employed, 

 the "cuts" do not in the least need to 

 be accurate. Their whole and sole pur- 

 pose is to give a grown-up child some- 

 thing to look at, and whether or not 

 they represent correctly the things or 

 persons they are supposed to represent 

 has simply "nothing to do with the 

 case." The mind exhausted by the pe- 

 rusal of a dozen lines of letterpress finds 

 refreshment and repose in gazing at a 

 picture of any object, however common, 

 connected in any way, however insignifi- 

 cant, with any incident, however trivial 

 that may form part of the gossip of the 

 day. As the Nation sarcastically ob- 

 serves : " The great question of cabmen's 

 beards might have been discussed indefi- 

 nitely without the thorough elucidation 

 given by a picture of a cabman with a 

 beard, a cabman without a beard, and 

 two or three cabmen prominent in the 

 agitation." 



Our contemporary fears that the 

 end is not yet, that there is perhaps 

 some lower depth of mental degradation 

 to be sounded. A silly letter press pre- 

 pared the way for yet sillier pictures, 

 and the question now is what these are 

 likely to bring forth as an ulterior result. 

 If it is any comfort, we may reflect that 

 the complaint of a growing childishness 

 of the public mind is a somewhat an- 

 cient one. Without going further back, 

 we recall Cowper's lines published in 

 1782: 



"Habits of close attention, thinking heads, 

 Become more rare as dissipation spreads ; 

 Till authors hear at length one general cry, 

 ' Tickle and entertain us, or we die ! ' " 



Nearly fifty years ago we find the 

 poet Wordsworth inveighing against 

 "illustrated books and newspapers" in 

 a sonnet which, judging by later devel- 

 opments, does not appear to have had 

 much effect, but which seems to express 

 our contemporary's views exactly: 



" Discourse was deemed Man's noblest attri- 

 bute, 



And written words the glory of his hand ; 

 Then followed Printing, with enlarged com- 

 mand 



For thought dominion vast and absolute 

 For spreading truth, and making love ex- 

 pand. 



Now prose and verse, sunk into disrepute, 

 Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit 

 The taste of this once intellectual land. 

 A backward movement surely we have here, 

 For manhood back to childhood ; for the 



age- 

 Back towards caverned life's first rude ca- 

 reer. 



Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page ! 

 Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear 

 Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower 

 stage ! " 



If the poet found so much to object 

 to in the scanty attempts at so-called 

 illustration made at the date at which 

 this sonnet was penned (1846), what 

 would he say to the present day devel- 

 opment of the illustration business? He 

 could have seen, had he lived to the 

 present t me, a picture, in a leading 

 English paper, of the hide taken off the 

 cow that ran down Mr. Gladstone ; the 

 cow itself was unfortunately killed and 

 cut up before her likeness had been 

 taken, but why that should have pre- 

 vented the image of some other cow, of 

 any cow, being offered to an intelligent 

 public in her stead, or why the joints 

 into which she was dissected should not 

 have been severally photographed, and 

 so exhibited as well as the hide, we have 

 never quite understood. 



It was a dictum of Auguste Comte, 

 delivered about the time that Words- 

 worth was uttering his unavailing and, 

 we must say, too undiscriminating pro- 

 test against " illustrated books and news- 

 papers," that the specific weakness of 



