MR. SEGUIN'S "RURAL ENGLAND."* Tats is one of the Art
books of the season,—one of the most important in size, price, and outward show. The binding is cream-coloured vellum, elaborated, embroidered in gold and colours ; the paper is rough hand-made, the print is fair and good. The work abounds in illustrations, many of them from drawings by celebrated artists ; the subject is Rural England ;
• Mr. Seguin's Rural England. London: Straban aid Co.
the matter is unobjectionable. Let us open the book at random, and take a specimen :—
" These things being so, it may be readily understood that at country dinner parties there is no difficulty as to stnall-telk where- with to while away the lagging hours. Ou the contrary, the talk is, to be sure, exceedingly small, not to say minute, but, at the same time, it is of interest to those who indulge in it ; and at least, society generally is saved from the horrors of the `awful pause.' The men, too, have plenty of interests in common, farm iug, gardening, hunting, stable interests, to say nothing of local politics ; and the result is generally a harmonious whole. In addition to these frequent dinners, which in country districts, by reason of the prevalence of clique and party, social and political, never attain the monster proportions of London dinners, there is now and again a ball, which embraces in its larger horizon a more extensive circle than could be expected to meet amicably and genially across the mahogany. In hunting districts there is always the Hunt Ball held at the nearest county town, and largely patronised by the upper ten. Then there is the County Ball, very comprehensive in character, but where each set knows how to keep in its proper place."
Poor author ! poor readers ! For two hundred and eighty folio pages does this stream of language flow on, with sluggish current, never, it seems to us, bearing with it a new fact or a fresh idea. Mr. Sliguin, no doubt, means well ; but what is the use of that to his unfortunate readers, who feel after a few paragraphs as if they had been swallowing dough wholesale ? Of course, we all know the meaning of this,—so much literature ordered to go with so many pictures ; but it is seldom that the product bears such indelible marks of its origin. A good deal of this writing which is paid for by the yard, like French bread, is at least fairly readable, but we defy auy one to read more than a page of this work without yawning desperately. Listen again, and bear in mind that these extracts are taken literally by chance :- " In the spring, the meadow is all alive with the bleating of lambs and the anxious, answering voices of the mother-sheep. It is also the natural habitat of the useful, domestic cow, and it is very rarely that we can enter a meadow in which half a dozen meek-eyed cattle are not grazing, and slashing their sleek sides with slow, measured strokes of their fringed tails. But, as a rule, though they are quite unattended, we need not fear to cross their path."
Why, Sandford and Merton is an intellectual treat, and full of the most demoralising excitement, compared to this unutter-
able twaddle. It is not the author that is to blame for these publications. It is the publisher, or rather, as a general rule, some third man, between author and publisher, who collects the
engravings, hires the writer, and makes his own bargain with the publishing firm. It is a legitimate business, but it produces an awful amount of thoroughly immaterial literary stuff, stuff which has this essential vice, that it is never meant to be read at all.
That, at least, is one way of looking at this work, considering it as literature. Let us now ignore the literary part of it, and consider the illustrations, which form the real raison d'i.:,tre of the book. They are wood engravings, nicely printed on toned paper, and mounted on the rough, hand-made paper of which the book consists, but all the best of them are from old blocks. They appear to have been collected from all sorts of places, without any regard to subject, and then given to the author, to do the best he could with. Thus, for instance, we notice two or three of Mr. Millais' illustrations to serial fiction, which we should say, from the look of them, belong to one of Mr. Trollope's earlier novels ; we see illustrations by Mr. North, which we remember in the large edition of Jean Ingelow's poems which came out about ten or twelve years ago ; there are two heads from Mr. Herkomer's "Chelsea Pensioners," &c. It may be that some of these drawings are new to the public, but there can be no doubt that many of them are not ; and it is, we think, objectionable to publish in a work of this kind illus- trations which have appeared before, without any statement as to their previous publication, or any acknowledgment of the purpose for which they were originally designed ; for it must be noticed that there is no index to these drawings whatever, and that the name of the artist is not given, except in the comparatively rare cases where it, or his initials, appears upon the wood block itself. The names, too, of the subjects which the pictures were originally designed to illustrate have been invariably altered. One or two of the larger wood; cuts have, we imagine, appeared in the illustrated papers. For instance, was not the one called here " Finding the Text" in the Graphic, as one of the series entitled, " Heads of the People ?" Since writing the above sentence we referred to the Graphic portfolio, and have found this print. It is there called " The Agricultural Labourer—Sunday," and is by Mr. Hubert Herkomer, A.R.A.
There is little more to be said about the book. Many of the illustrations are delightful, although few are new, and though, from their having been printed from old blocks, some of them are poor impressions. In conclusion, we must reiterate our opinion that when publishers collect wood engravings from various sources, rebaptise theni, and issue them to the public without ackaowledging their previous publication, they are pursuing a practice which, however legitimate it may be legally, is very unfair to the purchasing public.
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