of emotional light and shadow was encouraged by the character of the
full-page illustration which he had to supply. A signed full page
appears in Part XVI., page 541. It is a scene in which the four
martyrs, Bland, Frankesh, Sheterden, and Middleton, condemned by the
Bishop of Dover, 25th June 1555, are shown being burned at the stakes.
One of the martyrs certainly looks intensely smug with his hands folded
as if he were at grace before a favourite dinner. Yes, du Maurier
certainly failed to attain quite to the heights of the horror of this
book.

The following year we have from the artist's pencil illustrations to a
book of the heroine of which he was so fond that he named his own
daughter after her. That book was Mrs. Gaskell's _Wives and Daughters_,
"an everyday story," as it is called in its sub-title. For this story du
Maurier's art was much more fitted than for any other. In it, certainly,
and not in Foxe's book, we should expect his temperament to reveal
itself--and we are not disappointed. It is here that du Maurier is at
his best. His illustrations have a daintiness in this tale which they
have nowhere else. A sign of the presence of fine art is the
accommodation of style to theme. The illustrations had been made for
this book when it appeared serially in the _Cornhill_, and were
afterwards published in the issue in two volumes. There is a picture at
the beginning of the second volume called "The Burning Gorse," in
which du Maurier makes an imaginative appeal through landscape almost
worthy of Keene.

[Illustration: Illustration for "The Story of a Feather" 1867.]

The artist is again at his best in the work of illustrating fiction in
the following year in Douglas Jerrold's _Story of a Feather_. It is the