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believe that the imagination of this unaffected magician has furnished the raw material for his exceptionally engaging art.
Even Punch takes Rackham seriously, and he has been delighting young and old for so many years that in 1922 an admirer can merely follow, with docility, the trails of praise which earlier writers have blazed. His excellences have become byewords, but there are no amusing myths or romantic legends connected with his life to excite the attention of the curious. He was educated at the City of London School, and like every child in a well ordered English household, he soon became familiar with Punch and the Graphic. He has never ceased to hold the best early illustrators on the staffs of those papers in high esteem, and the most memorable step in his artistic development was the discovery for himself of the genius of one of their number, that great lover of children, the neglected one-eyed master, Arthur Boyd Houghton, who is also one of John Singer Sargent’s enthusiasms. Dalziel’s edition of the Arabian Nights,—for which Houghton made some of his striking drawings on wood,—became the boy’s treasure-trove, and among Rackham’s valued possessions to this day, are two original drawings by Houghton,
