Fantasy and Fun. A Collection of Children's Art, Poetry and
Prose. Collected Anony- mously. (Forbes Robertson. 12s. 6d.) A SMALL school of forty to seventy pupils has yielded here eighty pages of verse and prose, with a number of illustrations often excelling in imagination or humour. There are fifty-eight contributors, some of them providing as many- as six items at different ages, as the collection went on for eight years. None of the works is a work of genius, but the standard is high, and this and the number of contributors suggest, as the editor maintains, that children have writing and painting naturally in them, apart from any training in the arts, and if en- couraged will take pleasure in expressing themselves. Most juvenile collections are collections of imitations of adults. What else can children do ? Here the echoes are few ; a little Blake, a trace of Stevenson, and not much else. The vision is naturally limited, but the contributions have both gusto and unexpectedness as in a passage from" My Dream" by a boy of nine. " It was a beautiful land of violets, with dew hanging from the grass. It was morning, and the -trees were dripping half-white with dew, and the woods and lanes hard with frost." Piety and humour also come naturally—to boys at any rate. So does bloodthirstiness, as the first section belonging to the war- years demonstrates. The book altogether is more a study of children's minds than an aesthetic work ; but the children's minds are entertaining and surprising and here and there are flashes of what one can only call
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