say, just a few pictures at the end of the Spelling-Book, little oval
gray woodcuts of Bewick's, mostly of the Wolf and the Lamb, the Dog and
the Shadow, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson with long ringlets and
little tights; but for pictures, so to speak, what had we? The rough old
wood-blocks in the old harlequin-backed fairy-books had served hundreds
of years; before OUR Plancus, in the time of Priscus Plancus--in Queen
Anne's time, who knows? We were flogged at school; we were fifty boys in
our boarding-house, and had to wash in a leaden trough, under a cistern,
with lumps of fat yellow soap floating about in the ice and water.
Are OUR sons ever flogged? Have they not dressing-rooms, hair-oil,
hip-baths, and Baden towels? And what picture-books the young villains
have! What have these children done that they should be so much happier
than we were?

We had the "Arabian Nights" and Walter Scott, to be sure. Smirke's
illustrations to the former are very fine. We did not know how good
they were then; but we doubt whether we did not prefer the little old
"Miniature Library Nights" with frontispieces by Uwins; for THESE books
the pictures don't count. Every boy of imagination does his own pictures
to Scott and the "Arabian Nights" best.

Of funny pictures there were none especially intended for us children.
There was Rowlandson's "Doctor Syntax": Doctor Syntax in a fuzz-wig, on
a horse with legs like sausages, riding races, making love, frolicking
with rosy exuberant damsels. Those pictures were very funny, and that
aquatinting and the gay-colored plates very pleasant to witness; but if
we could not read the poem in those days, could we digest it in this?
Nevertheless, apart from the text which we could not master, we remember
Doctor Syntax pleasantly, like those cheerful painted hieroglyphics in
the Nineveh Court at Sydenham. What matter for the arrow-head, illegible