Howard Pyle, a chronicle by Charles D. Abbott, with an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle's works.

THE MIDDLE AGES
sure she was, and as Mr. Clemens has seen her....
1n reply to this note, thanking Mr. Wells for his words of
praise, Howard Pyle concluded with the postscript, "Again
let me urge you not to send me too much medieval work."
But the popularity of these pictures was too great for them
to be discontinued; and it must be admitted that in spite of
the artist's objections many of them were imaginatively and
technically excellent, for example the one illustrating
Cabell's story "In Necessity's Mortar," concerning which
the author wrote him:". I don't know when I have
seen anything I liked so well as the painting of Villon in
the October Harper. The verve of him! the cleverness!
and with it all the irremediable baseness! I only wish the
text suggested it."
These successes, however, did not reconcile him to a
continued application to strictly medieval work. On April
23, 1907, he wrote to Mr. Wells: " 0.. I am in great
danger of grinding out conventional magazine illustrations
for conventional magazine stories. I feel myself now to be
at the height of my powers, and in the next ten or twelve
years I should look to do the best work of my life. I do
not think that it is right for me to spend so great a part of
my time in manufacturing drawings for magazine stories
which I cannot regard as having any really solid or permanent literary value. Mr. Cabell's stories, for instance, are
very clever, and far above the average of magazine literature, but they are neither exactly true to history nor exactly
fanciful, and, whilst I have made the very best illustrations
for them which I am capable of making, I feel that they
are not true to medieval life, and that they lack a. really
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