20 DECEMBER 1890, Page 24

Royal Portrait gallery. (Nelson and Sons.)—Here we have a series

of pictures of English Sovereigns from William the Con- queror down to Victoria, together with some sketches of earlier times. Each portrait is accompanied by letterpress, sometimes in verse (for which Mrs. Hemans has been frequently laid under contribution), sometimes in prose. It is about time that the fiction of Prince Henry striking Judge Gascoigne were banished even from children's books.—From the same publishers we also get Pictures and Stories from English History. One of the pictures, we observe, is repeated (King Alfred in the Danish Camp). The Black Prince must have been very precocious to command an army at sixteen, but he could hardly have had the heavy moustache with which the artist adorns him in "The Black Prince finding the Banner."