The Microcosm of London. By John Summerson.--Elizabethan Miniatures. By Carl
Winter.—Fashions and Fashion Plates- 1800-1900. By James Laver.—British Shells. By F. Martin Duncan. (Penguin Books Ltd. 2s.)
PUBLICATION of the King Penguin Series was interrupted by the death of the Editor, Miss Elizabeth Senior, in one of the early raids on London. The series is now being continued under the joint editorship of Dr. Pevsner and Mr. R. B. Eishenden, and the first four volumes to be published under their auspices are calculated to appeal to many and offend none. Mr. Summerson gives, perhaps, the most able text, and has some pertinent comparisons to make between London today and London as it was in 1808, when Acker- mann began to publish The Microcosm of London, by Pugin and Rowlandson from which book the sixteen colour plates in Mr. Summerson's volume are selected. The reproductions, otherwise good, are marred by the extreme crudity of the re-touching, which debases the artists' original delicacy of line. Carl Winter supplies a good text for the volume on Elizabethan Miniatures, which is in- evitably largely devoted to Nicholas Hillyarde, whose work has extraordinary charm and brilliance, and to Isaac Oliver (the child of Huguenot refugees), who seems to retain a certain French precision and sophistication. It is a sad contrast to turn from Hillyarde's exquisite " Elizabethan Youth " to the stultified dandies of Mr. Laver's book on nineteenth-century fashions, and anyone idling by printshop windows may see more elegant and delightful prints than those reproduced here. Mr. Laver's text, however, is informative and amusing and the original notes ro the fashion plates, fascinating. The illustrations of British Shells are from Forbes and Hanley's History of British Mollusca, 1848-1853, and are well reproduced. The notes to the illustrations are well done.
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