Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 12.djvu/179

 us. xii. Ace. 28, i9i5.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

171

eleven score and seven yards. It appears from the records of the Southwell family that Little John was afterwards publicly executed for robbery on Arbour Hill (Walker's ' Historical Memories of the Irish Bards,' &c.). J. ABDAGH.

on

on Japanese Prints. By A. Davison Ficke. (Fisher Un\vin, 5s.)

THIS is one of the most delightful and notable members of an attractive series. The subject is one which lends itself more satisfactorily than most to being dealt with in an illustrated book. A bit of earthenware or silver or old furniture anything in fact which exists in the round and solid is difficult to render in a photograph ; but however deeply inferior to the original of a print a photograph may appear in the eyes of a con- noisseur, there is no doubt of its being able, if good in itself, to carry over to the blank mind a reasonably good initial impression of it. And, for this particular purpose, Japanese prints allow perhaps of as nearly complete success as any. Th book before us "is most lavishly illustrated, ana, having regard to the limitations of price, we hardly see how it could have been better done. A beginner who shall have mastered and made thoroughly his own the beauty of line and the various subtlety and boldness of linear composi- tion displayed in these sixty and odd photographs will have no mean foundation for further study. It is perhaps awkward for English readers that the examples are all taken from American collections, and that so little reference is made throughout the book to what may be seen in England.

The text consists of two introductory chapters, followed by five chapters on the five periods in the development of the art of the Japanese colour- print, and one entitled 'The Collector,' giving useful indeed excellent hints and details con- cerning the purchase of prints and their treatment and preservation. The writer is an enthusiast, both in this particular subject and also as a follower of that recent school of doctrine and criticism in art which makes what Mr. Clive Bell has dubbed " significant form "its touchstone and the key to all its mysteries. The " liberation that only art can give," the " significance " through which it is given, are helped greatly by unfamiliar- it y, by freedom from banal and adventitious associations. This Mr. Ficke gladly admits, and we think that, joyfully abiding under this spell of strangeness, he a little tends to exaggerate ' significance of form " on the one hand, and to underrate, on the other, what we may perhaps call the significance of orientation or, if a somewhat more searching metaphor be preferred, of polarization. But, if we think Mr. Ficke's philosophy of art not fully rounded out, we would not be understood to mean that the defect impairs this particular book. On the contrary, and especially in view of its being addressed to beginners its limitations and its pleasing and

i- exaggeration are positive advantages. More doubtful is the advantage of having the discussions t)f the several Japanese designers and

their works interspersed with bits of poetry ? and more doubtful still the advantage of the frequent " preciosity " of the writing, and of the rather over-heavy purple patches of praise, which, far from defining the more clearly the character- istic merits of schools and artists, tend often to obliterate their distinctions. Mr. Ficke has made the historical facts in the nature of things scanty and slender still more inconspicuous, by contrast and by method of arrangement, but we^ observe that nevertheless he has got all the requisite ones in. He might, we think, have drawn out with advantage the aesthetic connexion between these prints and Japanese calligraphy particularly in the pages dealing with the Primi- tives, and in those concerned with pillar-prints. To users of a literal alphabet worse still, of the type-writer theri will probably always be, in these concise, yet elaborate, pictorial statements, a secret, a trick both of mind and hand, which they feel, but cannot quite capture.

No view of the art of the world can henceforth be considered reasonably comprehensive which leaves put of count Kiyonaga, Sharaku, Shunsho, Hiroshige, or Utaniaro. To a great majority of cultivated readers in England, beyond the circle of collectors and enthusiasts for Oriental art, these names, if known at all, remain vague and unsub- stantial. There is hardly at the present moment an easier medium through which to make a first acquaintance with them than the book before us, and we can promise some unusual degree of curious and ever-heightening pleasure to any one who has the opportunity of poring over it.

GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS FROM 1830 TO 1880.

THE student and bibliophile who makes the mid- nineteenth century his hobby will find a fair amount of interesting material in the catalogues we have before us. Dickens and Thackeray are the two writers who bulk most largely, but the other lights of the period are by no means ill- represented. We may, perhaps, most usefully take the items we are able to mention in the alpha- betical order of the authors' names, and in this way we come first upon Harrison Ainsworth and the set of first editions of his novels illustrated by the work of the principal black-and-white artists of the period, which Messrs. Maggs are offering for 1251. Harrison Ainsworth seems rather in process of being rediscovered, and accordingly we notice that a good copy of the first edition of ' Jack Sheppard ' may now be expected to fetch 151. 15s. Matthew Arnold seldom fills many para- graphs in these lists, but we see that Messrs. Maggs have several attractive first editions, among them ' The Strayed Reveller,' bound by Zaehnsdorf, 51. los., and the very rare ' Alaric at Rome,' printed at Rugby in 1840 the year when it was recited as a piize-poem (65Z.). Messrs. Dobell have a first edition of ' Empedocles on Etna ' in the original cloth, which they offer for 21. 10*.

A Blake item worth noting is described by Mr. James G. Commin of Exeter in c The Illustra- tions to the Book of Job,' the series of twenty-one plates in proof impressions on India paper (1825,. 161. 16&.).