AND EVEN NOW

CARICATURES OF TWENTY-FIVE GENTLEMEN
THE POETS' CORNER
THE SECOND CHILDHOOD OF JOHN BULL
A BOOK OF CARICATURES
FIFTY CARICATURES




NOTE


_Stevenson, in one of his essays, tells us how he "played the sedulous
ape" to Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, and other writers of
the past. And the compositors of all our higher-toned newspapers keep
the foregoing sentence set up in type always, so constantly does it
come tripping off the pens of all higher-toned reviewers. Nor ever do
I read it without a fresh thrill of respect for the young Stevenson.
I, in my own very inferior boyhood, found it hard to revel in so much
as a single page of any writer earlier than Thackeray. This disability
I did not shake off, alas, after I left school. There seemed to be
so many live authors worth reading. I gave precedence to them, and,
not being much of a reader, never had time to grapple with the old
masters. Meanwhile, I was already writing a little on my own account.
I had had some sort of aptitude for Latin prose and Latin verse. I
wondered often whether those two things, essential though they were
(and are) to the making of a decent style in English prose, sufficed
for the making of a style more than decent. I felt that I must have