return again and again to accessible properties which could be fitted
into his scenes. Notable among those were the big vases and the
constantly reappearing ornamental gilt clock. Though drawn in black and
white we are sure of its gilt, for it belongs to the Victorian period.
It is to be met with in all the surviving drawing-rooms of the
period--that is, it is to be met with in "Apartments."

Du Maurier next furnishes a frontispiece and vignettes, which we do not
admire, to Clement Scott's _Round about the Islands_ (1874).

In 1882 he is at work in the field he had made his own, illustrating the
story of a fad that had always amused him, illustrating the craze he
had helped to create, in _Prudence: A Story of Aesthetic London_, by
Lucy C. Lillie. We hope the reader of this page does not think we should
have read this book. We looked at the illustrations of a muscular
curate--whom we took to be the hero--making an impressive entrance into
a gathering of "æsthetes," and farther on leaving the church door with
"Prudence"; we read the legend to the final illustration--"It was odd to
see how completely Prudence forsook her brief period of æsthetic
light"--and we came to our own conclusions. The illustrations are made
very small in process of printing, but du Maurier's art never lost by
reduction. A picture of a Private View day in a Gallery--which at first
makes one think of the Royal Academy, but in which the pictures are too
well hung for that, and which is probably intended for the Grosvenor
Gallery--is one of those admirable drawings of a fashionable crush with
which du Maurier always excelled. In reviewing this book, however, we
are already away from the most characteristic period of du Maurier's
work as an illustrator of fiction. That was between 1860 and 1880. His
line is altogether less intense in the next book we have to
consider--Philips's _As in a Looking Glass_ (1889). The falling off