pictures which we select as birthday and Christmas gifts for our little ones, pictures to keep as special treasures, should be of the higher order. For the rest we hail gladly any child pictures with good drawing, good story interest, and a natural rather than an artificial or forced situation.
To limit a child’s story pictures to subjects of child life would be a mistake which no wise educator is likely to make. It would be like shutting him up in a Lilliputian kingdom. We must help our children to grow up, and pictures are an invaluable means to this end. They should open to the young mind many avenues of thought and enjoyment. They may reflect the life of the workaday world about us, make the past vivid, or awaken visions of the fairyland of fancy. Sometimes they arouse an interest in something we should not otherwise care for by investing the subject with the glamour of art. It was the peculiar charm of the seventeenth-century Dutch school to interpret homely domestic themes. These painters were wonderful realists and clever story-tellers, with good dramatic sense and much humor. Their pictures suggest to the quick imagination endless stories of everyday life—the goldsmith weighing his gold, the old market-woman haggling over her fruit and vegetables, the lady at her piano, or the cavalier with his lute. We look into the parlor, the kitchen, the chamber, the banquet-hall, the tailor’s shop, the market, and the inn, and imagine all sorts of pleasant things about the occupants. With Gerard Dow and Maes we see touching scenes among the poor, the old
