good artistic work, Robert Louis Stevenson once said, is only useful
play.

Probably Edwin Landseer's education began a hundred years before he was
born; but his technical instruction in art began when he was three years
old, when his father would take him out on the Heath and placing him on
the grass, put pencil and paper in his hand and let him make a picture of
a goat nibbling the grass.

Then the boy noted for himself that a goat had a short tail, a cow a
switch-tail, and horses had no horns, and that a ram's horns were unlike
those of a goat.

He had begun to differentiate and compare--and not yet four years old!

When five years of age he could sketch a sleeping dog as it lay on the
floor better than could Thomas, his brother, who was seven years older.

We know the deep personal interest that John Landseer felt in the boy,
for he preserved his work, and today in the South Kensington Museum we
can see a series of sketches made by Edwin Landseer, running from his
fifth year to manhood.

Thus do we trace the unfolding of his genius.

That young Landseer's drawing was a sort of play there is no doubt.
People who set very young children at tasks of grubbing out cold facts
from books come plainly within the province of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and should be looked after, but to do
things with one's hands for fun is only a giving direction to the natural