volume he reverts once more to the familiar form adopted in his original
efforts, and with little falling off. It is to be remarked that the third
division is styled "Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures," although
there is no more rhyme than reason in any of the set. Our favorite
illustrations are those of the "Scroobious Snake who always wore a Hat on
his Head, for fear he should bite anybody," and the "Visibly Vicious
Vulture who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a Volume bound in
Vellum." In the fourth and last of Mr. Lear's books, we meet not only with
familiar words, but personages and places,--old friends like the Jumblies,
the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, the Quangle Wangle, the hills of the Chankly Bore,
and the great Gromboolian plain, as well as new creations, such as the Dong
with a luminous Nose, whose story is a sort of nonsense version of the love
of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted. In these verses,
graceful fancy is so subtly interwoven with nonsense as almost to beguile
us into feeling a real interest in Mr. Lear's absurd creations. So again in
the Pelican chorus there are some charming lines:--

"By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around," etc.

The other nonsense-poems are all good, but we have no space for further
quotation, and will take leave of our subject by propounding the following
set of examination questions which a friend who is deeply versed in Mr.
Lear's books has drawn up for us:--